A little over five years ago, Tahrir Square in Cairo was overflowing with Egyptian people determined to overthrow the 30-year-old dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak and stake their claim to citizenship, representation, dignity and the rule of law. They wanted to effect change and change was indeed effected as planned.

Bearded members of the Muslim Brotherhood, their skin scarred by the systematic torture of Mubarak’s security police, embraced secular Egyptian liberals and declared a common cause. Young men and women, their eyes burning with conviction, proclaimed that the 18 days in Tahrir had not been wasted, as for the first time they had given their lives meaning by showing they had the power to effect change. Their dream was to build a better Egypt to proclaim a new birth, not just for Egypt but on an individual level. It was like falling in love when you become a better person....

Those were heady days. It was impossible not to suspend one’s disbelief. The army was impassive, the Brotherhood restrained and Twitter-empowered Arab youth ascendant. Liberation unfurled as if by magic in a wave unseen since 1989.

After the fall of the Tunisian dictator, Zine Ben Ali, less than a month earlier, it all seemed clear as crystal that the frozen, decades-long Arab confrontation between cynical dictators and repressed Islamists had given way to the possibility of more inclusive societies. If Egypt, home to about a quarter of the world’s Arab population, could see the birth of meaningful citizenship, festering Arab humiliation would be replaced by empowering dignity.

It was not to be. Five years on, Tahrir has the quality of a dream.  The Middle East remains in turmoil. From Tahrir Square and straight to ISIS, the chasm between the square and the brutal theocracy of the so-called Islamic State reveals the extent of the failure...

Who should be blamed for this epic failure? The Muslim brotherhood for reneging on its promise not to contest Egypt’s first post-uprising presidential election? The Egyptian army for never giving the Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi the means to govern? Or Morsi himself for his foolish power grabs, inept rigidity and inability to realise that he had to demonstrate that he was everyone’s president, not merely the Brotherhood’s? Or was it Syria’s Bashar al-Assad for burying the Syrian uprising in rivers of blood?

Egyptian’s dream has been shattered, it has evaporated and many citizens are giving way to apathy or despair, or even nostalgia for the old regimes they had assailed.

This is the world’s dilemma... the bloodstained ruins of the Arab Spring.

 

Jos Edmond Zarb

Birkirkara