Review 2012

Well what a year we’ve had! There has been the most expensive Presidential Election of any country ever, Greece has gone from bad to worse, the Arab Spring continues in Syria and here in Britain we entered into a double dip recession. Although I don’t feel that 2012 was the year of change that 2011 was, it will still go down as important in the history books. The shooting of a 15 year old girl by the Pakistani Taliban sparked outrage in the country. The attack could help to stop people joining the terrorist organisation! The Palestinian-Israeli conflict took a turn for the worse after Israel killed one of Hamas’ leaders and Israel was furious when Palestine had its status upgraded in the UN.

The year saw a change of leadership in China and France and Greece choose a new government for its sinking economy. It was confirmed that in 2013 the EU will get a new member, Croatia, whilst the Eurozone crisis continued to rattle on.  

The year ahead of us will be the sixth since the economic crisis began and still there is no light at the end of the tunnel. Predictions are that the Eurozone economy has shrunk by a small amount in the past year, the same is true for Britain. What stopped the crisis that began in 2007 being worse than the 1929 crash was the economies of the developing nations, particularly Brazil, China and India. Unfortunately their economies are beginning to slow down, China has stopped producing double digit growth for the first time in a decade and India and Brazil are below 5%. Although European countries would kill for growth figures like those, the world economy depends on them being very high. The US has just fallen off the fiscal cliff (although a deal should be one the way) and Europe’s economy is expected to shrink again this year, if the developing nations’ economies do start to slow this could have cataclysmic knock on effects.

We are living in a time of change, what happens over the next year could prove very important in the long run.  

Terrorism

Terrorism did not slow down in 2012 unfortunately, thousands of people were killed across the globe in terrorist atrocities. Yet most of those attacks took place in just a handful of countries:

Country	Attacks*	Dead
Iraq	55	1,676
Afghanistan	35	543
Nigeria	21	511
Pakistan	30	425
Yemen	14	328
Somalia	11	78
Russia	9	51
Kenya	8	47
Colombia	5	31
China	2	26

*Co-ordinated attacks that take place on one day are counted as one attack.

Looking at this rather horrifying table you can see that Iraq had the worst year of any country. Terrorists killed over three times as many people as in Afghanistan, the second worst affected country. One of the most prominent terrorist attacks of the year was not in Iraq or Afghanistan, but Pakistan; the shooting of 15 year old Malala Yousafzai. Thankfully Malala survived and is recovering well in a British hospital. There were protests all across Pakistan against the assassination attempt and 50 Islamic clerics issued a fatwā against the perpetrators. Despite this the Taliban claim they still want to kill her and her father. So what was her ‘crime’? Trying to get young girls into education in Pakistan, this infuriated the Taliban who are anti-education especially when it comes to women. As Malala rose to fame in Pakistan, the Taliban increasingly sent death threats to her home and on the internet. But she continued in her struggle, in 2011 Desmond Tutu nominated her for the International Children’s Peace Prize and later won Pakistan’s first National Youth Prize. Time magazine recently selected her as the runner up of Time Magazine’s person of the year.

There was some pleasant news on the terrorist front, Anders Breivik, was finally sentenced to Prison for this mass shooting and bombing in July 2011.  There is finally closure for the families of the 77 killed and those that were on the island of Utøya on that fateful day.

Up until November 2012, Northern Ireland was relatively quiet on the terrorism front, apart from the odd bomb scare. Then on the 1^st of November a prison officer was shot dead. Then trouble began after Belfast City Council voted to fly the Union flag on certain days of the year. That seriously upset some unionists who for the past few weeks have been causing chaos across Northern Ireland, but particularly in Belfast.

Terrorism is something that will likely always exist, it will never go away but certain places such as the Basque region, Northern Ireland and Sri Lanka all prove that things can be done to improve the situation, to show the terrorists that talking produces better results. The West should learn from these if it ever wants to truly ‘defeat the Taliban’.

Malala Yousafzai's page in Time Magazine