The great upheavals

While the new wave swept Middle East and North Africa, West sat by quietly, plotting, watching each move with caution.

In 2010, it was the Arab Spring, morning, noon and night on the telly, in glorious colour. This was the Great Uprising. The Maghreb would never again be the same. Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco and Sudan, all countries with majority Muslim populations, caught in the whirlpool of revolt, whose eddies can still be seen four years later. It was almost as if some mysterious power or force imbued with a desire to spawn a movement of political rectitude had set off the hurricane. And while the new wave swept the Middle East and North Africa, the West sat by quietly, plotting and planning, listening to the throbbing engine of the drama, watching each move with caution.

Then it was Egypt, morning noon and night on the telly. Egypt, one of the world’s oldest civilisations, land of the Pharaohs and their monuments, where Cleopatra once seduced the greatest of all Roman emperors; and where the priests wrote their memoirs on papyrus, was being torn apart. This was a powerful rebellion, a major upheaval. The cameras were permanently fixed on Tahrir Square in Cairo. President Mubarak stood firm. The opposition stood firm. The battle lines were drawn. The military got into the act. There was bloodshed. The air force strafed civilians. More bloodshed. Bodies were strewn everywhere. It looked like a bizarre scene from an old Hammer-horror Gothic movie. Right?



Then it was Syria, morning, noon and night on the telly. Syria, once a land of great learning and culture, turned into a fierce battlefield where the atrocities on both sides had a freshly minted terror. In the terminology familiar to the former Republican president of the United States, Bashar alAssad was the bad guy and the rebels were the good guys. Most of the broadcasts had a potato famine of a script, dumbly repetitive, relentlessly tedious. And then… a strange thing happened. Christiane Amanpour, the star of CNN, who has an enormous appetite for facts, discovered that some of the Syrian women who had crossed the border and sought refuge in Jordan were being kidnapped at their shelters and ended up in brothels. Amanpour was horrified. And rightly so. And so were a hell of a lot of journalists in Russia, Iran, the United States and Europe. It suddenly dawned on everybody that the rebels weren’t exactly boy scouts with pop guns playing cops and robbers. Right?

And now it is the Crimea, morning, noon and night on the telly. This time, it is Vladimir Putin who is being portrayed by the Western media as the bad guy. In 1939, when Adolf Hitler tried to reunite ethnic Germans in East Prussia with their western brethren, who were separated by Danzig and the Polish Corridor, it was regarded as an act of nationalism. Right? And in 1982, when Argentine forces occupied the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic, Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady of British politics, sent a naval task force to get the dagos out — because she was protecting the rights of citizens loyal to the Crown. Right? But when Vladimir Putin wants to protect ethnic Russians in Crimea, he is not being allowed to do so. Right? It’s finally come down to the judgment of Thrasymachus in the Republic. Might is right. And justice is the interest of the stronger.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 9^th, 2014.

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