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What to do (Arab Spring)?

Hezam

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24 Aug 2007
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Last week big protestings started in Tunisia,The reason is that people reached their limit,No jobs and they can't make any business without a license that costs more than what they earn.



read this :
At least 19 killed in riots in Tunisia
Tunis, Tunisia (CNN) -- Nineteen demonstrators protesting high unemployment and poor living conditions have been killed during the past two days in riots that broke out in two Tunisian cities near its border with Algeria, a government official said Monday.

The incidents occurred in the cities of Thala and Kasserine, said Minister of Information Samir Abidi. All of the dead were demonstrators; more than 30 police were injured, he said.

Amnesty International said at least 23 people died in protests over the weekend, and it had received reports of more deaths on Monday.

Citing "information gathered by Amnesty International," it said security forces fired tear gas and live ammunition to disperse demonstrators in the cities of Thala, Kasserine and Regueb in central Tunisia.

"The authorities must urgently ensure the safety of protesters and instruct security forces to act with restraint and not to use excessive force against them," said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, Amnesty International's Middle East and North Africa deputy director.

"The authorities claim they acted in self-defense but the rising death toll and the images of demonstrations suppressed by the security forces cast serious doubt on this version of events," Hassiba said.

In Kasserine alone, 13 people were killed in two days, Amnesty International said.

The organization called for an investigation into the deaths and for those responsible to be punished.

Major cities were unaffected by the unrest.

The demonstrations included demands for the government to improve social services. Tunisia's government called the protesters violent troublemakers. Tunisia has been ruled for 23 years by President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, an ally of Western powers and a target of activist and human rights groups that accuse him of running a corrupt police state that has infringed on citizens' rights.

In his second speech since the riots erupted, he said on national radio and television that he was ordering the creation of as many as 300,000 jobs and called for greater freedoms for members of the news media.

"These violent, sometimes bloody events, which caused deaths among civilians and injuries among security officers, were perpetrated by hooded gangs that attacked, at night, public institutions and even citizens in their houses," he said. "This is an intolerable act of terrorism."

He said he would lower taxes on employers who generate new jobs.

Tunisia's 14% unemployment rate does not reflect the true problems faced by the nation, Abidi said. The government pays for college educations, but only about a third of the 80,000 students who graduate each year from the nation's universities are able to find work, he said. As a result, he said, unemployment among college graduates hovers around 25%.

Abidi said the government does not oppose the right of demonstrators to express their opinions, but it will not tolerate violence.

He said extremist groups like al Qaeda might use the riots to recruit young people.
Human rights groups have said the Tunisian government has cracked down on demonstrators with force. Reporters Without Borders condemned the arrests and disappearances of bloggers and online activists across a number of Tunisian cities.

The worldwide press freedom organization said police arrested the bloggers to question them about hacking into government websites.

The wave of demonstrations was sparked by the suicide of an unemployed college graduate in early December.

Mohamed Bouazizi, 26, set himself on fire in front of a government building in the town of Sidi Bouzid in early December after police confiscated his fruit cart, saying he was selling without a permit, according to Amnesty International. He died from his injuries.
Source:
At least 19 killed in riots in Tunisia, government official says

The president called this protesting "Terrorist Acts" !!!
Today the number of killed people reached 23 and some people says it's 50.

Also In Algeria 2 people were killed and 300 injured for the same crisis:
(CNN) -- At least two people have been killed and 300 others injured in riots that erupted across Algeria amid rising food prices and a housing crisis, state-run media said Saturday.
2 killed, 300 injured in Algerian riots

In Egypt,people are even more poor than Tunisia and Algeria,they are treated like prisoners.They might do the same like Tunisian/Algerian people soon.

In the richest region in the world,people barely live and get food.!

What suprised me is the French government offer to Tunisian gov,They offer to help the Tunisian police !

I don't know what to do and what peaceful way to change the governments or at least to make the governments listen to people ?

Any suggestion ?

*We are sick of those who call us terrorists when we try to get the minimum rights*
 
In Jordan too,Few days ago there were several protestings against the high prices...Also in Yemen.
 
This article from the Guardian
The failure of governance in the Arab world
Protests in Tunisia and Algeria are part of a rising tide of popular dissatisfaction with illiberal, unreformed Arab rule
Tunisiandemonstrator007-1.jpg


The official response to unrest on Tunisia's streets comes straight out of a tyrant's playbook: order the police to open fire on unarmed demonstrators, deploy the army, blame resulting violence on "terrorists" and accuse unidentified "foreign parties" of fomenting insurrection. Like other Arab rulers, President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali seems not to know any better. For this murderous ignorance, there is less and less excuse.

The trouble started last month when Mohammed Bouazizi, 26, an unemployed graduate, set himself on fire outside a government building in protest at police harassment. Bouazizi's despairing act – he died of his injuries last week – quickly became a rallying cause for Tunisia's disaffected legions of unemployed students, impoverished workers, trade unionists, lawyers and human rights activists.

The ensuing demonstrations produced a torrent of bloodshed at the weekend when security forces, claiming self-defence, said they killed 14 people. Independent sources say at least 50 died and many more were wounded in clashes in the provincial cities of Thala, Kasserine and Regueb. The latest reports spoke of continuing clashes in El-Kef and Gafsa.

Despite Ben Ali's assertions, there is no evidence so far of outside meddling or Islamist pot-stirring. What is abundantly plain is that many Tunisians are fed up to the back teeth with chronic unemployment, especially affecting young people; endemic poverty in rural areas that receive no benefits from tourism; rising food prices; insufficient public investment; official corruption; and a pseudo-democratic, authoritarian political system that gave Ben Ali, 74, a fifth consecutive term in 2009 with an absurd 89.6% of the vote.

In this daunting context, Ben Ali's emergency job creation plan, announced this week, looks to be too little, too late.

If this long tally of woes sounds familiar, that's because it's more or less ubiquitous. Across the Arab world, with limited exceptions in Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq, similar problems obtain to a greater or lesser degree. Indeed, until recently, Tunisia was held to be better than most. In Algeria, four days of rioting about price rises in food staples earlier this month forced the government to use some of its vast $150bn stash of gas export cash to boost subsidies.

Egypt, the Arab world's most populous country, has problems that dwarf Tunisia's but are basically similar: the population is booming, 60% are under 30, youth unemployment is soaring, 40% of citizens live on under $2 a day, and one third is illiterate.

Add to this a growing rich-poor divide, a corrupt electoral system that bans the country's largest party, the Muslim Brotherhood, and President Hosni Mubarak's apparent determination to cling to power indefinitely, and the picture that emerges is both disturbing and largely typical of the illiberal, unreformed Arab sphere.

Failing or failed Arab governance across an arc stretching from Yemen and the Gulf to north Africa is not a new phenomenon, nor are the likeliest remedies a mystery, except perhaps to rulers such as Ben Ali.

A discussion last month at the Carnegie Endowment identified high unemployment triggering social unrest, rapid population rises and slow growth, caused partly by the European downturn, as the key challenges facing relatively poorer, oil-importing Arab states. Governments were urged to seek new export markets, increase manufacturing and enhance competitiveness through education and labour market reform.

But analyst Marina Ottaway suggested political leadership and the will for reform was lacking as regional governments openly flouted calls for change. Other experts deplored a general trend towards "authoritarian retrenchment" as Arab leaders used the west's preoccupation with terrorism, its energy dependence and the Palestine stalemate to deflect external and internal reform pressures.

The striking underperformance of most Arab governments in political, economic and social terms – and of the Arab League, dubbed by some an "autocrats club" – has been expertly charted in the past decade by a series of UN-sponsored Arab human development reports. Overall, they make depressing reading. Ben Ali and his ilk would do well to study the 2009 Arab Knowledge survey produced by the Al Maktoum Foundation.

It says, in part:


"Stringent legislative and institutional restrictions in numerous Arab countries prevent the expansion of the public sphere and the consolidation of opportunities for the political participation of the citizenry in choosing their representatives ... on a sound democratic basis.
"The restrictions imposed on public freedoms, alongside a rise in levels of poverty and poor income distribution, in some Arab countries, have led to an increase in marginalisation of the poor and further distanced them from obtaining their basic rights to housing, education and employment, contributing to the further decline of social freedoms."
 
Sins the media everywhere have made terrorist the greatest evil sins 9/11
For a government to cal something a terrorist act gives them some sort of world wide oke to use al force to stop them and to go and help THE FIGHT AGSINGST TERRORIST.
I have no idea on what you should do. But maybe it would help to (I don't know how) get the media to call it what it is. That would be a good first step I think.
Dealing with a protest is something really different then dealing with terrorist. If people are aware of that much, they will have a different few on the situation all together.
 
I didn't mention to America in any part of what i said above,I want to focus on the positive discussion that will help and lead to sulotion.
I know France/USA/Israel won't stay watching the dictator falling by people even if they killed thousands of civilians,So that's why i titled this thread "What to do?"
I don't want to see more AlQaeda and neither you do,So how to fix a problem like this !

Plus,Don't be very sensitive,I don't know why you get mad when someone tells you something that is right !

Plus Plus...Sorry if i offended you but i really didn't mean any offence !

Plus Plus and one more Plus....Please take some of your time to read about the past 200 years in the middle east.
 
Hezam has posted a serious topic here with an honest appeal for people's opinions and I'm dismayed to see an advisor use it as an excuse to have a dig at his previous anti-American comments. I would hope that the staff on the forum were above such pettiness.
 
Hezam has posted a serious topic here with an honest appeal for people's opinions and I'm dismayed to see an advisor use it as an excuse to have a dig at his previous anti-American comments. I would hope that the staff on the forum were above such pettiness.

Lets bring a bit of balance into this discussion. First off, my original post wasn't aimed at Hezam... honestly it didn't register to me that he was the OP. It was a humorous statement at the usual blame-game that surrounds these sort of political disasters.

However my second post was most certainly a dig at his response. I've seen Hezam's "honest appeals" before. Actually if look at my posting in this forum, I make an strong effort to actually post relevant, factual information on topics I have an expertise in. I actually put several hours of work into a number of my posts on American policy into the middle east, after Hezam asked for a previous "honest appeal." The response? Zilch. Another time we had another discussion (after making a detailed reply to his previous query), I was told I know nothing about the Middle East. Even here he told me that I "need to read more about the middle east history for the past 200 years."

Should I have made such a response? I don't react well to personal insults or hate speech. So I think my response is fairly timid given his previous statement.
 
Tsuyoiko said:
his previous anti-American comments
Thanks Tsuyoiko,I want to mention that i've never been anti-american and i won't.I'm against the american foriegn policy but i have nothing against the people :).

noyhauser,the thread messed up and went too far off-topic.
I posted this thread to find a democratic way to change dictators and to get our rights.
Last year in Tunisia some people ate donkeys because they couldn't find anything to eat.Same happend in Gaza and some parts of Arab world.
until this moment,more than 50 person have been killed by the military,Snipers and also police.

noyhauser said:
Even here he told me that I "need to read more about the middle east history for the past 200 years."
Is that an insult ??
You need that because you have informations about the past 60 years after the colonization.

I'm sorry to see such posts from you.
 
I posted this thread to find a democratic way to change dictators and to get our rights.
Last year in Tunisia some people ate donkeys because they couldn't find anything to eat.Same happend in Gaza and some parts of Arab world.
until this moment,more than 50 person have been killed by the military,Snipers and also police.

Democratic methods only work if both sides are willing to talk and change. If one side doesn't want to talk, or doesn't want to change then there isn't much you can do democratically. It usually takes a revolt, revolution, or some other type of action/stance to get things to change. I will note that a revolt or revolution doesn't necessarily need to be violent. It could be by strikes, gatherings, doing something to interrupt daily life, or many other ways (think Ghandi). If you do this successfully enough hopefully the other side will be willing to start talking/negotiating or be willing to change.

Also, I would like to say that there are very few, if any, pure democracies in the world. Even the US is not a pure democracy, though that is the term thrown around most often. The USA is "Constitution-based federal republic;[with a] strong democratic tradition", from the CIA's World Fact book found here: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html
 
I really don't know what to suggest either. If i knew what to do i would do it in my own country, but even in England the rights of protesters are being eroded and its effectiveness waning. The only seemingly successful protesters are those who blackmail the companies who employ them by striking en mass for days on end, costing their companies huge sums of money.
But those who protest for political reasons don't seem to ever get very far. However i do think it is vital uphold our rights to protest and to continueing on protesting as if we loose this right then what else do we have against our corrupt politicians? We might live in a democracy but i think we will eventually head the way of Tunisia if we carry on going the way we are going.
 
I would love to infor everyone that the worst dictator in Arab world has fall and ran away from Tunisia...
I can't tell how i'm happy right now and i hope the other dictators will fall like that one...Peacefully or by force and power.

It's the biggest event in the 21th century...Finally the freedom is on our hands.
:) :) :)
 
First its important to make a distinction between Tunisia and the other Maghreb states to the Arab Monarchies. They have very different political environments which makes it difficult to draw useful comparisons. Tunisia has a basic set of democratic institutions, which makes it easier for a transition towards a more representative political system. It also has significant contact with Western society and a highly educated populace, so it has an great base for such reforms. The president knows he's there at the behest of the people. I think Algeria is in the same boat, with Morocco possibly trailing behind. In these countries

A similar transition is much much harder in most other Arab states. For one, there is the government's perspective that they have a right to be in power, sometimes due to Divine intervention (Jordan and Saudi Arabia.) Moreover many people don't want to transition towards democracy. I've heard from many in UAE, Kuwait, Oman and elsewhere (prior to 2008) that they rather have their monarchies than democracy. The wallowing support for Kuwait's National Assembly is a good example.

While there have been some positive efforts, like a more effective media sector and better social communications, I don't believe that its the gateway for "revolution." One of the Wikileaks real revelations was evidence the US had accumulated about the state has an inordinate say in Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

I think if you want to see a good example of how bad it might get, look to Egypt. The failure of Nasser's reforms in the 1960s and the subsequent rule of the autocrats like Saddat and Mubarak has pushed people toward the Muslim Brotherhood as the only legitimate opposition party. Moreover given the Islamic hold in many countries, I really wonder about the ability for a true democracy to emerge. Look at Lebanon, where Hezbollah basically uses coercive methods to enforce their control. I don't mean to sound really pessimistic but after researching and reading about Arab history (from 1919 AND since 600AD) Its difficult to find an easy answer. The US has been trying to build up the rudimentary bases for an effective civil society, but its really a drop in the bucket for what is needed.
 
noyhauser said:
First its important to make a distinction between Tunisia and the other Maghreb states to the Arab Monarchies. They have very different political environments which makes it difficult to draw useful comparisons. Tunisia has a basic set of democratic institutions, which makes it easier for a transition towards a more representative political system. It also has significant contact with Western society and a highly educated populace, so it has an great base for such reforms. The president knows he's there at the behest of the people. I think Algeria is in the same boat, with Morocco possibly trailing behind. In these countries

I agree,but most Arab people now are educated,take Egypt for example,The people are highly educated just like Tunisians,Syria too...Lybia,Lebanon,Jordan,Palestine and Iraq,They are same like Tunisia.

noyhauser said:
A similar transition is much much harder in most other Arab states. For one, there is the government's perspective that they have a right to be in power, sometimes due to Divine intervention (Jordan and Saudi Arabia.) Moreover many people don't want to transition towards democracy. I've heard from many in UAE, Kuwait, Oman and elsewhere (prior to 2008) that they rather have their monarchies than democracy. The wallowing support for Kuwait's National Assembly is a good example.
Absolutely true,It's because most of them are bedouins and the monarchy fits with them more than democracy.
But what happened in Tunisia is going to be a big lesson for the governments of the countries above.
All Arab dictators are shaking :D

There is one country that is in danger now,It's Yemen.
You know all the people are armed,most of them are low educated,poor and rule by tribal system.
If it happened to be like in Tunisia then Yemen will be like hell....
Yemen is the most dangerous region in Arab world.
But Yemeni governemnt is very curropted so they have to take the lesson.

noyhauser said:
I think if you want to see a good example of how bad it might get, look to Egypt. The failure of Nasser's reforms in the 1960s and the subsequent rule of the autocrats like Saddat and Mubarak has pushed people toward the Muslim Brotherhood as the only legitimate opposition party. Moreover given the Islamic hold in many countries, I really wonder about the ability for a true democracy to emerge. Look at Lebanon, where Hezbollah basically uses coercive methods to enforce their control. I don't mean to sound really pessimistic but after researching and reading about Arab history (from 1919 AND since 600AD) Its difficult to find an easy answer. The US has been trying to build up the rudimentary bases for an effective civil society, but its really a drop in the bucket for what is needed.
Hezbullah is a movement that works for Iran and it's interests,Further more,they are Shiite so there are a lot of differences between the islamic movements in Arab world and Hezbullah & Iran.

The Arab world needs a real democracy or Caliph System witch fits 100%...
The fall of Tunisian dictator is the begining of another age in Arab world.
Prime minister of Turkey (Rajab Tayyep Erdogan) has been chosen as the Personality of the Year 2010 in Arab world...He is not even Arab but he deserve to be the leader,we've never seen a man like him in the past 20 years.
 
I have no idea why these dictators do such a thing, stealing people's lands, money and souls sometimes, they are really sick
I hope what happend in Tunisia will soon happen to any other region that suffer
 
That is possible how?
If they can steal the oxygen they will.
They protect each other,See the Tunisian president ran to Saudi Arabia.
Yesterday and Today are feastival moments that we never had for along time.

:)
 
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i wish what happened in Tunisia happen in egypt too
i wish see mubarak out of egypt ,he make people hate to Egypt because of the severity of poverty and the lack of real education and a healthy care ,
i am egyptian and i see what i say every day , and i think Tunisia future will be beter than before ,

Man sets himself on fire in Cairo protest

A man has set himself on fire outside the parliament building in the Egyptian capital, Cairo.

He shouted anti-government slogans before pouring fuel on his clothes and setting himself alight, witnesses said.

Policemen nearby managed to put out the flames, and the man is now in a stable condition in hospital, officials said.

The action echoes that of a 26-year-old Tunisian whose self-immolation sparked a wave of protest in the country that brought down the government.

Also on Monday, a Mauritanian man said to be unhappy with the government there was taken to hospital after setting himself on fire.

BBC WORLD NEWS 17 January 2011
 
3 persons burned themselves in Algeria before the egyptian man,And yesterday there were several protestings in Jordan,Algeria,Mauritania,Oman,Yemen,Egypt,And syria.

The American government sent a security adviser to Algeria and Saudi Arabia is discussing the issue with America and Algeria.
Arab ministers in Sharm el-Sheikh are now discussing the situation.

Goddamn thieves.
 
President's wife took 1.5 tonne of gold with her to Dubai.

few hours ago 3 egyptians burned themsleves...
 
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