Editorial: Yearning for freedom in Arab world

Mohammed Bouazizi did not live to see the spark that he lit ignite into a raging fire. But it may safely be said that he did not die in vain.

On December 17, the 26-year-old was selling fruit and vegetables on the street in rural Tunisia because he could not find a job, when police confiscated his produce, telling him he did not have the necessary permit.

According to some reports he was beaten and humiliated. In any event, soon after, he doused himself in petrol and set himself alight.

Bouazizi's desperate act sparked an uprising that led, within a month, to the ousting of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, whose repressive regime ruled the country for more than 23 years.

Subsequent protests have engulfed much of the North African Arab World.

Most conspicuous has been the fury against the brutal and corrupt 30-year-rule of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt.

There, as elsewhere, unemployment among graduates has united the children of the middle-class with the dispossessed poor in rage against economic disadvantage, political repression, police brutality and corruption.

Unsurprisingly, Mubarak and his cronies have fought back. The army, however, has pledged not to harm protesters and it is that development that will strike fear into the hearts of autocrats from Casablanca to Damascus.

When those responsible for enforcing the authority of a corrupt state side with the people, change is in the wind.

In the West, and particularly here, so far out on the fringes of international events, it is easy to buy - and sell - the image of the Arab world as a hotbed of anti-Western fundamentalist discontent.

But the events of the last weeks have shown, and continue to show, that these countries' millions, who live on an average of $3 a day, hunger not just for food but also for freedom.

The West in general, and the US in particular, owes a duty of support to these spontaneous and passionate liberation movements. Such support will count for much more, in the end, than another 10 years of the war on terror.