Tuesday, February 22, 2011

The springtime of the peoples

Two changes are sufficient to mark the turning of an era, while the riots are already occurring in the Arab world are still ongoing. It is increasingly bloody repression in Libya. The new chapter of history is not limited to countries that are the theater. The sensitive area, from Algeria to Iran, represents 36 percent of world oil production.

This is what concerns us in practice, together with the risks of war not only civilians, in an area full of frozen conflicts, at the gates of Western Europe. On the political, ideological, moral, what is happening is also intended to disrupt, to reverse the damage of the West on the Arab Muslim world.

The famous clash of civilizations. The first change has already happened is that men and women claiming the rights of citizens of a democratic state, and therefore reject the model of the rais, omnipotent and irreplaceable, dominating the Indian Ocean from the Atlantic for decades. After Ben Ali of Tunisia and Egypt's Mubarak, Gaddafi also now totters, caricature of the autocrat in petrodollars Arab billionaire, in operation for over forty years.

Other pins will fall. Trying to unravel the mysteries that inevitably fog the revolutionary phenomenon just exploded, Historians boldest dare a comparison, recall the "springtime of peoples" of 1848, which shocked a few months in Europe in the political system created by the Congress of Vienna.

After great sacrifice, generous exaltation and many hopes, the revolutions of the time, which occurred in the chain, from Sicily to the Bourbons of Paris of Louis Philippe, failed one after another. So we're seeing popular uprisings, beyond the Mediterranean, doomed to fail? Like in the 800 returned to the authoritarian monarchies and empires were formed new, so could return to the rais of the Arabs have just been released or are liberandoo want to free? The questions remain.

But perhaps above all historians know predict the past. Our time is fast. The peoples of insurgents under the eyes of the democratic models. The images, information, jump over the borders and censorship. The second change, highlighted by Henry Laurens, a historian of the Arab world, about the image that Arabs have of themselves and that we were so widespread as to be an obsession.

The protester's Tahrir Square in Cairo or Bourguiba avenue in Tunis, and the opponent of the Gaddafi regime that sacrifices the lives of Benghasi, have replaced the image of the bearded terrorist and fanatic. The peoples, whose civilization had been humiliated by colonialism, I decided to go back on the international scene, met in Bandung (1955), to celebrate the sovereignty of their states, the newly acquired national independence, and also to claim, in some cases , their religious beliefs.

Jean Daniel remembers him, and I remember the matches in an old reporter, Cesco Tomaselli, sent to the Indonesian city where the conference was held, where participants (including Chou En-lai, Nasser, Tito, Nkrumah, Nehru) were described, or rather mocked, as expressions of civilization lower scimmiottanti the true greats of the Earth.

Slightly more than half a century later is no longer a question of an independent nation and assertion of religious identity. The old journalist, then convinced the representative of a superior civilization, now discovers that the young Tunisians, Egyptians, Yemenis, Moroccans and Libyans also, which we did not have the impression of knowing the faces, because their country seemed to be embodied only by Gaddafi and its grotesque extravagances, claiming individual rights and freedoms.

Without expressing religious needs. Not limited to nationalist appeals. Just like the Europeans of 1848, as well as those of the Forties, the fight against fascism, and 1989, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The story is reunified. The computer and its derivatives have opened an uncontrollable space for the thugs of Saddam and provide common tools to civilization increasingly divided.

The ideas run more easily. Conquer the soldiers, conscripts, which should suppress but which are often susceptible to the slogans of peers ready to defy the police and Ben Ali Mubarak and Qaddafi's planes. The losers are not only rais, long favored by Western powers, as guardians of their people, ready to fight to suppress the fundamentalist temptations just surfaced in society.

Even the extremist currents of Islam have suffered a defeat, because the dream has not been popular uprising led by them. Them by surprise. Indeed, he has invested Iran itself, where opponents of the theocratic government have claimed the same freedom sought in Tunis, Cairo, Tripoli. This American attitude counted.

The United States of Barak Obama has been crucial in Egypt. This time the force was placed at the service of justice. Without urgent intervention of the Washington Generals in Cairo would be resolved any time soon to get rid of the president, who was also their commander in chief. Obama has kept his promise two years ago with a speech in Cairo, facing the Muslim world.

It supported democratic movements, while making some diplomatic contortion. To avoid compromising the stability of old too far from democratic allies. For example Saudi Arabia, threatened by the Shiite revolt in Bahrain. Europe too has been faithful to his principles and condemning the crackdown and ruled in favor of the opposition in revolt.

Only Italy's Berlusconi has failed to honor the appointment of a democratic country. If the insurgency Libyan drown in the blood, the Italian Government has its share of shame.

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