Are offers of Western aid to the Arab revolutions a shell game designed to benefit the world’s wealthiest nations at the expense of Arabs demanding freedom and justice? Columnist H. Sulayman of Algeria’s El Khabar writes that the G8 countries are pretending to side with Arab peoples after decades of taking benefit from their oppression.
For Algeria’s El Khabar, columnist H. Sulayman writes in part:
Listening to the G8 heads of the richest countries in the world talk about “assistance to the Arab revolutions,” a listener might imagine that the “sluice gates of wealth” have suddenly opened for the Arab peoples, and lots good things are on the way to their pockets and mouths.
What G8 leaders refer to as assistance in the form of subsidies, gifts, grants, loans and direct and indirect investments wouldn’t even compensate for a few days of the losses already suffered in areas undergoing the “revolution.” What good is a billion dollars compared to the damage suffered in the eight nations already affected? And what good is such aid to a country the size of Egypt with a population of 85 million people, when behind it is an attempt to circumvent the will of these peoples to allow them to manage their own affairs?
Didn’t the G8, until the last possible gasp, stand by the toppled regimes? Didn’t they do all they could behind the scenes to prevent the people from bringing down Ben Ali, Mubarak and others? Yet here they are, after having dined with the wolf, trying to cry with the shepherd! Here they are putting their own interests before those of the people, who want to reform the rules put in place by regimes that had ‘fixed the match.’
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