“The global public, more aware than ever of what is going on in the world, and more able than ever before to share ideas, facts, experiences, and testimonies, is acutely sensitive to the vested interests of the powerful who stand in the way of their dreams,” (Sullivan, Andrew). As all countries are products of their past history, a review of such as well as respective political, economic, and social characteristics may offer insight into the future prospects of those states. “Despite the unique characteristics of each country’s situation, the common theme of the protests in the Arab world, and the West has been shaped by the continuing world economic crisis, expanding economic inequality, and rising social injustice,” (Ben-Meir, Alon). In 2011 the twin drivers of America’s promising protest movement against the financial sector and the Arab Spring uprisings, came with a big difference between young men and women willing to face bullets for change in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, and American citizens of all ages gathering under far less dangerous circumstances. Nonetheless, showing the only way to meet their demands is through meaningful political change, the use of exercising their rights, and practicing the same means of communication for the accomplishment.
2011 appeared to have begun with no road map, “...no actually existing normality toward which to drive,” for dissolving dictatorship, ending random and brutal violence towards citizens, and enabling free association and speech are the foundations for that public sphere in which public furnishings “...can be identified, defended, and sought,” (Kennedy, Michael D.). The term “Arab Spring” was conveyed to suggest the arrival of a new era of awakening that would soon engulf the Arab World and serve as a foreshadow of newly constructed socio-economic and political order (Ben-Meir, Alon). “The ethos of protest began growing in the Arab World several years ago. In their 2007 National Interest article entitled ‘Arab Spring Fever,’ Nathan J. Brown aptly observed that the unusual protests in the streets of the Middle East from 2005-2007 indicated that ‘dreams of democratic openings competitive elections, the rule of law and wider political freedoms have captured the imagination of clear majorities in the Arab World’,” (Ben-Meir, Alon). The only certainty thus far that can be concluded from the uprisings that have occurred throughout the Middle East and North Africa is that the Arab World will never be the same again (Ben-Meir, Alon).
The birth of the Arab Spring, lies in the hands of Muhammad Bouazizi. On December 17, 2010, the twenty-six-year-old street vendor from Sidi Bouzid, had committed self-immolation “...to protest what he regarded as bureaucratic harassment,” (Bishku, Michael B.). The main target was the corruption and repressive policies of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali (Manfreda, Primoz). “His plight, which came to symbolize the injustice and economic hardship afflicting many Tunisians under the Ben Ali Regime, inspired street protests throughout the country against high unemployment, poverty, and political repression,” (“Jasmine Revolution.”). President Ben Ali was forced to flee the country on January 14, 2011, after the military refused to shut down the protests and demonstrations (Manfreda, Primoz).
“The uprising of the Egyptian people following Tunisia’s ‘Jasmine Revolution’ opened a new chapter of change for the Arab world,” (Ben-Meir, Alon). The movement began on January 25, 2011, in Tahrir square, attempting to overthrow the autocratic regime that had been in absolute power since 1952 (Sarihan, Ali). “Most insurgents drew their motivation from the country’s history of corrupt and autocrat leadership; limited social, political, and economic rights; and their desire for greater economic inequality,” (Sarihan, Ali). After a historic eighteen-day wave of demonstrations and rallies by hundreds of thousands, on the night of February 11, 2011, Vice President Omar Suleiman announced Mubarak would be stepping down as president, leaving the power in the hands of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.
“Unlike rebellions in Tunisia and Egypt, Libya’s conflict looked more like a conventional war than a series of protests,” (Arsenault, Chris). The protests beginning on February 15 in Benghazi were against the arrest of well-known human rights lawyer Fathi Terbil.”When underway, this initially spontaneous gathering of several hundred demonstrators quickly grew in size to several thousand. ...By the evening of February 15, 2011, the Benghazi protest devolved into violence that left dozen of protesters injured and a police station ablaze,” (McQuinn, Brian). Muammar al-Gaddafi was killed, leaving his regime disintegrated in October 2011, however it took about nine months to realize that objective (Salih, Kamal Eldin Osman). “A number of combined forces explain why the Gaddafi forces were able to survive for a longer period despite massive air attacks by NATO forces targeting the regime’s military and administrative infrastructure over the last eight months of Gaddafi’s rule [March 2011 to October 2011], as well as simultaneous attacks orchestrated by the Libyan rebels,” (Salih, Kamal Eldin Osman).
“The political protests have provided an important reminder that the economic situation we find ourselves in was not inevitable,” (Dean, Amy). “Equal American now seems ancient history. Fifty years ago America’s top 400 incomes averaged only $14.6 million each, in today’s dollars. In 2008 our top 400 averaged $270.5 million. The 1961 ultrarich paid, after loopholes, 42.4 percent of their incomes in federal tax. The 2008 ultras paid just 18.1 percent,” (Pizzigati, Sam). In the United States, the protests have helped shift the national dialogue from the deficit to economic problems many ordinary Americans face, such as unemployment, the excessive amount of student and other personal debt that burdens middle class and working class citizens, and other major issues of social inequality (Greenhouse, Steven). The division between the top one percent and the rest of the population is particularly apparent among officeholders. The economist, Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz explained, many senators and representatives in the House are “members of the top one percent when they arrive, are kept in office by money from the one percent, and know that if they serve the top one percent well they will be rewarded by the top one percent when they leave office,” (Dean, Amy). Currently, Tunisia’s unemployment rate is sixteen percent, in a very homogenous population of 10.7 million (Bishku, Michael B.) Within the labor force, 18.3 percent participate in agriculture, 31.9 percent in industry, and 49.8 percent in services (Bishku, Michael B.) As for Egypt, “The annual rate of inflation is 13.3 percent, while 20 percent of Egypt’s population is below the international poverty level. The unemployment rate is currently 12.2 percent in a population of 83.7 million, … As for the labor force, 32 percent are engaged in agriculture, 17 percent in industry, and 5 percent in services,” (Bishku, Michael B.). Analyzing the gap between countries difference in income, it is concluded that Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita in Tunisia, which was $7,979 in 2010, is much higher than Egypt, which was $5,889 (Boutayeb, Abdesslam, and Uwe Helmert). “Oil is the economy in Libya and oil profits have bankrolled massive investments in education and infrastructure - yet Libya lags far behind other oil rich Arab states. Unemployment recently stood at 30 percent,” (Mother Jones Reporting Staff).
“Libya is North Africa’s most prosperous country, given its tremendous oil wealth and small population. Yet most Libyans live in deplorable conditions. The state provides little by way of civil society and does not take care of even the most basic governmental obligations. There are police to control people who stray from the leader, but there is little else. As a housing crisis has escalated in the past few years, the regime has made no effort to provide adequate public accommodation. Wealth is concentrated in the hands of the very few,” (Solomon, Andrew). “Our objective should be to develop a proactive financial and economic system based on fairness, transparency, sustainably and social responsibility, as opposed to rampant self-interest, and unconscionable profiteering that we have seen,” (Myers, Thomas).
“Arabs, Europeans, Israelis, and Americans have all pointed their fingers at those they believe to be responsible for their problems,” (Ben-Meir, Alon). “Those who described themselves as ‘actively involved’ in the Occupy movement were overwhelmingly white, highly educated and employed, according to a new report from the Joseph F. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies at the City University of New York,” (Berman, Jillian).
The report surveyed the protesters at a joint Occupy and labor movement May Day rally in New York City. The survey reported that two-thirds of protesters that described themselves as “actively involved” in the Occupy Wall Street movement, were white, while eighty percent had a bachelor’s degree or higher. These were the individuals who represented the protest in the public sphere, the unofficial “leaders,” (Berman, Jillian). News of Muhammad Bouazizi’s incident and subsequent demonstrations calling for economic and political reform spread through various means of communication, leading to the uprising. “The uprising’s participants included unemployed youth, students, union workers and professionals,” (Bishku, Michael B.).
Meanwhile in Egypt, urbane and cosmopolitan young people in the major cities organized the uprisings (Anderson, Lisa). The poll conducted in Egypt, confirmed that participants in the Stand had in fact been ordinary people, and that many actually did want to take part but had been prevented from doing so by their parents, who feared for them (Ghonim 84). Inspired by the downfall of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, Libyan activists began establishing clandestine opposition groups in late January, 2011 (McQuinn, Brian). “Shortly after the beginning of the popular uprising against Col Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in mid-February, residents of towns and cities in eastern Libya formed an interim rebel administration,” (Gritten, David). The rebel forces were in fact predominantly university students with no fighting experience (Gritten, David). “The year 2011 will go down in history as a year of youth revolt. Throughout the year, beginning with the Arab Spring, protests, riots, and revolutions involving tens of millions of teenagers and twenty-somethings have shaken the global political order. International business media outlets from the Financial Times to the Wall Street Journal to the Economist have been fretting openly for months about today’s rebellious young people. Commentators across the political spectrum have already started comparing 2011 to that seminal year of international youth rebellion, 1968,” (Zill, Zach). It is not difficult to see why. “The uprisings and revolutions of the “Arab Spring,” where a majority of the populace is younger than twenty-five; ...and the Occupy encampments that have broken through the ossified US political climate and ignited a new mass social movement—all of these movements show how young people have led the way in a growing wave of social upheaval,” (Zill, Zach).
“In all of these Arab countries, the protests have taken the form of sustained campaigns involving thousands of ordinary citizens using the same techniques of civil resistance: strikes, demonstrations, marches and rallies. Particularly pivotal to the protest process as well has been the use of social media to organize,communicate, raise awareness, and issue danger alerts among the thousands of protestors in the face of state attempts at repression, internet censorship, crowd control, and even physical attack to the point of protestors being beaten or shot point blank,” (Salih, Kamal Eldin Osman). In Tunisia, the event of Bouazizi’s self-immolation became national and eventually international news. “Television networks such as Al Jazeera and Facebook both played a significant role in disseminating information and mobilizing the masses of protestors in Tunisia. Both virtual and real revolutionaries came out in droves to protest,” (Khondker, Habibul Haque). Khaled Koubaa, the president of the Internet Society in Tunisia reported that of the 2,000 registered tweeters, only 200 were active users, and before the revolution there were 2 million users of Facebook (Khondker, Habibul Haque). “‘Social media was absolutely crucial’, says Koubaa. ‘Three months before Mohammed Bouazizi burned himself in Sidi Bouzid we had a similar case in Monastir. But no one knew about it because it was not filmed. What made a difference this time is that the images of Bouaziz were put on Facebook and everyone saw it’ (Beaumont, 2011). Stressing the role of the new media, Zeynep Tufekci (2011) makes the point that in Tunisia protest movements were crushed in 2008 without a significant backlash. Part of the reason was that at that time there were only 28,000 Facebook users in Tunisia. In other words, the new media penetration was low. In December 2010, the news of the self-immolation of Bouazizi in a small town was transmitted by the new media, triggering mass protests,” (Khondker, Habibul Haque). In 2003, was the first public protest against Mubarak since his reign began (Sarihan, Ali).
Five years later on April 6, 2008 a youth group emerged on Facebook as another movement against the Mubarak regime. “The administrators of the Facebook group described themselves as youths from different backgrounds, ages, and social classes who did not have any political experience, but who were working together to change the current brutal regime to one of transparency, equality, and liberty,” (Sarihan, Ali). The group’s logan later became “We are al Khaled Said.” In honor of Said, who was killed by Egyptian security forces after his capture on January 6, 2010 (Sarihan, Ali). The Egyptian revolution was well organized, coordinated, and civil, with social media being played at every part (Khondker, Habibul Haque). “During the anti-Mubarak protests, an Egyptian activist put it succinctly in a tweet: ‘we use Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world’,” (Khondker, Habibul Haque). Another Facebook page emerged in Libya, calling on Libyans to protest in the streets on February 17 for their own Day of Rage, demanding basic freedoms and human rights, which did not explicitly call for Gaddafi’s removal (Topol, Sarah A.)
Each of these revolutions began differently, but they all were organized and fueled by tech-savvy social media users, particularly on Facebook and Twitter. “Adbusters' protest campaign -- with the hashtag #occupywallstreet -- began in July with the launch of a simple campaign website calling for a march through the streets of Lower Manhattan and a sit-in at the New York Stock Exchange, just as demonstrators did in Tunis' November 7 Square and Cairo's Tahrir Square,” (Saba, Michael).
According to The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 20 states, “Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association,” (“The Universal Declaration of Human Rights,...”). In September 2011, waves of protests against socioeconomic injustice began across the United States, capturing the attention of the entire country. The Occupy Wall Street is the name given to the movement that began on September 17, 2011 in Zuccotti Park, located in New York City’s financial district. Within weeks of their emergence, the protests greatly expanded and deepened United States political communication around the gap between rich and poor, bank bailouts and immunity of financial crimes, and the role of money in politics. The response of U.S. authorities of policing the protesters also received significant attention. Images of police using pepper spray, the baseless arrests of peaceful protesters, midnight raids on encampments, baton-swinging officers, and officers obstructing and arresting journalists were beamed around the globe.
Reports, videos, and allegations of unjustifiably police force have been a constant and persistent feature of the Occupy protests. Documents and research shows a large spectrum of incidents that range from very serious to relatively minor. The number of incidents show the nature, range, and extent of force directed in the Occupy movement (“Occupy Wall Street Spreads Woldwide.”).
There are records of 130 alleged incidents of police employing such force without apparent need or justification, included as an appendix to Suppressing Protest. “The explosion of anger that grew into a revolutionary whirlwind that spread beyond the borders of Tunisia to other Arab countries began on December 17, 2010. The trigger for this explosion was the dramatic suicide of Mohamed Bouazizi, a twenty-six-year-old fruit and vegetable street vendor,” (Aleya-Sghaier, Amira). During the first months of the revolution, the protesters acted peacefully through demonstrations, marches, sit-ins, strikes, building occupations, roadblocks, and the establishment of camps in front of the ministries (Aleya-Sghaier, Amira). “Their weapons were their voices, which shouted their slogans; their banners, which made their claims known; and their graffiti, which marked their existence. Young people with clenched fists and bare breasts clashed with the police, sometimes throwing stones at them. But this peaceful revolution saw only two kinds of violence,” (Aleya-Sghaier, Amira). After the outbreak of the revolution on December 17, 2010, the regime’s violence gradually increased. The use of gas and batons as a means of repression, only escalated to live bullets against demonstrators. The massacre of the protesters were deliberately ordered by the ousted president and his advisors (Aleya-Sghaier, Amira). “Between December 17, 2010, and January 14, 2011, more than 330 people were killed and 700 injured as a result of counterrevolutionary violence. The majority of victims were shot dead at the site of protest, and a minority (seventy-two) were either asphyxiated or shot dead while attempting to escape from prisons such as Monastir, Mahdia, Kasserine, Bizerte, and Gafsa,” (Aleya-Sghaier, Amira). Counterrevolutionary violence continued for five months after the fall of Ben Ali, however, compared with other Arab revolutions in progress at the time, the Tunisian revolution produced fewer victims (Aleya-Sghaier, Amira). A comparison between Tunisia and Libya seems impossible. Under the reign of Gaddafi, Libya lacked the concept of a state, and the uprisings were more of a conventional war than peaceful demonstrations (Beidoun, Abbas). Protesters and Egyptian riot police clashed in Cairo on January 17, and “At least 278 people were killed, including 235 civilians, state TV reported, citing an Egyptian emergency official. Interim Interior Minister Gen. Mohammed Ibrahim said that an additional 43 police officers died,” (Botelho, Greg).
“Democracy has been the American religion since before the Revolution, from New England town halls, to the multicultural democracy of Atlantic pirate ships. But can our current political system, one that seems responsive only to the wealthiest among us and leaves most Americans feeling disengaged, voiceless, and disenfranchised, really be called democratic? And if the tools of our democracy are not working to solve the rising crises we face, how can we, average citizens, make change happen?” (Graeder, David). Due to the Arab Spring and Occupy Movement the world has seen how change can happen, and what they do share, is a theme that everyone has alienable rights and that, together, we can effect change to ensure those and provide safe-keeping for those.
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