Iraq
The Arab Spring
The Arab Spring was identified as a series of violent revolutions which caught the attention of nations all over the globe. The beginning of the revolutions started when a man named Mohamed Bouazazi, a Tunisian fruit vendor, decided to set himself on fire to protest against the Tunisian government. He was upset that his fruit stand’s fruit were confiscated by government officials and that he never received them back or any form of payment for the goods. Due to the death of Mohamed, a revolt broke out in Tunisia to change the government at the time. The protestors successfully overthrew and started a transitional democratic government. It wasn’t long before the surrounding countries heard about this and began to follow the same path. These countries included Tunisia, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia, Bahrain, Djibouti, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Oman, Jordan, Kuwait, Algeria, Morocco, Mauritania, Lebanon, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. Between January and March of 2011 this was the foreshadowing of the Arab Spring. Although all these countries revolted, only Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and Syria had extreme protests and major changes in their governments. To this day Syria is still stuck in a civil war unlike the others. However, the others dealt with weak governments and the transition from the old to the new. Unfortunately, those governments that began from the Arab Spring had a hard time transitioning from their previous government systems to more democratic governments. It was difficult because they were trying to make a huge transition from a dictatorship to a democracy; which isn’t an easy change to complete successfully. While all the transitions were happening, it was hard to control the nations from total chaos. Until the transition is completed, these countries were standing on thin ice before chaos broke out. The Arab Spring was seen by the transitions and goals needed to be accomplished. Some of the techniques used during this time were even complete disobedience of newer laws and using modern day technology to share information about the protests to the entire world. This raised concerns around the globe and brought attention to the issues happening in these countries. Governments then began to shut down internet in some places because if violated certain human rights created by the United Nations. Because of this, governments began to interrogate, torture, and even kill in front of the entire public. However no outside country is justified to intervene due to the fact that many of the violations claimed before are unable to be confirmed. In other words, it wouldn’t be right for another country to butt in since the violations aren’t for certain. All of these extreme activities sparked the attention of Russia, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The UK, US, and France were always supportive towards the idea of reconstruction of the struggling countries with overthrown governments. The G8 began to get involved which consists of the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Japan, Italy, Russia, German, and Canada. In May 2011 a G8 summit of western powers was held to deal with the conflicts of the Arab Spring. The 3 great powers of the United States, the United Kingdom, and France were completely in support to provide great amounts of financial support to post-Arab Spring countries like Tunisia. They wanted to do this so they could help these countries get back on their feet and build up their new democratic governments. Some of the other powers were considering allowing military involvement on the situation at hand. All of these powers were willing to take some form of step to help out these countries, except for Russia. Russia didn’t agree with any of this and refused to send any military or financial aid to the Arab Spring conflict. Not only this but they even condemned the United States for their major involvement