The new year will see no let-up in the repression and state violence in countries in the Middle East and North Africa as protest movements of the so-called Arab Spring have proved to be "astonishingly resilient," Amnesty International (AI) said Monday, dpa reported.
In a new report, entitled Year of Rebellion: State of Human Rights in the Middle East and North Africa, the human rights group describes how governments in the region were willing in 2011 to deploy extreme violence in attempts to resist unprecedented calls for fundamental reform.
However, there were few signs that the protest movements in the countries concerned were ready to abandon their goals or accept piecemeal reforms, said Amnesty.
"With few exceptions, governments have failed to recognize that everything has changed," said Philip Luther, Amnesty International's Middle East and North Africa Director.
"The protest movements across the region, led in many cases by young people and with women playing central roles, have proved astonishingly resilient in the face of sometimes staggering repression."
They had shown that they would not be fooled by superficial reforms and wanted "concrete changes to the way they are governed and for those responsible for past crimes to be held to account."
Persistent attempts by states to offer "cosmetic changes," to push back against gains made by protesters or simply to "brutalize their populations into submission" betrayed the fact that for many governments, regime survival remained the ultimate goal, said the Amnesty report.
Despite optimism in North Africa at the toppling of long-standing rulers in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, Amnesty said it believes these gains had "not yet been cemented by key institutional reforms to guarantee that the same kinds of abuses would not be repeated."
Amnesty said it feared that 2012 could see further attempts by the ruling military council in Egypt to restrict the ability of Egyptians to protest and freely express their views.
In Tunisia, it was crucial that a new constitution would be drafted in 2012 to ensure that it guaranteed protection of human rights and equality under the law.
In Libya, "significant questions" remained about the ability of the new authorities to control the armed brigades that helped oust the pro-Gaddafi forces and prevent them from "replicating the patterns of abuse learnt under the old system."
Elsewhere, governments remained "grimly determined to cling onto power, in some cases at almost any cost in human lives and dignity," said the Amnesty report.
The Syrian armed forces and intelligence services had been responsible for a "pattern of killings and torture amounting to crimes against humanity," in what Amnesty said was a vain attempt to force protesters and opponents into submission.
Amnesty said the response of international powers and regional bodies such as the African Union, Arab League and European Union to developments in 2011 had been inconsistent, and "failed to grasp the depth of the challenge."
"Support from world powers for ordinary people in the region has been typically patchy," said Luther. "But what has been striking about the last year has been that - with some exceptions - change has largely been achieved through the efforts of local people coming onto the streets, not the influence and involvement of foreign powers."
The refusal of ordinary people to be deterred from their struggle for dignity and justice gave hope for 2012," the report concludes.
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