rss feedAn Eventful Year
2011 has had it all. It started January 1st with Estonia becoming the seventeenth Eurozone country and taking the euro as its currency, and from there it’s been a rollercoaster of world events and change – some good, some bad. Let’s go over the main ones…
The biggest event early in the year was what the media has dubbed the ‘Arab Spring’, starting with the fall of the Tunisian government in January and then the crucial uprisings in Egypt that resulted in president Hosni Mubarak’s resignation. This then catalysed a string of similar revolts throughout the Arab world that are still continuing, or still resonate, even now in December. At last all kinds of countries long-oppressed by corrupt regimes voiced a universal sentiment – no more.
However, while one part of the world looked up, another suffered; on March 19 Japan was struck by the extraordinary 9.1 earthquake which even shook the world slightly off its axis. The terrible tragedy only escalated when as a consequence the nuclear reactors at Fukushima Daichi melted down with potentially catastrophic effects. Although now the situation is vastly improved, the lives lost or destroyed by the earthquake and resultant tsunami have had a lasting impact on the country.
Then in April some joy was returned to parts of world on Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding in London, the first royal wedding since the fated Princess Diana spectacle. And, people became yet more optimistic when in May public enemy number one, Osama Bin Laden, was found and killed in Pakistan, ending a decade of cat-and-mouse and bathing much of the US and even other countries with a sense of justice and satisfaction that the alleged mastermind of the September 11 attacks finally came to an end.
More tragedy occurred in July, this time in Norway as Andrei Behring Breivik is charged with a double terrorist attack, involving a car bomb and then a mass shooting massacre. The world reached out to all those affected by the unpredecented attack.
Another much-loathed dictator fell in October; Muammar Gaddafi, outlawed by his people and feeling the full force of NATO opposition, is eventually overcome and murdered by Libyan citizens, his body paraded through the streets to show all that Libyan freedom was finally won, and the Arab Spring continued its Zeitgeist-changing charge. Meanwhile, the European financial sector ran into severe difficulty and a series of emergency meetings were called to try to prevent Greece from defaulting and bringing the whole economy down. In December, David Cameron refuses to involve the United Kingdom in a fiscal union, reasoning that the British banks require financial security, much to the dismay of many European leaders.
Finally, in December the last of three dictators reaches the end of the line as North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il suffers a heart attack, leaving an uncertain son as his heir and torrents of grief among his people.
Overall, the magnitude of change this year has been humongous, and here’s hoping for a quieter 2012… maybe!
