Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Egypt has halted the drive to derail the Arab revolution



The uprisings across the Arab world have been crushed, hijacked and poisoned. But Egyptians have taken back control

A GOOD COMMENT
Seumas Milne
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 23 November 2011

"Until the last few days pessimism about the Arab revolution had become the norm. After the euphoria of Tunisia and Egypt, the "Arab spring" had become bleak autumn. Savage repression, foreign intervention, civil war, counter-revolution and the return of the old guard had become the order of the day. To some there had been no revolution at all – and only strategically marginal Tunisia would be allowed to undergo a genuine democratic transformation.
But now the revolutionary wave has broken again in Egypt, as hundreds of thousands have defied lethal violence to reclaim authority from a military regime that had no intention of letting it go....

Since the day the Egyptian dictator was ousted there has been a determined drive by the western powers, their Gulf allies and the old regimes to buy off, crush or hijack the Arab uprisings....

The third tactic has been for the west and its autocratic Arab allies to put themselves at the head of uprisings – which is what happened in Libya, where Nato's military intervention was made possible by Qatar and other authoritarian Gulf states....

It's this return of former colonial powers to the Arab world to reclaim oil concessions in Libya, following the occupation of Iraq, that has led Gamal Abdel Nasser's former confidant Mohamed Heikal to talk recently of the threat of an effective new "Sykes-Picot agreement" – the carve-up between Britain and France after the first world war – and a redivision of spoils in the region....

What's clear is that the upheavals across the Arab world are intimately connected, and that sectarianism and foreign intervention are enemies of its fledgling revolution. A crucial factor in the persistence of authoritarian regimes has been their support by western powers determined to maintain strategic control. And any genuinely democratic Middle East will inevitably be more independent.

That's why the reignition of the revolution in Egypt, the pivot of the Arab world, has the potential not only to accelerate the democratisation of the country itself but change the dynamic across the region – and strike a blow against the hydra-headed attempts to stifle its renaissance."

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