Why isn’t this the British spring?
Since Bouazizi’s supreme sacrifice, a lot kept happening during the street riots that followed his death. This ended Zain el Abidine Ben Ali’s twenty year tyranny in Tunisia as well closed the chapter on Hosni Mubarak’s thirty year old dictatorship in Egypt. Then with domino effect other Arab cities caught on. Thus Bahrain, Yemen, Libya […]
Since Bouazizi’s supreme sacrifice, a lot kept happening during the street riots that followed his death. This ended Zain el Abidine Ben Ali’s twenty year tyranny in Tunisia as well closed the chapter on Hosni Mubarak’s thirty year old dictatorship in Egypt. Then with domino effect other Arab cities caught on. Thus Bahrain, Yemen, Libya and Syria were soon engulfed. They became theatres of war. Government cracked down on protesters, hundreds were killed, thousands more were maimed as the rebels fought back. Except for Bahrain the remaining three have remained theatres of war with casualties on both sides.
The popular song among all these Arab rebels is regime change. Former US president George W Bush must be dark green with envy at how some of these protesters and their western backed financiers were able to achieve in a few months, what he couldn’t accomplish in 8 years, though it was he who coined the phrase ‘regime change’. The others want their rulers gone, just as they saw happen in Tunis and Cairo, but this time around the rulers are determined to fight to the finish. An unfortunate situation, with a huge toll on the civilian population, yet international media continues to applaud. It is after all the Arab awakening! It is the Arab Spring!
But alas, it is also the British spring, though no one is saying it. In circumstances much similar to the Tunisian case, a police action ignited the English Awakening. A trigger-happy policeman killed one Mark Duggan following a verbal exchange. People took to the streets in peaceful a protest but because security forces are the same everywhere, the police clamped down hard on them. The protesters rioted by burning buildings, buses and cars as well as by looting banks and shops. In no time at all it spread from North London to other parts of England. The English spring soon gained momentum and casualties continued to increase with at least one fatality recorded.
Events of the past week in Britain reminded me of the nursery rhyme we sang in primary school a long time ago. The flames rising from rooftops and the bodies of buses force back the lines from ‘London’s burning’ into my mind. The rhyme runs thus:
London’s burning, London’s burning
Fetch your engine, Fetch your engine
Fire, fire! Fire, fire
Pour water pour water
London’s burning…’
The song commemorates the great London fire of centuries ago. That incident razed the city and left indelible marks of its horror in the residents’ consciousness.
Today no less than 1700 residents of London and the other cities where these protests took place are behind bars. Among these are young children of no more than nine years of age. Nothing is being said about their human rights or minor status. Indeed when the Prime Minister David Cameron cut short his holiday to attend to this emergency he described it as ‘Criminality pure and simple and it has to be confronted and defeated.’ Justifying the arrest of under-raged children Mr Cameron’s spokesman said that if they were old enough to loot and burn then they should be old enough to face its penalty. This is incredible coming from the deputy leader of the so-called Free World. When similar police raids were witnessed in Syria and Libya, the Britons were quick to sack their diplomats and say the governments lack legitimacy but at the first taste of the people’s power, Britain has lost its sanctimonious morality and is going to such extreme measures even against minors.
Protestors and analysts say these riots were spontaneous and borne out of the difficult economic situation forced on ordinary Britons by the Conservative party government of Cameron but the Tories won’t even consider it. To them the protestors were lawless criminals and had to be crushed. Yet it is on record that the British economy is facing one of its worst economic crises for decades with budget cuts, rising unemployment and serious decline in social security biting hard.
With a resolve to do ‘everything necessary to restore order to Britain’s streets’, the current government is determined to prosecute tens of hundreds for last week’s unrest, but it should know that it no longer has the moral high ground to descend on Arab or Chinese or Iranian governments when they deploy security forces to quell riots or check protests. They are obviously incapable of doing any better. This is probably why Iran’s president Mahmud Ahmadinejad gave it back to them when he criticised the security crackdown by the police as ‘unacceptable’ and urged British statesmen to listen to the voice of their people and grant them freedoms. In obvious reference to what he and other governments not too cosy with London and Washington have been taking in the name of human rights abuses, Ahmedinejad had asked British leaders to ‘get on the people’s side and change their management instead of using such approaches.’
In addition to the media not willing to see the English awakening for what it is, there is also the conspiracy of silence from other developed nations who had endless harsh words for Libya and Syria and none for one of their own. It seems like there is no end in sight for the double standards we see in the labelling of incidents as well as in reporting them. To those of us who can see through these semantic manoeuvres, it is worthwhile noting that what we saw in Britain is a taste of the British spring, because there is as much poverty, anger and discontent there as there is in the Arab world or elsewhere. They can only ignore this warning at their own peril.