The Arab spring or revolution started in Tunisia, a half-African-half-Arabian country, in late 2010 and early 2011. The revolution in Tunisia was bloodless and less dangerous than the revolution in the other Arab countries after them. The revolution removed former President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and replaced him with a temporary unity government. In October 2011, the Tunisian people had elections where an Islamic organization won election and started to form a Constituent Assembly which is supposed to make a new national constitution. The success of the Tunisian revolution encouraged the early-existing rebels in Egypt. They have got the motivation and solidarity to take over the military dictator, Hosni Mubarak. The revolution in Egypt was much worse and bloody than the Tunisian revolution. After weeks of fight, protests, and bloodshed, the military dictatorship was defeated by the rebels. They formed a new constitution and held elections. Currently, Egypt is ruled by a military government led by Mohammad Morsi, a former NASI engineer as I read his biography from a magazine. When this was happening in Egypt, I was studying in Sudan, an African-Arabian country which is the neighbour of Libya. We had the fear of revolutions starting from this country since it is also an Arabian country ruled by a military dictator, but Thank God it did not happen.
The Libyan civil war began immediately after the Egyptian revolution. This was more terrible and horrible than the previous two Arab revolutions. Moreover, the Libyan dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, was a very big enemy of Europe and the United States. Because of that, the rebels got help from those countries and defeated him and killed him eventually. From that day on, the Libyans were looking for political and social reform. The revolution that was also happening in parallel with the Libyan revolution was the Yemeni uprising. The dictatorship leader of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, used almost his maximum military power to resist and defeat the rebels, which he actually managed to do. When the Yemeni Revolution was happening, I was moving from Sudan and coming back to my country, Somaliland, through Yemen. I was in the airport of the capital city of Yemen, Sana’a for three days. The flight schedules of the airport were really unstable and delaying day after day due to the civil war. They told us that we cannot go out of the airport to the hotels in the city because we could hear the gunfire near the airport. In Yemen, the protesters succeeded in removing President Ali Abdullah Saleh, but then replaced him with his Vice-President, Abd al-Rab Mansur al-Hadi. The Syrian revolution is still on-going and very devastating as the Libyan revolution. Unfortunately, the rebels did not manage to overthrow Bishar Al Assad. President Assad has used his military on an almost daily basis to kill rebels and protesters there, and is unwilling to negotiate with them. At the moment it appears that the fighting in Syria could go on for a very long time.
As we can clearly see from here, each uprising or revolution is more terrible and blood-shedding than its former revolution. WHY? As Newton’s Third Law of motion says, every action has equal and opposite reaction. The more force the rebels use to fight with the government, the more force and military power the government uses to resist the anti-government protesters to win. Nobody likes dictatorship and people are thirst for democracy and freedom. However, we will see if the uprising of the Arab countries leads to positive transformation where people become satisfied with their leaders and continue to have freedom and the power to choose their representatives.
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