Sidi Bouzid’s rage still simmers eight years on from the Tunisian uprising
▶ Democracy has yet to translate into jobs in hardluck town, writes Simon Speakman Cordall
Sidi Bouzid’s streets filled with the angry shouts of the region’s unemployed graduates this week – not an unusual sight in a town where joblessness is rife.
But on Monday their protest marked the eight-year anniversary of an event in the town which changed the country, the region and, ultimately, the world.
Amid the sand and brush that dominates much of Tunisia’s hardscrabble hinterland, Sidi Bouzid is an unremarkable town. On its main street, shopkeepers talk about extended families and the unemployed relatives they must support from the day’s takings.
It was not much different eight years ago, when street seller Mohammed Bouazizi, 26, unable to afford a bribe after police kicked over his fruit cart and confiscated his scales, set himself alight outside the governor’s office, starting an uprising in Tunisia that spread across the region.
Almost a decade after the revolution, there are still questions over what was achieved during those tumultuous days between 2010 and 2011.
While Tunisia has turned to democracy, advances in free speech and civil liberties have yet to translate into jobs and a stable income for the legions who are jobless or who eke out a living in informal employment.
Activist Aymen Abderrahmen grew up near the town.
“Life was not easy in Sidi Bouzid before December 2010 and even worse in the peripheries,”
Mr Abderrahmen tells The National.
The party of autocratic President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the Democratic Constitutional Rally, was everywhere.
“If you had an opposition figure in your broader family, you’d very likely be denied legal documents from the police station, denied application to work and studies, denied a passport and such,” Mr Abderrahmen says. “So everyone, including members of my family, had to join the party.”
Before the uprising, any activity outside the president’s party came at a cost.
“Even organising a school cultural club or a sports tournament, or joining the students union, would have jeopardised my father’s job as a school principal,” Mr Abderrahmen says.
Learning of Bouazizi’s self-immolation through foreign reporting, Tunis resident Inel Tarfa never imagined that the street seller’s final act would trigger an uprising.
There had been another self-immolation, that of Abdesslem Trimech in Monastir nine months before, which received little media attention.
Even the widespread riots in the mining basin of Gafsa in 2008 had done little to loosen the grip Mr Ben Ali and his wife’s extended Trabelsi family exerted on the country.
“I’d never really been politically involved,” says Mr Tarfa, 23. “But one day the political police came to our house, arrested my brother and seized his computer. We didn’t hear anything about him for two months.”
Mr Tarfa’s brother had been accused of posting anti-regime propaganda online, an offence punishable by law. His parents were desperate.
“They went round all the police stations, all the hospitals, everything,” Mr Tarfa says. “Eventually, a parent of another prisoner told them that their son had been imprisoned alongside my brother, so we knew he was OK. A month later he was released on probation.
“After that I hated them. I’d watch them on TV just lying to us. They would look us in the face and they would lie.”
Tunisia’s economy was stagnating. Inflation and mass unemployment were intruding on the lives of many. Dissent was spreading.
Mabrouka Mbarak, who later became one of the Constituent Assembly deputies responsible for helping to draft the country’s post-revolution constitution, says: “When I heard of the immolation I immediately recognised that Bouazizi is us, marginalised by contempt, dispossessed by a global system of accumulation capitalism and domination, and deprived from dignity by a dictatorship supported by the West.”
The demonstrations that started after Bouazizi’s desperate protest morphed into riots, engulfing much of the country.
Mr Tarfa tracked their spread on social media, eventually heading into the city centre and joining with the hundreds who had gathered round the central trade union office to give voice to their fury.
“I couldn’t believe it,” he says. “They were actually chanting the names of the Trabelsi family and even Ben Ali himself. I was sure that the police would react violently but all they did was insult us and tell us to go home.”
It wasn’t until later, when Mr Tarfa joined another protest, that he witnessed the brutality of Tunisia’s police.
“They just beat people,” he says. “You could see their faces, they were filled with hate.”
On January 13, Mr Ben Ali made a speech promising economic relief for the country’s hard-pressed population.
But it was too late. A day later, with the smell of teargas lingering and bullet casings lying on the ground, he resigned.
Today, Tunisia still struggles with the legacy of his 23-year rule. Despite a commitment to the principles of democracy, there has been a reluctance among parts of the Tunisian establishment to reckon with past sins. Recovery and reform have been slow.
Many of Mr Ben Ali’s cadre have returned to mainstream politics with the president, a former ally of the deposed autocrat, leading the amnesty of the old regime’s civil service last year.
Joblessness remains at about 15 per cent, climbing to double that figure in some of the more hard-pressed interior towns.
With little sign of economic growth to inspire hope for the future, many citizens take to the streets at regular intervals. Occasionally, their demands are met.
At other times, their presence serves as a reminder to those in power that, with many of the conditions that sparked the country’s uprising still evident, the public’s thirst for something better is unquenched.