Even as a second Arab Spring blooms in Sudan and Libya, the West’s myth of strongman stability refuses to die GlobeDebate
Alaa Salah, a Sudanese woman propelled to internet fame earlier this week after clips went viral of her leading powerful protest chants against Omar al-Bashir, addresses protesters during a demonstration in front of the military headquarters in the capital Khartoum on April 10, 2019.On Wednesday night, the mood on the streets of Khartoum was infectious.
But this is nothing like 2011. This time, the world was barely watching, at least until Thursday morning, and Western leaders were not jumping over each other to side with the people’s movement. Even though Sudan’s triumph follows Algeria’s equally jubilant mass uprising, which forced dictator Abdelaziz Bouteflika to step down on April 1 after two decades in office, the phrase “Arab Spring 2.
Libya remains trapped, at least for the moment, in a standoff between unpleasant options – hardline military rule or a simulacrum of the old corrupt dictatorship – which has led otherwise sensible people to speculate that it might have been better, in 2011, to have left Moammar Gadhafi in place, or at least for NATO not to have lent air support to the popular uprising against him.
That argument has won the day in Egypt, where Western countries now overtly support and co-operate with Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the former general who originally seized power in a 2013 coup, and now holds seemingly perpetual power through more or less undemocratic elections. Mr. el-Sisi has led a campaign of mass imprisonment, torture and killing on a scale worse than that of Hosni Mubarak, the dictator Egyptians rose against in 2011.
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