Arab Spring violence - Cure may be worse than the disease

EVEN when the Arab Spring was in its faltering infancy, concerns were raised about who or what would replace the regimes toppled by popular, relatively peaceful revolution.

Recent events suggest those concerns were justified and that in some instances tyrants have been replaced by the tyranny of a rudderless vacuum.

The fear that relatively secular dictators, however unattractive, might be replaced by radical, aggressive Islamists was real and cannot yet be fully discounted.

In Bahrain, at least 20 medical staff — some of them trained in Ireland — face courts for doing no more than treating those in need of their attention. Bahrain’s Sunni Muslim rulers crushed protests in March, with military help from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. At least 30 people were killed, hundreds wounded and more than 1,000 — mostly Shia — detained in the crackdown.

In Libya, Col Gadaffi’s dictatorship has been ended but the remnants of his enforcers still resist transitional government forces in the centre of Gadaffi’s hometown, as desperate, destitute civilians try to flee the street fighting. Though Gadaffi’s defeat has been inevitable for some time, its achievement has been so protracted, and so many civilians’ lives have been lost, that the National Transitional Council may face the kind of hostility that will make uniting the huge north African state even more difficult than it already is.

Though elections are scheduled in Tunisia later this month, the inevitable conflict between religiously motivated zealots and secular democrats has led to street violence. In recent days, Tunisian police used tear gas to disperse hundreds of Islamists who were protesting against a decision by a television station to broadcast Persepolis, a celebrated animated film which, they said, denigrated Islam. In another incident last weekend, 200 protesters stormed a university in Sousse because a student was denied a place because she was wearing a full-face veil.

However, the most graphic illustration of the breakdown of society and government was seen on the streets of Cairo in recent days. In scenes reminiscence of Nazi pogroms in Poland and Russia’s borderlands 70 years ago, Muslims attacked minority Coptic Christians and at least 25 people were killed. Coverage of the violence was viscerally disturbing, especially as we imagine that humanity has gone beyond such blind hatreds and murderous insanity.

Salafist and other strict Islamist groups which were once controlled by Murbarak are now free to give vent to their extremism, extremism that may provoke divisions that will make the elections scheduled to begin at the end of next month irrelevant.

As well as all of those difficulties and other Arab Spring legacy conflicts, the Israeli/Palestinian impasse seems to have reached a new level of difficulty since the US opposed attempts at the UN to have a Palestinian state recognised.

It would be a tragedy for the region, and for the rest of the world, if the cure turned out to be worse than the disease.