The chaos of the dictator and not of the anarchism

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.

Syria and its Spring Dream

By mid march 2011, through social networks, specially Facebook, a meeting in Damascus was convened which would later become a revolution. “A Syria without tyranny, emergency laws or exception courts,” was the name of the group in different websites trying to follow Egyptians, Tunisians and Libyans steps, who got involved in riots in their corresponding countries. Days later, tens of thousand of Syrians from the entire national territory, manifested themselves against the dictatorship of Bachar al Asad.

The authoritarian government accused opponents of creating an “armed rebellion of Salafist groups” with only religious or terrorist purposes. With great rising revolutions also started the different massacres executed by the regime and massive arrests, besides torture cases.

The international community, concerned about the situation in Libya or Egypt, asked the Syrian dictatorship to give an end to repressions, besides setting certain sanctions to the presidential circle. Last year in August, the president Barack Obama and some of his European colleagues, demanded al Asad´s resignation in order to solve the problem. The petition was not taken into consideration and repression sharpened terribly.

Despite efforts for ending riots pacifically, neither the Arab League nor the United Nations could set down a possible solution, given the constant obstacles imposed by Syria allies, China and Russia, which hold million dollar contracts with Syria.

Only one year after riots took place, a deadline for the cessation of violence could be established. Even though the deadline was met on April 12, the Syrian dictatorship kept attacking rebels and defenseless opponents. Al Asad broke the agreement and bombarded Homs again, an emblematic city for the resistance.

The consequences of more than a year of internal fight are alarming. According to the Syrian Observatory of Human Rights, the riots caused at least 10,000 deaths in 13 months of fighting; the arrest of 80,000 opponents, thousands of them tortured; 200,000 refugees were displaced from the national territory and 55,000 found refuge in Turkey, Irak, Lebanon and Jordan.

Meanwhile, the Syrian dictatorship keeps oppressing and repressing its own citizens, rising the number of deads caused by the army. The conflict is growing older because multilateral organizations do not wish something similar to what happened in Libya by the intervention of the NATO, to happen again. Specially because of the strong opposition of Beijing and Moscow.

Everything that started by inspiration from the Arab riots in Syria is in risk because of the sanguinary action of the dictatorial government and the international bureaucracy of organizations supposedly in charge of ensuring the fulfillment of human rights. Syrians deserve a better future, without the restrictions of another dictatorship or the sick slavery of Islamism, another possible threat at the door.

The Arab Spring is not over yet, and consequences resulting from the postponement of fundamental freedom rights warn about what happens when individuals are subjected to a horror regime for a long time.