Pardon my ignorance, but all this trouble in Egypt seemed to come out of nowhere. What caused it all?
My brother says that Wikileaks is a base cause of it, and he says that recent trouble in Tunisia is no different. (i.e Some cables were released, the public were outraged, then all this trouble happened)
Any truth to any of that?
WikiLeaks was one of the entities that had released information about government corruption in Tunisia. However, Tunisian youth had been simmering for some time, and the opposition had been complaining of the ruler’s corruption, mistreatment of lower economic persons and et cetera for some time.
The spark that lit the keg was a shopkeeper who set himself afire as a form of protest. Demonstrators went on relatively peaceful marches, inspired by the man; the Tunisian government’s initial response to these marches was heavy handed. That response whipped the people into an absolute frenzy and basically set the whole country into an outright riot that forced the President out of office.
This is decades in the making. Any longstanding oppression basically has the potential to suddenly go critical. People have been unhappy for a long, long, long time. We aren’t too aware of this, of course, because simmering disaffection rarely makes the news.
To answer “yeah, but why now” I’d look at rising global food prices. Americans spend a tiny portion of our incomes on food, so it’s hard for us to understand the impact of rising food prices. But in much of the world, this is a huge, critical deal…much like Americans would freak the heck out if gas prices suddenly doubled. I was in Cameroon for the last global food crisis, and it made a huge difference in my standard of living. You end up watching helplessly as the price of basic commodities- cooking oil, grain, powdered milk, etc. seem to double overnight.
What makes food especially sensitive is that food prices affect the one population that is physically and culturally close enough to power to make a difference- the urban elites. Peasants can grow their own food, but urbanites (students, mid-level government workers, the police and militaries, business people) are helplessly dependent on the global food market.
People will put up with a lot, from a bad government, but once that government can’t assure them access to food, they are going to start looking for changes.
Your brother seems to be confusing Wikileaks with the Qatari-owned news agency Al Jazeera, who were the ones who actually released the leaked cables that are tearing the Arab world apartat the moment.
The Palestine papers are tearing the Palestinians apart, but I don’t think they’re having much of an effect on the rest of the Arab world. I agree the Egypt thing has a lot to do with rising food prices and growing dissatisfaction with Mubarak and the government’s heavy handed autocracy and corruption.
Grinding poverty and a general lack of any opportunity to improve the situation is more or less the problem in Egypt. A few years back young people were having a problem getting married because they simply couldn’t afford a proper wedding. The government set up a program to perform mass marriages and cover the costs but I don’t know if it was successful at all. Of course this has been the situation for a while now and it’s always relevant to ask why now rather than years in the past? [even sven] seems to have provided a good explanation. When you’ve got a powder keg it doesn’t take a big spark to set things off.
An additional factor or two: oppressive regimes don’t like to hear bad news about themselves, and people living under oppressive regimes don’t readily share their dissatisfaction openly.
So while I’m no expert on Egypt specifically, I’m guessing that the Cairo Daily News didn’t have a little pie chart on page A2 showing the results of a Mubarak job approval poll – and even if they did, the poll results would not be particularly trustworthy. So no one, neither outside analysts nor Egyptian government officials, has a real sense of the level and depth of anti-government feeling until the pot boils over.
Having to live on $51.00 a month, combined with communications; i.e., knowing that other countries, say, like India or China, have a real growing middle class and the events in Tunesia set it all up for the perfect storm, politically for anarchy.