That the Arab Spring did little more than add another chapter to regime change in the Arab world and Middle-east is encrypted in history. Those that camped out in their numbers in the Egypt's famous Tahrir Square, flooded with questions about the 'why' of change, aren't asked about the 'what'. It was all under the guise of a passage of seasons. The power of social media led to the Shahbagh protests demanding people's expected justice for war criminals, rather than confidence in the judicial process. It's all quiet now, as if the hanging of two score or so settles the issue. It doesn't.
And now the focus is on Iran. The Shia bastion that has survived a protracted war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, is now its biggest trading partner and a country that has defied everything from sanctions to the almost obvious proxy wars with Saudi Arabia. The recent unrest is being defined as a people's movement against corruption and want. Unfortunately there's no seasonal garb to hide the almost obvious conclusion that it is indeed intervention from outside than a spark from within.
The United States with a twitter-friendly President hails social media while proposing greater control on the internet, its content and its abilities. We too, have had our own share of social media blockage, albeit for shorter duration. Yet that doesn't stop us or for that matter anyone yelling about the 'restrictions' imposed by China on the internet and social media. Iran is doing that to a certain extent and there are certain social media platforms that are not available in some of the more apparently forward-looking countries of the Middle-east. No one yells because it isn't the thing to do. Live and let live - as the adage goes.
There are freedoms that are curtailed by every state in the world. Media is forbidden to make any comments that could have the slightest influence on electioneering in the UK and when police investigate a murder only one voice, the designated spokesperson, is ever heard to comment. That's as how it should be but expect that the emotional Bangladeshis don't think along those lines. To be fair, they have their reasons.
The move against the so-called dictators was necessitated by flagging trade concerns and as a recent event such as Zimbabwe exemplifies how the powers that be are comfortably accommodated even as when a momentous change has apparently taken place. Come to think of it, Robert Mugabe can stay in his own country, in palatial property, surrounded by an army of attendants and a comfortable economic set-up. He won't be tried of corruption or anything else. It's what Mr. Donald Trump would gleefully declare 'a deal'.
Libya, liberated from Muammar Gaddafi, doesn't have a democratic government yet and so the rebuilding of the ruins that remain is on hold. Iraq boasts a democracy that can't really get anything done and Egypt lurches from one end of the scale to the other. In between, the simmering discontent among people grows as does a generation that have watched a war, suffered from want and bear scars that will heal but never go away. The rise of the nationalists in France was spectacularly defeated, Germany still hasn't worked it out, Austria has triumphed and now the 'Srebreneca' genocide is being portrayed as something else. Perhaps the word too will be re-defined at some stage and then history really will have to be re-written.
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