IT IS hard to believe that five years have passed since the start of the Arab Spring uprisings. Back then, I found myself on the streets of Arab cities from Cairo to Tripoli and Benghazi to Tunis, covering the revolutionary fervour that had ignited across the region.

Yes, it was a time of violence and uncertainty but it was also a time of hope. I’ll never forget many of the youngsters I met on those streets with their heady determination, courage and collective sense of purpose.

Most were focused on ridding their respective countries of despots and oppression while ushering in a newfound sense of freedom. How sad it is that their aspirations have been so ruthlessly dashed.

Today, even use of the term the Arab Spring is criticised for being inaccurate and overly simplistic. Perhaps the saddest thing of all is that we rarely hear about many of those young activists now.

Some have, of course, paid the ultimate price. Across the Arab world their voices of reason have been choked or drowned out by extremists, new despots and those dictators still surviving amidst civil wars where one faction is scarcely recognisable from the other and all are played like puppets by the greater powers. Watching the latest television pictures coming out of the Syrian city of Aleppo, I find my stomach churning.

It’s not just the scenes of unspeakable horror that invoke a sense of unease but also an anger at the terrible betrayal of so many ordinary people by the wider world. What we are witnessing in Aleppo is an utter disgrace. I’m sure I’m not alone in bristling at the sight of TV footage showing civilians, children in particular, in terrible pain and distress that then cuts to images of the usual “power brokers” in suits in safe places who haggle ad nauseam at a diplomatic level as the bombs fall relentlessly.

Yesterday, Stephen O’Brien the UN’s humanitarian affairs chief, pleaded with UN Security Council members to protect civilians “for the sake of humanity”. The besieged part of eastern Aleppo was, he said, in danger of becoming “one giant graveyard”. Doubtless, as before, his pleas will fall on deaf ears. But what those who refuse to listen might not realise is that, in the long term, they could well pay a heavy political price for their inaction.

Where was the West when we needed it most? What did the governments in Washington, London, Paris, Berlin and elsewhere do to help stop the bombs falling on Aleppo? Why did so many countries close the door on us as we fled war, torture and oppression, having risen up against dictatorship? These are the burning questions a new generation of Arabs will be asking in the years ahead and many Western countries will not come out of this interrogation well.

If my own experience is anything to go by, Arabs and many others who come from the Middle East have long memories. Perhaps this has to do with having being used as geopolitical pawns so many times and for so long in the past. What has changed, however, is that the new generation of Arabs is the largest, the most well educated and the most highly urbanised in the history of the region. This is not a personal assessment but an element in the latest findings of the UN’s Arab Development Report, published earlier this week. On one level, the improved performance in education is a cause for celebration but look further into the report and it makes for some rather alarming reading.

Young Arabs might be better educated but many are also trapped in massive levels of unemployment and submerged in dysfunctional political regimes riddled with corruption. The vast majority of the 180 million Arabs under 35 years old came of age in the last two decades. This has been a time when political legitimacy across the region has weakened, corruption and abuse of power have reached unprecedented levels and many republics have turned into familial fiefdoms.

As the Economist magazine recently pointed out using data from the UN report, those Arabs between the ages of 15-29 sit somewhere in the region of 105 million and their numbers are growing fast. Within their ranks, however, unemployment, poverty and marginalisation are all growing even faster. Arab youth unemployment stands at 30 per cent, which is more than twice the world’s average of 14 per cent. Both males and females are caught in this depressing cycle. Almost half of young Arab women looking for jobs are unable to find them, this against a global average of 16 per cent.

But there are other even more alarming figures. Terrifyingly, while home to only five per cent of the world’s population, in 2014 the Arab world accounted for 45 per cent of the world’s terrorism, 68 per cent of its battle-related deaths, 47 per cent of its internally displaced and 58 per cent of its refugees.

If all of this is not a recipe for future disaster then I don’t know what is. All of these figures should be a wake-up call both for the Arab world itself and for those of us looking on from afar.

In the past five years since the last Arab Awakening, more than 300,000 Arabs have been killed and more than four million displaced as a result of civil wars, social confrontations and state-sanctioned bloodshed. In that time, very few of the crimes against humanity that have been perpetrated in the Arab world have been seriously investigated.

You don’t need to be smart to see how this diminished sense of justice can so easily engender a culture of revenge. Educated as never before, unemployed in vast numbers, often surrounded by war and politically dysfunctional, corrupt regimes, it would hardly be surprising if another Arab Awakening were just around the corner.

Certainly, the evidence gathered in the latest UN report suggests that Arab protest movements tend to come in five-year cycles. Should that be the case, as the acclaimed Egyptian political economist and author, Tarek Osman, has pointed out, there are two ways events could go.

The first is that there are factors that could plunge the Arab world into more disintegration, violence and chaos. The alternative is that positive factors prevail, helping to salvage the Arab world and to move it on a more constructive trajectory.

As ever, should another awakening erupt, how the West responds will be crucial. Its leaders should not be surprised, however, if a new generation of Arabs takes little heed of what they say or do. Over the past five years close to 40 million young Arabs, mainly in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, have come to live in regions without central authority or rule of law.

Many are all too aware of how the Arab community was let down or manipulated by the West in 2011 and are still on the receiving end today. The West has a lot to answer for in this respect, and it may well pay a heavy political price for it next time around.