(contents)
Chapter 7: The "Arab Spring" - A fleeting dream (1)
168 Enough already! The masses are
tired of long-term dictatorship (1/4)
The Middle East and North Africa region is collectively called MENA. It may sound strange to say that MENA region hardly had radical political change before so-called "Arab Spring" in 2011. But from Ramadan War (Yom Kippur War) in 1973 to Arab Spring in 2011, most of Arab countries had no experience of the political change for nearly 40 years because the dictatorship continued so long in most of Middle Eastern countries. The long-dictatorship was not only by secular military power in Egypt, Syria but also by monarchic regime by the Gulf countries.
Most of the MENA countries are ethnically Arabs except Turkey, Iran and
Israel. And Muslim occupies a majority religious group including Turkey and
Iran. It is difficult to answer that whether the long-dictatorship regime is due
to the ethnicity of Arabs or the religion of Islam. It might be said that both
of them brought about the long-term dictatorship. Ethnicity and religion are
inevitable two facts of Middle Eastern dictatorship. Anyhow it could be the
right answer that the political stability had been maintained by dictatorship.
In addition, it can also be pointed out that the political stability in
MENA countries could not bring about the progress of science and technology and
the economic prosperity of every countries except the Gulf countries which achieved
economic prosperity by oil. Despite being a similar authoritarian politics,
Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand and Indonesia had in reverse enjoyed
progress of industries and economic prosperity during the same period.
(To be continued
----)
(From an ordinary citizen in the
cloud)
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