Activists and opposition groups continue to demand the basic human rights and political reforms promised to them for more than two years, but the Bahraini government has responded by subjecting citizens to arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, interrogation, torture, and abuse.
Egypt’s Sahara was noticeably absent from the great story of Egypt’s recent history: the overthrow of Mubarak by popular dissent in 2011. Egypt’s Arab Spring was fundamentally urban, both a product of crippling levels of urban unemployment, particularly youth unemployment, and the space the city opened up, with the help of social media, for protesters to coordinate and mobilise in major cities as they did in the days leading up to Mubarak’s fall. If the Egypt of colonial lenses was a T E Lawrence vision of uncharted deserts, the dominant image of contemporary Egypt is the crowded urban arena – the demands and desires of Tahrir Square.
Moaz al-Khatib, the former Damascus cleric and leader of the Syrian opposition coalition, has resigned his post to “work with freedom”
In Libya your eyes receive constant reminders of the Arab Spring and the violent end to Col Gaddafi’s 42-year rule – from the bullet holes at the airport, posters of revolutionary martyrs, to the thousands of national flags on buildings.
Spurred by a political assassination, tens of thousands have taken to the streets to protest the state into which their country has fallen. The same sense of decency and dignity that propelled them to the streets before drives them on now.