I have been following very intensely the Arab Spring since it began in January, in Tunisia, when Mohammed Bouazizi lit himself on fire in protest of elitist rule and oppression towards him. Since that flame started, the fire has spread throughout North Africa and the Middle East. Of all the revolutions in the region Tunisia made it out relatively unscathed in terms of mass violent oppression of the opposition, thankfully. It took merely weeks to destroy a tyranny of over two decades. Good riddance.
But as the flames spread they also stoked and Egypt then found itself in the fiercest torrent of those flames. My jaw dropped to the floor the first time I saw the massive protests held in Tahir Square; I knew right then and there that the world was seeing the largest historical shift since the end of the Cold War, and possibly bigger than that. Egyptians, nearly overnight, went from a complacent being to a collective of actors, individuality had sprung. But this time the revolution required violence, though not the initial intent, to acquire the overthrow of the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak. International eyes were intensive on Egypt and that decisive stare is what kept the Egyptian army from slaughtering the people, though they tried their damndest to use violence to intimidate, but the movement was too big.
The events involving Libya were the next theatre of the revolution, though this time it took a much different form than that of Tunisia, Egypt, and erupting at the time, Yemen. Moammar Qaddafi was, can’t believe I’m using the past tense, absolutely crazy and the world knew he was not afraid to slaughter his own people; he had the West by the balls on this one as Libya had just recently ceased it’s nuclear weapon program, which he could’ve started again, and had oil reserves that caused British oil giants to salivate. But the UN stepped up, China and Russia stepped up and implemented the no-fly zone, which protected the citizens of Libya and paved the way for the death of Qaddafi, which you can watch on the internet if you’re interested.
Though Yemen’s fire is stoking higher and higher, the clearest advent is now that of the horrifying scene in Syria. Why is Syria important? Syria is arguably Iran’s closest ally and has deep connections to China and Russia, who have clearly aligned themselves against the West, both economically and in foreign policy, as they are Security Council members. But this time the world has sat by and done next to nothing for the last eight months as the Syrian government systematically murders its own citizens.
When I saw the first video of protesting Syrians being shot and killed it was quite clear that this time the dictators have recognized the stakes, might makes right, and as long as you win the world will soon forget, just as they had with Qaddafi years after having Pan Am flight 103 bombed. And now the stakes are above and beyond the stakes of Libya. If Syria falls then the anti-west alliance will fall, and after Syria falls, most likely the Iranian protesters, who I had helped by setting up proxies on twitter, would likely challenge the Iranian government as they had in 2009, which ended in violent oppression and destruction of the movement.
But what I have seen in videos and articles coming out of Syria has shaken me to my core. It’s hard to think that you’re watching innocent people murdered and yet that just had happened earlier in the day. One video that simply horrified me and literally made my blood boil with anger over inaction and complacency amongst the west was a video of parade of Syrian protesters being shot at, and then one man comes into view. He’s sitting on the ground in the midst of the chaos as if somehow inept to the obvious need to clear out. But a woman lifts his head up and you see this man with a look of total emptiness, a type of shock that is so horrifying that it will inspire the fear into you, that same fear that Syrians feel when security officers knock on their door at night, to be taken, tortured, and murdered. Underneath this look of shock is the source. And in the screams, the cries for help, the blood, the bodies, you see this man’s face, or what’s left of it, his entire lower jaw had been blown off and all that showed was the remnants of his tongue. As the camera comes in closer all you can see left of this man’s life is his desire to die, all that this human being wants to do, in the face of utter brutality, is die, to feel no more pain.
I saw this video months ago and everyday since the uprising in Syria started around eight months ago protesters have been murdered, arrested, and tortured. There are numerous videos of soldiers standing atop bodies, laughing, smiling, shooting them, beating them, taking pictures. This is just a metaphor for the “free world” standing up for the Syrian people…they do not, they stand atop the bodies of innocents. But now truly heroic Syrian defectors have formed the Syrian Free Army to defend their people, something that Barack Obama, Europe, Russia, China, and the truly sickening autocrats of the Middle East have refused to do.
Shame on them, shame on the Arab League for being but a face-saving elitist outreach to a mass murderer. Now Syria descends into a civil war that will utterly shake the system of power in the middle east; this could’ve been averted had the world had taken a genuine attempt to stop this mass murder, when the same argument, the same situation, was used to go into Libya. People are dying, children are dying, murder and injustice is rampant and the world just sits and watches; the world has again failed the ideas of justice and human rights; the world has failed the Syrian people. May the Free Syrian Army succeed and hopefully one day I’ll be watching the video of Bashar Al-Assad’s capture and killing.
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