It has, by any standards, been a dramatic year on the global political stage. During the spring, events moved quickly in different parts of North Africa and the Middle East. Protests in Tunisia and Egypt escalated into full scale revolutions. Dictators were overthrown. It looked like a spring tide, a full-scale changing of the guard. There have also been uprisings in Bahrain, Yemen and Syria – where President Bashar al-Assad has dealt brutally with insurgents and protestors with up to 2,000 people being killed by Government forces.

Inspired by what had been happening in other Arab countries, and the sense that we might be seeing the dawn of something radically new in the Arab world, Libya too erupted. The initial protests were peaceful. Historians will interpret the events that followed with the benefit of hindsight, but what does seem clear even now is that when the President, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi made the decision to kill civilians in his attempt to restore order, he lost forever the iron grip that he and his family had exercised on the country for over 40 years. What had begun peacefully became a violent armed revolution and Libya became engulfed in a bloody civil war.

JOINING THE REVOLUTION