Ten years after the Arab Spring, is there still hope for democracy?

 

A decade after the Arab Spring, this film tells the story of the uprisings known as the "Arabellion." The protagonists describe how it started, what happened and what life is like today in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt.

Ten years after the Arab Spring

 

Ten years after Arabs mobilised in their millions, we take a retrospective look at the media’s role and the damage that has been done to journalism since.

The wave of revolutions that came to be known as the Arab Spring began a decade ago – in December of 2010.

Arabs mobilised in their millions in collective calls for democracy, justice and freedom of expression. Governments fell. Autocrats – names like Mubarak, Gaddafi, Ben Ali – went with them.

Egypt's Morsi: The Final Hours

Investigation into the behind-the-scenes events during the final days of Egypt's first democratically-elected president.

The 2011 Arab Spring had seen the end of President Hosni Mubarak's 30-year rule and within 18 months, Mohamed Morsi had become Egypt's first democratically-elected president. But after one year in office, almost weekly street protests and riots appeared to reach a climax with calls for Morsi to resign and even for the military to intervene. In July 2013, Morsi was overthrown.

Al Jazeera's Jamal Elshayyal reported on events in Egypt at the time - and now reveals new exclusive evidence of top-level conspiracy, power-broking and betrayal in the turmoil that led to Morsi's last days in office.

The Lust for Libya: How a Nation was Torn Apart

The legacy of the life and death of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.

Torn asunder by competing local, regional and international forces, its survival as a singular nation-state is under threat.

Once Africa's wealthiest country with the continent's largest oil reserves and highest standard of living, Libya, liberated from a dictator's grip, is mired in a violent, internecine conflict that has left many of its people struggling for food, fuel and security.

So how did it come to this?

Libya is split between rival governments and conflicting centres of power - one in the east of the country and one in the west - each backed by militias fighting for their own share of Libya's loot seven years on from the violent overthrow of the Gaddafi regime.

Tunisia's Dirty Secret

Five years after the revolution, Tunisia's black minority has yet to experience the freedoms enjoyed by other citizens.

In January 2011, driven to despair by high unemployment, food inflation, corruption, a lack of political freedom and poor living conditions, Tunisians ousted President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and introduced democracy to their country.

As the celebrations of this remarkable achievement began to quieten down, people got ready to enjoy the benefits of liberty - especially those to do with fairness, human rights and equality.

And indeed, many of those benefits did follow; even though many Tunisians continue to feel economically marginalised and the country faces security problems, for the most part the repression that was such a feature of the Ben Ali years has gone. Tunisia is widely regarded as one of the few successes of the Arab Spring.

Tunisia's Dirty Secret

Five years after the revolution, Tunisia's black minority has yet to experience the freedoms enjoyed by other citizens.

In January 2011, driven to despair by high unemployment, food inflation, corruption, a lack of political freedom and poor living conditions, Tunisians ousted President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and introduced democracy to their country.

As the celebrations of this remarkable achievement began to quieten down, people got ready to enjoy the benefits of liberty - especially those to do with fairness, human rights and equality.

And indeed, many of those benefits did follow; even though many Tunisians continue to feel economically marginalised and the country faces security problems, for the most part the repression that was such a feature of the Ben Ali years has gone. Tunisia is widely regarded as one of the few successes of the Arab Spring.

After the Arab Spring

Five young Arabs from countries that went through the 2011 revolutions reflect on what has happened five years on.


In December 2010, protests broke out in Tunisia which led to the first of the series of revolutions that became known as the Arab Spring.

In this film, five young people from Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Syria and Libya look back at the revolutions in their respective countries - at the effect these revolutions have had on their lives, at what has happened since, and their hopes and fears for the future.

Insaf Qasmi, from Tunis, was 15 during the uprising and now studies media and management at university. "Today's Tunisia is better than yesterday's Tunisia," she says, and feels that civil society needs to be strengthened for the country to succeed.

Egypt's media: Revolution and reality

What is the state of Egypt's media five years after the toppling of Mubarak? Plus, behind the UK's surveillance reform.



Five years on from the January 25 revolution that represented the high watermark of the Arab Spring, Egypt's authorities and broadcast media in the country have been spreading a clear message: do not take to the streets.

Last week, Egypt's authorities arrested five people who ran Facebook pages marking the anniversary of the revolution. According to press freedom groups, the number of journalists in Egyptian jails is at an all-time high.

The bulk of the mainstream news media in Egypt aligned itself with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi when he took power from the Muslim Brotherhood, but there are signs now that their wholesale acceptance of his rule is wavering.

Torture in Tunisia

We investigate allegations that despite its new democratic institutions, police torture continues in Tunisia.


It has been four years now since a popular uprising in Tunisia ousted former president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. It was hoped then that the Jasmine revolution - and the democratic governments to which it gave birth - would usher in a new era; that consensus politics and the rule of law would be reflected in the actions of those supposed to protect society from criminality, wherever it lies.

State repression, so much a feature of the old regime, was meant to be at an end; police brutality, torture and the abuse of human rights were to be consigned to history.

But this, it seems, may have been wishful thinking. As this People & Power investigation has found, while police brutality is no longer officially sanctioned by the state, it continues unabated nonetheless. Many of those responsible for enforcing the rule of law in Tunisia are themselves still breaking it, time after time.

In Bahrain citizen journalists are under arrest

On August 14, protesters have promised to take to the streets once more to demand democratic reform in the latest installment of a two-year long protest movement. The response of the government of King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa to the protest wave has been repression, and the government has made it almost impossible for foreign reporters to cover the turmoil.

Following the protests that erupted in Bahrain as part of the Arab Spring the Bahraini government tried and convicted a group of doctors and nurses for providing treatment to protesters injured in clashes with government security forces.

 Twenty doctors and nurses jailed during the spring revolt against Bahrain's ruling monarchy received sentences of up to 15 years in prison Thursday.The government of the Persian Gulf kingdom leveled a range of charges against the medical workers, including possession of weapons and taking part in efforts to overthrow the regime. Human rights groups are calling the verdicts "bogus" and say the doctors are being falsely targeted for doing their jobs and treating wounded protesters.

Given the government's willingness to jail doctors and nurses for simply treating the injured imprisoning citizen journalists is just the next logical step in keeping the population uninformed and repressed.

 With August 14 quickly approaching, citizen journalists are the government's new targets. A week ago, I spoke online with a citizen journalist inside Bahrain who told me his arrest might be imminent because he feared a crackdown had begun against him and his colleagues. He had good reason to worry. At 3 am on July 31, fifteen masked men woke up Bahraini blogger Mohammed Hassan in his house and arrested him.His computer, camera, phone and every other electronic item found in his room were also confiscated. The young blogger's family was only told that he was "wanted." On Friday, after his lawyer AbdulAziz Mosa tweeted about evidence that Hassan had been beaten in detention, Mr. Mosa was arrested. 

The U.S. the government in its usual role of complete hypocrisy on the one hand "condemning the violence" while on the other fully supporting the governments doing the repression.

  "Under the frame and discourse of terrorism, the Bahraini regime is attempting to prevent protests from taking place," Maryam AlKhawaja, the Acting President of BCHR, told me over the phone from Copenhagen in Denmark. She accused the government of going after citizen journalists and activists to make coverage of the protests impossible. She tried to fly into Bahrain this Friday, but was turned away at the airport in Copenhagen, told by her airline that she was on a list of people banned from entering Bahrain.

Bahrain is a perfect case study of this double standard the U.S. has barely mentioned the abuses meted out by the government on its citizens for simply exercising their rights because of the U.S. Fifth fleet which is stationed in Bahrain