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Conclusion
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Conclusion There can be no substitute for justice and accountability for serious crimes. Shielding people from justice and accountability will encourage future abuse and hinder national reconciliation.1 On 17 December 2010, in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, a twenty-sixyear -old street vendor by the name of Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire in the middle of a busy street. His act of self-immolation was a protest against what he viewed as the unjust treatment he had received at the hands of the local police and government officials. That morning the fruit and vegetables Bouazizi was trying to sell were confiscated on the grounds that his did not possess a street vendor’s license. A municipal official , Faidi Hamdi, had allegedly slapped him across the face and spat on him before seizing his scales and pushing over his cart. It was not the first time that Bouazizi had fallen foul of the local police, but, according to his friends and relatives, for some years they had regularly harassed him.2 Typically, the abuse was the result of “petty bureaucratic tyranny.” The police “would confiscate his scale and his produce, or fine him for running a stall without a permit.” Earlier in 2010, Bouazizi had been fined for vending without a license. The fine had been equivalent to more than two months’ wages.3 On the day that he set himself alight, Bouazizi had appealed to the office of the governor to have his scales returned. When his request was denied, he doused himself in petrol and set himself on fire. Mohammed Bouazizi died from his burns eighteen days later, having sparked a wave of revolutionary protests against authoritarian regimes across the Arab world. In the face of increasingly intense violent protests, by 14 January 2011 the president of Tunisia, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, had stood down and fled to Saudi Arabia. However, the Jasmine Revolution, as it became known, did tion tion PB Conclusion 199 not end there. Taking to the streets with “a rock in one hand, a cell phone in the other” the Tunisian protesters were able to defy the authorities’ censorship laws and media blackout.4 Before long, Tunisia’s revolution had thus spread to Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, Algeria, Morocco, Kuwait, Lebanon, Mauritania, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Western Sahara, and Mali and become known as the Arab Spring. While some of these states, such as Lebanon, Mauritania, and Oman, experienced only minor protests, to date the authoritarian governments of four Arab states have been toppled. Following eighteen days of civil protests, on 11 February 2011 President Hosni Mubarak resigned, bringing his thirty-year rule of Egypt to an end. On 23 August of the same year, the Libyan dictatorship of Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown after ruling for more than forty years. After two more months of bloody conflict between anti-Gaddafi forces fighting under the auspices of the National Transitional Council established to guide Libya’s transition to democracy and those loyal to the former ruler, Gaddafi was killed on 20 October 2011. In Yemen, a year of protests came to fruition on 27 February 2012 when President Ali Abdullah Saleh handed power to his deputy, Vice-President Abd Rabbuh Mansur al-Hadi, and fled to exile in Ethiopia. Violent civil uprisings continue in Syria and Bahrain. Unsurprisingly, the question of how best to address the human rights violations committed by the former regimes has been at the forefront discussion and debate, of both the scholarly and public varieties, about the Arab Spring. The four authoritarian governments that have been overthrown thus far were all well known for the persistent perpetration of human rights crimes. Indeed, the impunity with which authoritarian rulers in the region unjustly treated their people was one of the central grievances that stood at the heart of the revolutionary protests. However, alongside their demands for an end to impunity, protesters have also been fighting for self-determination, most pervasively understood in terms of democracy. On the face of it, the revolutions of the Arab Spring have thus brought debate about transitional justice full circle: just as discussions emanating from the Latin American “third wave” transitions brought debates about the relative merits of using amnesties to usher out authoritarian rulers and facilitate smooth transitions to democracy, so too have these debates been revived with this new wave of democratization. In the case of Egypt, a combination of justice and impunity has been pursued. On 24 May 2011, Hosni...