Finally, after months of trial, the ex dictator Hosni Mubarak was sentenced to life imprisonment for the massacre of more than 850 people in Egypt, and after having strictly ruled the country for more than three decades.
Mubarak led the nation by sinking its population into ignorance, chaos, repression, exile, and death, besides rising the state corruption index. He is the first mandatary of the Arab Spring in being sentenced to life imprisonment. Muamar el Gadafi ended up dead, while Zine Ben Alí could escape to Saudi Arabia and find refuge in this theocratic kingdom.
Curiously, days ago, another ex dictator, Charles Taylor, was sentenced to 50 years in prison for crimes against humanity, committed during his despotic rule in Liberia, in the denominated case of “the blood diamonds.”
The damaged perpetrated by both totalitarian rulers will never be repaired, but their crimes should not remain unpunished. The chaos imposed to control the population should neither be forgiven nor forgotten.
The Arab Spring aroused the interest of millions of inhabitants from North Africa and Middle East towards individual liberties and secular justice. The riots started on December 2012 in Tunicia keep inspiring further riots against the active authoritarism in the world. Unfortunately, in Lybia or Egypt itself, the revolution serves as a bridge for other extremist groups, reluctant to install the “occidental” democracy, to set their dangerous religious or statist goals.
The Arab Spring especially serves to remind us that individual rights are still being violated in several regions of the planet. Amnesty International, on the report of this year, recalled that in the last months 101 states kept practicing torture and dictatorships kept repressing their opponents, besides sending them to jail or directly executing them.
Sentences to Mubarak and Taylor support the evidence that the arbitrary power of the state keeps violating human rights in the 21st century, and that authoritarian political leaders benefit from external support, which is why their departures from their respective governments take so long to happen, and cost hundreds of innocent lives.
Egypt has to go through a long path if its real goal is to change the course left by Mubarak´s dictatorship. It has to clear the policy of the former regime´s collaborators and islamic extremists. However, the awful truth is that Egyptians will have either a muslim or an ex Mubarak´s minister in the government. One of them will become the first “democratic president” of Egypt.
Many dictatorships to be abolished remain in different countries, but the Arab Spring gave a key step by displacing some tyrants, now it has to give several similar steps, and get in the track of long fights to defend and keep freedom. A search that has cost humiliations, retirements and deads in many of its countries.
