1. The Arab Spring Blooms in Tunisia and Egypt
When a young man set himself aflame on a street in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, his cry of anguish at the hardship of life under a stifling autocracy echoed across the region. Within weeks, his protest had sparked a full-blown people-power revolution that spread quickly throughout the Middle East. Nowhere were its effects more dramatic than in Egypt, the most populous country in the Arab world and its cultural epicenter. The regime of President Hosni Mubarak, backed by considerable aid from the U.S., had held sway for three decades and entrenched itself in all corners of Egyptian society.
But the spectacle of Tunisians ousting their long-ruling President, Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, gave courage to myriad Egyptian dissident groups. Through social media and the Internet, protesters organized a Day of Revolt on Jan. 25, with tens of thousands taking to the streets against Mubarak. Cairo's Tahrir Square once a pedestrian-unfriendly traffic circle became the locus of protest and symbolic home of the revolution. In a matter of weeks, a regime that for so long seemed invincible simply unraveled; authorities announced Mubarak's departure on Feb. 11. He's now on trial, at the order of the interim military government, on corruption charges and for the brutal crackdown by state security forces that led to the deaths of nearly 1,000 protesters. Egypt held its first democratic elections Nov. 27, but its struggles are far from over: for weeks ahead of the vote, thousands massed at Tahrir Square yet again, voicing their disquiet with the military's dubious commitment to real democracy. With Egypt's Islamist parties buoyed by a strong showing in the Nov. 27 vote, the struggle for power only grows trickier.
2. The Killing of Osama bin Laden
On Sunday night, May 1, 2011, President Barack Obama made a televised declaration from the White House, heralding the discovery and death of Osama bin Laden, the U.S.'s most wanted foe. Bin Laden had been tracked to a compound in Abbottabad, a leafy town not far from Islamabad, Pakistan's capital. The clandestine raid that followed carried out by a crack unit of Navy SEALs took the world (and likely Pakistan's leaders) by surprise. Bin Laden's body was reportedly given Muslim rites of burial and dumped into the Arabian Sea.
The repercussions of his death were legion. It capped the decade-long manhunt that had originally driven the U.S. to war in neighboring Afghanistan, while sounding a death knell for al-Qaeda, a group that had already lost much of its allure and capabilities in the decade that followed the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. More crucially, the discovery of the location of bin Laden's hideout not in a mountain cave but in a quiet suburb just down the road from Pakistan's main military academy raised obvious alarms over Islamabad's commitment to fighting extremists. The ensuing months saw a steady deterioration of ties between Washington and Islamabad, with growing calls in the U.S. Congress to cut aid to Pakistan's murky military, whose intelligence agency, the ISI, is considered to have a long history of abetting militant groups in Afghanistan and India.
3. Japan's Triple Disaster
James Nachtwey, an award-winning photographer for TIME who has spent years documenting the ravages of war, was awed by the destruction caused by the March 11 earthquake off the northeast coast of Japan and the cataclysmic tsunami it spawned. "The scale of this is beyond belief. It's apocalyptic," he said after visiting Japan in the quake's aftermath. Measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale, the temblor was one of the worst natural disasters in modern history, so powerful it knocked the whole planet off its axis by a foot. It also posed the greatest challenge to Japan since the end of World War II.
The quake and the waves it produced decimated towns and cities along an entire stretch of the northeastern Honshu coast. Nearly 16,000 residents are estimated dead, and the price of the disaster may reach into the hundreds of billions of dollars. That's in part because of a third crisis that followed the earthquake and tsunami's one-two punch: a major meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, caused after tsunami waves overwhelmed the facility and corrupted its coolant systems. The problems at Fukushima proved to be the quake's most enduring aftershock, causing months of frantic emergency efforts, scares over radioactive contamination and global hand-wringing over the safety and viability of nuclear energy around the world.
4. Europe's Financial Crisis
The aftereffects of the financial crisis laid bare the clumsy and at times irresponsible state of affairs underlying growth and prosperity in a number of euro-zone economies, particularly in Greece, where a proposed IMF and European bailout package mandated crippling budget cuts and other austerity measures. In response, tens of thousands took to the streets in Athens and elsewhere to protest the prevailing financial institutions and feckless political elites that got them into the mess in the first place. Similar antiausterity demonstrations rocked Spain, where the indignados, the outraged, occupied Madrid's iconic Puerta del Sol square for weeks.
In both countries, incumbent governments fell and beleaguered Prime Ministers departed. The threat of fiscal contagion from Greece spreading elsewhere pushed Italy the euro zone's third biggest economy to the brink and forced the departure of controversial Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a man who had been unbowed by an earlier string of sex and corporate scandals. The crisis has strained the very fabric of the E.U. and threatened the dissolution of the common euro currency, as disgruntled voters in Germany the continent's main economic engine and biggest lender and elsewhere chafe at Brussels-imposed austerity measures and at their own governments' obligation to bail out struggling neighbors.
5. The Fall of Gaddafi
Muammar Gaddafi's four-decade-long dictatorial rule over the oil-rich North African nation of Libya came to a grisly end Oct. 20, 2011, but the months preceding his death were similarly bloody. In early March, uprisings sparked by the Arab Spring unrest in neighboring Egypt and Tunisia exploded into full-fledged civil war, as barely trained militias rose up against Gaddafi's forces, and several prominent allies and generals defected to their cause. Prompted by a rumored threat of genocide should Gaddafi overrun the rebel stronghold of Benghazi, the United Nations adopted a resolution in March that in essence legitimated a foreign intervention. NATO operations formally began at the start of April and steadily rolled back Gaddafi's forces. But the war drifted on for months as Libya's rebels struggled to hold their regained ground, while their Western allies led by the U.K., France and the U.S. remained wary of putting their own boots on the ground. By the end of fighting, an estimated 20,000 to 40,000 Libyans had died; hundreds of thousands more had been displaced as refugees. The steady toll of air strikes enabled rebel advances to seize the capital, Tripoli, sending Gaddafi and the last vestiges of his regime scurrying to his hometown of Sirt. On Oct. 20, after being discovered cowering in a sewage ditch, Gaddafi was seized by rebels and killed, his body placed on display in a meat locker in the port city of Misratah.
6. The Arab Spring in the Weeds
In Tunisia and Egypt, the popular protests of the Arab Spring sent long-ruling dictators tumbling. But similar uprisings in Syria and Yemen haven't played out that way. Both Syrian President Bashar Assad and Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh have long presided over fractious, complex societies and consolidated their rule through webs of patronage spread across sectarian, tribal lines. The upheavals of 2011 unraveled that status quo in spasms of violence.
Saleh, after months of tribal insurrections, an Islamist insurgency and the defections of key military men, agreed in November to step down from power. Roughly 2,000 protesters have been slain in the process, and it's unclear what sort of political order will emerge in what is one of the Arab world's poorest nations. In Syria, the calculus is even more grim. The Assad regime has bitterly clung to power, confronting protesters weekly with tanks and rocket fire. The bloodshed the U.N. estimates that more than 3,500 have been slain has horrified Damascus's neighbors and allies, with some calling for Assad's departure. The Arab League has demanded an immediate cessation of hostilities and recently leveled sanctions against the Syrian state, an act that appeared only to push Assad and his remaining loyalists further into a blood-soaked corner.
7. Famine in the Horn of Africa
The Horn of Africa seems to be one of the most perennially unstable parts of the world, plagued by myriad insurgencies, Islamist extremism and the frailty of the Somali government in Mogadishu. Deepening the sense of crisis in the region this year was a terrible drought the worst, by some accounts, in more than 60 years. In July, the U.N. declared much of southern Somalia to be in a state of famine a complicated calculation that, among other metrics, states that over 30% of the local population faces acute malnutrition not a term to be taken lightly. Hundreds of thousands of starving Somalis fled to refugee camps on the Kenyan border at a rate of more than 1,000 a day. The camp at Dadaab, already the world's largest sanctuary for refugees, was overwhelmed. Relief efforts in much of southern Somalia have been complicated by the dominance there of al-Shabab, an Islamist militia linked to al-Qaeda. While U.N. officials are wary of providing an exact death toll from the famine, some estimates place the figure in the tens of thousands.
8. The Utoya Massacre
On July 22, Norway experienced its worst single spasm of violence since World War II. In Oslo, a car bomb detonated near a set of prominent government buildings, killing eight people and shocking Norwegians who watched TV footage of smoke pouring from the heart of the otherwise sleepy seaside capital. The news was about to get far grislier: at a youth summer camp run by Norway's ruling center-left Labour Party on the island of Utoya, a gunman had mowed down 69 people.
While some commentators leaped to pin the attacks on Islamist terrorists, authorities eventually found one culprit: Anders Behring Breivik, a 32-year-old Norwegian and far-right fanatic who shortly before the attacks posted online a manifesto filled with hate for immigrants, multiculturalists and leftists. Breivik, who has admitted his guilt, has been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic by a panel of psychiatrists who ruled he was "insane" during the attacks. The ruling could see him eventually be committed to a psychiatric institution rather than prison at the conclusion of his trial, set to resume in April 2012. Breivik's hideous deeds prompted a moment of introspection in Norway whose government has played such a prominent role in trying to author peace in other parts of the world regarding the rise of far-right extremism there and elsewhere in Europe.
9. Dream of Palestinian Statehood Deferred
With the Mideast peace process as moribund as it has ever been, the leaders of the Palestinian Authority this year chose to appeal directly to the United Nations in their pursuit of statehood. In the months preceding the September U.N. General Assembly, Israeli and American officials warned against the move, arguing that such recognition could be gained only by first directly negotiating with Israeli interlocutors. But the Palestinians countered that the current right-wing Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has shown little inclination to achieve a formalized peace and, particularly with its continuing expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, seemed antagonistic to the idea.
When Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas appeared at the U.N. in September and, with a stirring speech before the General Assembly, announced the attempt to achieve full recognition at the Security Council, he was greeted as something of a hero back home. But in subsequent months, the effort proved stillborn: the certainty of a U.S. veto, as well as pressure applied by Washington on other members of the Security Council, has almost guaranteed that the Palestinians' bid won't get off the ground and may not even reach the General Assembly, where the occupied territories could receive at least the symbolic gloss of international legitimacy.
10. Anna Hazare's Hunger Fasts Rock India
In a year with more than its share of protests worldwide, perhaps the most striking act of dissent took place in India, where the country's ruling coalition took flak for a host of corruption cases implicating a number of leading politicians. Anna Hazare, a 74-year-old activist with a Gandhian air, commanded something of the Mahatma's aura when he embarked on a series of hunger strikes in protest of the graft that his supporters say pervades all strata of Indian society. Hazare's fasts even the threat of them triggered mass demonstrations of support across India's major cities and heaped pressure on the government to create an independent ombudsman body capable of investigating the nation's political elites even the Prime Minister and bringing the corrupt to justice. The anticorruption bill, which critics fear could erode India's robust, albeit imperfect, democracy by placing it under the authority of an unelected institution, is still being debated in Parliament. But the mass support Hazare commanded, particularly from India's burgeoning middle class, is a sign of the growing frustrations and aspirations of those in the world's largest democracy.
The Arab Spring Blooms in Tunisia and Egypt - The Top 10 Everything of 2011 - TIME
When a young man set himself aflame on a street in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, his cry of anguish at the hardship of life under a stifling autocracy echoed across the region. Within weeks, his protest had sparked a full-blown people-power revolution that spread quickly throughout the Middle East. Nowhere were its effects more dramatic than in Egypt, the most populous country in the Arab world and its cultural epicenter. The regime of President Hosni Mubarak, backed by considerable aid from the U.S., had held sway for three decades and entrenched itself in all corners of Egyptian society.
But the spectacle of Tunisians ousting their long-ruling President, Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, gave courage to myriad Egyptian dissident groups. Through social media and the Internet, protesters organized a Day of Revolt on Jan. 25, with tens of thousands taking to the streets against Mubarak. Cairo's Tahrir Square once a pedestrian-unfriendly traffic circle became the locus of protest and symbolic home of the revolution. In a matter of weeks, a regime that for so long seemed invincible simply unraveled; authorities announced Mubarak's departure on Feb. 11. He's now on trial, at the order of the interim military government, on corruption charges and for the brutal crackdown by state security forces that led to the deaths of nearly 1,000 protesters. Egypt held its first democratic elections Nov. 27, but its struggles are far from over: for weeks ahead of the vote, thousands massed at Tahrir Square yet again, voicing their disquiet with the military's dubious commitment to real democracy. With Egypt's Islamist parties buoyed by a strong showing in the Nov. 27 vote, the struggle for power only grows trickier.
2. The Killing of Osama bin Laden
On Sunday night, May 1, 2011, President Barack Obama made a televised declaration from the White House, heralding the discovery and death of Osama bin Laden, the U.S.'s most wanted foe. Bin Laden had been tracked to a compound in Abbottabad, a leafy town not far from Islamabad, Pakistan's capital. The clandestine raid that followed carried out by a crack unit of Navy SEALs took the world (and likely Pakistan's leaders) by surprise. Bin Laden's body was reportedly given Muslim rites of burial and dumped into the Arabian Sea.
The repercussions of his death were legion. It capped the decade-long manhunt that had originally driven the U.S. to war in neighboring Afghanistan, while sounding a death knell for al-Qaeda, a group that had already lost much of its allure and capabilities in the decade that followed the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. More crucially, the discovery of the location of bin Laden's hideout not in a mountain cave but in a quiet suburb just down the road from Pakistan's main military academy raised obvious alarms over Islamabad's commitment to fighting extremists. The ensuing months saw a steady deterioration of ties between Washington and Islamabad, with growing calls in the U.S. Congress to cut aid to Pakistan's murky military, whose intelligence agency, the ISI, is considered to have a long history of abetting militant groups in Afghanistan and India.
3. Japan's Triple Disaster
James Nachtwey, an award-winning photographer for TIME who has spent years documenting the ravages of war, was awed by the destruction caused by the March 11 earthquake off the northeast coast of Japan and the cataclysmic tsunami it spawned. "The scale of this is beyond belief. It's apocalyptic," he said after visiting Japan in the quake's aftermath. Measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale, the temblor was one of the worst natural disasters in modern history, so powerful it knocked the whole planet off its axis by a foot. It also posed the greatest challenge to Japan since the end of World War II.
The quake and the waves it produced decimated towns and cities along an entire stretch of the northeastern Honshu coast. Nearly 16,000 residents are estimated dead, and the price of the disaster may reach into the hundreds of billions of dollars. That's in part because of a third crisis that followed the earthquake and tsunami's one-two punch: a major meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, caused after tsunami waves overwhelmed the facility and corrupted its coolant systems. The problems at Fukushima proved to be the quake's most enduring aftershock, causing months of frantic emergency efforts, scares over radioactive contamination and global hand-wringing over the safety and viability of nuclear energy around the world.
4. Europe's Financial Crisis
The aftereffects of the financial crisis laid bare the clumsy and at times irresponsible state of affairs underlying growth and prosperity in a number of euro-zone economies, particularly in Greece, where a proposed IMF and European bailout package mandated crippling budget cuts and other austerity measures. In response, tens of thousands took to the streets in Athens and elsewhere to protest the prevailing financial institutions and feckless political elites that got them into the mess in the first place. Similar antiausterity demonstrations rocked Spain, where the indignados, the outraged, occupied Madrid's iconic Puerta del Sol square for weeks.
In both countries, incumbent governments fell and beleaguered Prime Ministers departed. The threat of fiscal contagion from Greece spreading elsewhere pushed Italy the euro zone's third biggest economy to the brink and forced the departure of controversial Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a man who had been unbowed by an earlier string of sex and corporate scandals. The crisis has strained the very fabric of the E.U. and threatened the dissolution of the common euro currency, as disgruntled voters in Germany the continent's main economic engine and biggest lender and elsewhere chafe at Brussels-imposed austerity measures and at their own governments' obligation to bail out struggling neighbors.
5. The Fall of Gaddafi
Muammar Gaddafi's four-decade-long dictatorial rule over the oil-rich North African nation of Libya came to a grisly end Oct. 20, 2011, but the months preceding his death were similarly bloody. In early March, uprisings sparked by the Arab Spring unrest in neighboring Egypt and Tunisia exploded into full-fledged civil war, as barely trained militias rose up against Gaddafi's forces, and several prominent allies and generals defected to their cause. Prompted by a rumored threat of genocide should Gaddafi overrun the rebel stronghold of Benghazi, the United Nations adopted a resolution in March that in essence legitimated a foreign intervention. NATO operations formally began at the start of April and steadily rolled back Gaddafi's forces. But the war drifted on for months as Libya's rebels struggled to hold their regained ground, while their Western allies led by the U.K., France and the U.S. remained wary of putting their own boots on the ground. By the end of fighting, an estimated 20,000 to 40,000 Libyans had died; hundreds of thousands more had been displaced as refugees. The steady toll of air strikes enabled rebel advances to seize the capital, Tripoli, sending Gaddafi and the last vestiges of his regime scurrying to his hometown of Sirt. On Oct. 20, after being discovered cowering in a sewage ditch, Gaddafi was seized by rebels and killed, his body placed on display in a meat locker in the port city of Misratah.
6. The Arab Spring in the Weeds
In Tunisia and Egypt, the popular protests of the Arab Spring sent long-ruling dictators tumbling. But similar uprisings in Syria and Yemen haven't played out that way. Both Syrian President Bashar Assad and Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh have long presided over fractious, complex societies and consolidated their rule through webs of patronage spread across sectarian, tribal lines. The upheavals of 2011 unraveled that status quo in spasms of violence.
Saleh, after months of tribal insurrections, an Islamist insurgency and the defections of key military men, agreed in November to step down from power. Roughly 2,000 protesters have been slain in the process, and it's unclear what sort of political order will emerge in what is one of the Arab world's poorest nations. In Syria, the calculus is even more grim. The Assad regime has bitterly clung to power, confronting protesters weekly with tanks and rocket fire. The bloodshed the U.N. estimates that more than 3,500 have been slain has horrified Damascus's neighbors and allies, with some calling for Assad's departure. The Arab League has demanded an immediate cessation of hostilities and recently leveled sanctions against the Syrian state, an act that appeared only to push Assad and his remaining loyalists further into a blood-soaked corner.
7. Famine in the Horn of Africa
The Horn of Africa seems to be one of the most perennially unstable parts of the world, plagued by myriad insurgencies, Islamist extremism and the frailty of the Somali government in Mogadishu. Deepening the sense of crisis in the region this year was a terrible drought the worst, by some accounts, in more than 60 years. In July, the U.N. declared much of southern Somalia to be in a state of famine a complicated calculation that, among other metrics, states that over 30% of the local population faces acute malnutrition not a term to be taken lightly. Hundreds of thousands of starving Somalis fled to refugee camps on the Kenyan border at a rate of more than 1,000 a day. The camp at Dadaab, already the world's largest sanctuary for refugees, was overwhelmed. Relief efforts in much of southern Somalia have been complicated by the dominance there of al-Shabab, an Islamist militia linked to al-Qaeda. While U.N. officials are wary of providing an exact death toll from the famine, some estimates place the figure in the tens of thousands.
8. The Utoya Massacre
On July 22, Norway experienced its worst single spasm of violence since World War II. In Oslo, a car bomb detonated near a set of prominent government buildings, killing eight people and shocking Norwegians who watched TV footage of smoke pouring from the heart of the otherwise sleepy seaside capital. The news was about to get far grislier: at a youth summer camp run by Norway's ruling center-left Labour Party on the island of Utoya, a gunman had mowed down 69 people.
While some commentators leaped to pin the attacks on Islamist terrorists, authorities eventually found one culprit: Anders Behring Breivik, a 32-year-old Norwegian and far-right fanatic who shortly before the attacks posted online a manifesto filled with hate for immigrants, multiculturalists and leftists. Breivik, who has admitted his guilt, has been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic by a panel of psychiatrists who ruled he was "insane" during the attacks. The ruling could see him eventually be committed to a psychiatric institution rather than prison at the conclusion of his trial, set to resume in April 2012. Breivik's hideous deeds prompted a moment of introspection in Norway whose government has played such a prominent role in trying to author peace in other parts of the world regarding the rise of far-right extremism there and elsewhere in Europe.
9. Dream of Palestinian Statehood Deferred
With the Mideast peace process as moribund as it has ever been, the leaders of the Palestinian Authority this year chose to appeal directly to the United Nations in their pursuit of statehood. In the months preceding the September U.N. General Assembly, Israeli and American officials warned against the move, arguing that such recognition could be gained only by first directly negotiating with Israeli interlocutors. But the Palestinians countered that the current right-wing Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has shown little inclination to achieve a formalized peace and, particularly with its continuing expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, seemed antagonistic to the idea.
When Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas appeared at the U.N. in September and, with a stirring speech before the General Assembly, announced the attempt to achieve full recognition at the Security Council, he was greeted as something of a hero back home. But in subsequent months, the effort proved stillborn: the certainty of a U.S. veto, as well as pressure applied by Washington on other members of the Security Council, has almost guaranteed that the Palestinians' bid won't get off the ground and may not even reach the General Assembly, where the occupied territories could receive at least the symbolic gloss of international legitimacy.
10. Anna Hazare's Hunger Fasts Rock India
In a year with more than its share of protests worldwide, perhaps the most striking act of dissent took place in India, where the country's ruling coalition took flak for a host of corruption cases implicating a number of leading politicians. Anna Hazare, a 74-year-old activist with a Gandhian air, commanded something of the Mahatma's aura when he embarked on a series of hunger strikes in protest of the graft that his supporters say pervades all strata of Indian society. Hazare's fasts even the threat of them triggered mass demonstrations of support across India's major cities and heaped pressure on the government to create an independent ombudsman body capable of investigating the nation's political elites even the Prime Minister and bringing the corrupt to justice. The anticorruption bill, which critics fear could erode India's robust, albeit imperfect, democracy by placing it under the authority of an unelected institution, is still being debated in Parliament. But the mass support Hazare commanded, particularly from India's burgeoning middle class, is a sign of the growing frustrations and aspirations of those in the world's largest democracy.
The Arab Spring Blooms in Tunisia and Egypt - The Top 10 Everything of 2011 - TIME
