“Bread, Liberty, Dignity” and “We will follow Tunisia”, these chants are all over the place in Egypt now a days when the country is on verge of revolution. I was startled the way revolution bechanced in Tunisia within days and now the Egyptians are going forward in same direction. I was following the happenings very closely in Tunisia and it reminds me of a saying by JFK. He once said,
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable"
All the time a question was pounding in my head that what actually triggered this revolution in Tunisia and I got my answer when I read the interview of Dr. Azzam Tamimi, an author and political analyst. In reply to the question that what he see when he look at what has been happening over the past few weeks in Tunisia, he said,
“I think it is the question of threshold. For such a revolution to take place, the anger within people has to reach a certain threshold and I think in Tunisia it has reached that threshold, because none of us could tell. For many years we were wishing this to happen, but it happened without us even knowing.”
This is exactly what happened in Tunisia when Mohamed Bouazizi burned himself to death in protest because he didn’t have money to bribe and was humiliated by a female police officer who slapped him and threw away his produce cart. He was the only earner of the family. What kind of repression do you imagine it takes for a 26 years old to do this? He did go to the governor’s office to complain but was refused by the governor to see or listen to him even after his saying that “If you don’t see me, I will burn myself”. , Egypt is almost there as the people are enduring the same problems and after the revolution of Tunisia their hopes are rising and I loved the words an Egyptian protester in a rally said to a news channel. He said that
"We will not be silenced, whether you are a Christian, whether you are a Muslim, whether you are an atheist, you'll demand your god damn rights ..and we'll have our all rights ...one way or the other"
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| Anti-government protesters clashed with the riot police in the center of Cairo |
If we look at the reasons, the common thing everywhere is poverty, unemployment, corruption and a total freeze of political dynamics; just like the political system has failed completely and the people everywhere felt humiliated. Isn’t it felt like I am talking about the issues in our country?? We deal with these problems on day to day basis in Pakistan and although we have so called democratic government, for me its not dandier then dictatorship. I ascertain the similar issues all over my country then why we are not next in line? Why we only sit back in our couches, watch these events on TV, praise these people and then carry on with our life? Is our conscious is dead or we are cowards who feel that we cannot bring a change! Why we don’t want to fight for our rights, the same rights which are written in our constitution and still we are unable to use.
Revolution doesn’t need years of struggle and hardships. It can happen within days as we already witnessed in Tunisia. The only thing we need is a push from a sincere leadership. We need to break our emotional attachments with the political parties. I can’t say this for sure about the older generation but our youth is capable of stand up for their rights as Abraham Lincoln once said that
“Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable - a most sacred right - a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.”
All we require is faith in ourselves. In Yemen its already begin, Jordan and Algeria are next then why not us? What are we waiting for????
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