Waves Of People’s Uprising Across The Middle East

Siddhi B. Ranjitkar

The Middle East is the home of oil-rich countries but only the few ruling people have enjoyed the fruits of the nature-given richness leaving millions of the common people impoverish. The people have been deprived of democracy, rule of law and social justice. They have tried several times in the past to rise against those rulers but the despotic rulers have suppressed the voices of the people. This time, people of Tunisia and Egypt have already been successful to drive the autocratic rulers out of power, and people of neighboring courtiers have been voicing against their oppressive rulers. Certainly, our moral support is for the people to enjoy democracy, rule of law and social justice: the fundamental human rights.

None of the Middles East countries have democracy except for Israel. So, they don’t have the rule of law and social justice that go with democracy. Consequently, the circle of the ruling people has everything while majority of the people have nothing. They live in poverty because the riches of the country don’t trickle down; they live in ignorance because the rulers don’t want them to be educated, and finally they are deprived of the social justice because of not having access to riches, education and rule of law.

Tunisian people have chased away the autocratic president and have been in the process for setting up democracy. They have demanded to bring the former president to justice for his crime of denying the people the fundamental human rights for 30 years. They have asked the foreign banks and institutions to freeze his assets stashed away in foreign countries. If the people of Tunisia can have the stolen treasures back then they can build economy of the country on such assets.

Egyptians have ultimately dislodged the mighty president Hosni Mubarak from the presidential palace. Nobody knows where he is. He has stashed away $ 78 billion in foreign banks stealing the people’s money. The Swiss Government has already announced that the assets of Mubarak will be frozen in Switzerland. The US, UK and other European countries need to follow suit.

Egyptians have been watching how the army controlling the administration will institutionalize democracy, rule of law and social justice. The military rulers have promised to amend the constitution and then hold elections to a parliament that the army has dissolved. Egypt is on the way to democratization after almost 30 years of the autocratic rule of Mubarak that has used a state of emergency as a tool to suppress any dissident voices.

Currently, people in Iran, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya and Algeria have risen up against the totalitarian rulers. Some of the rulers of these countries have squandered their vast riches on supporting terrorists and their activities abroad in the name of Islam and of destroying the people of faiths other than Islam. Talibans had already destroyed more than 150 meters high two statues of Buddha in Bamiyan, Kandahar of Afghanistan in 2001, and thousands of other statues of Buddha in the museums of Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. Iran has been hastily building nuclear reactors for processing uranium for making nuclear weapons in the hope of finishing off non-Islamist countries. The current Iranian president has publicly said that he will erase the map of Israel from the world map. Libyan President Gaddafi had spent billions of dollars worth of oil money on terrorizing the western world keeping his fellow citizens in poverty.

Consequently, people of the Middle East suffer from social injustice. It is natural that people of the Middle East have risen up against those totalitarian rulers that have misused the national wealth.

People of tiny kingdom called Bahrain have been demanding the share in the national wealth. They have protested against the king and his circle of people enjoying the national wealth denying the majority of people their share in the national wealth and keeping them impoverished. The police and the army of the king have fired shots at the people peacefully demonstrating for their fundamental human rights and brutally killed some of them on Thursday, February 17. Again, on Friday, February 18, 2011, the army has fired shots at the mourners that have participated in the funeral of the people killed on Thursday. However, the people have continued to demonstrate even calling for improvement in their lives. They have said that the king that has killed his own people has no rights to rule.

Protestors have continued to pour in on the streets of Tehran protesting the dictatorial system of governance. Perhaps, Iranian people will go on building the pressure on the rulers until they quit the power voluntarily. The opposition has protested the Iranian presidential elections charging the ruling people with rigging the elections to the president. However, the Iranian government has suppressed the opposition voices and has continued to give the legality of the elections the opposition has labeled as rigged. The Iranian police have also taken the lives of some protestors while suppressing the street protests launched by the opposition. The Iranian police have already taken the opposition leaders in custody. Whereabouts of these leaders are not known, yet. Iranian police have also killed unknown numbers of protestors during this week.

Libyan leader Gaddafi has been in power for about 40 years. He has spent hundreds of billions of dollars if not thousands of dollars on his administration but majority of the people still live in poverty despite the country being so rich in oil resources. Currently, the people of Libya have been rising for their rights to have their share in the national natural wealth. But the security force has brutally killed 84 people that have risen for their share in the national wealth. A human rights advocacy group feared that a number of other people might have killed in the clashes with security at the funerals for the dead.

People in the Middles East have been protesting against the dictatorial rulers and demanding democracy, rule of law and social justice, and their share in the national wealth. However, we cannot expect anything more than killings of the peaceful protestors from the autocratic rulers that have been used to suppress the people’s voices, then enjoy the national wealth for their lavish life styles and spend the national wealth on supporting the international terrorists for decades.

However, the international community has been able to do nothing except for giving the moral support for the people that have been demanding nothing but the fundamental human rights such as democracy, rule of law and social justice. The international community has not been able to do anything when the Talibans blasted the huge statues of Buddha in Bamiyan, Kandahar of Afghanistan in 2001. So, it has been urgently needed to set up an international security force to support the peaceful protestors that demand the fundamental human rights elsewhere in the world, and to preserve the world cultural and religious heritage.

The rulers of the mighty nation such as the People’s Republic of China have killed thousands of pro-democracy protesters in the Tinaminan Square in Beijing in 1989 with impunity. They have been doing the same to the Tibetans that have been demanding nothing but an administrative autonomy to their country.

The Putin administration of Russia has been unjustly suppressing the people of Chechnya. They have been asking for the fundamental human rights. They have suffered from the totalitarian administration of Stalin during the Soviet Power in Russia.  Now, they have found that the so-called democratic rulers have been behaving as the foreign rulers not giving them to enjoy the fundamental human rights.

The world has been so small; the world order should not be same as in the past: people of one country enjoy everything including the fundamental human rights but of another live in poverty without having any rights to live as humans. The world of humans of the 21st century should not have such disparities. So, there is the need for the world community to set some sorts of rules that can be enforced by a force so that people can enjoy fundamental human rights everywhere in the world.

February 19, 2011