Self-immolation is grim trend in Tunisia
Seven years after protest fueled revolution, frustration at failed promise of Arab Spring is common
WTEBOURBA, Tunisia hen Adel Dridi poured gasoline on his head and set himself on fire in May, his first thought was of his mother, Dalila, whose name is roughly tattooed on his arm. But another person was also on his mind: Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor whose self-immolation in 2010 set off the Arab Spring uprisings.
Dridi, 31, is also a fruit seller, and, like Bouazizi, he snapped after the police spilled his apricots, bananas and strawberries on the ground in front of the city hall here in his hometown.
“I wanted to burn myself because I was burning inside,” Dridi said in an interview while lying on a mattress in his family’s home, where he was still recovering, his neck and chest scarred by burns. “I wanted to die this way.”
Seven years after Bouazizi’s desperate and dramatic protest helped start revolutions across the region, frustration at the failed promise of the Arab Spring is widespread. Authoritarian rule has returned to Egypt. Libya is a cauldron of chaos. Syria and Iraq are torn by civil wars. The Gulf monarchies are essentially unchanged. Neighboring Algeria is paralyzed.
Yet it is a paramount irony that in Tunisia — cradle of the Arab Spring and the one country that has the best hope of realizing its aspirations for democracy and prosperity — Bouazizi’s once-extraordinary act has become commonplace, whether compelled by anger, depression or bitter disappointment, or to publicly challenge the authorities.
Tunisia has advanced more than any other country in the region toward freedom and democratic governance, yet it has been largely unable to provide hope and opportunity for a better life. Thousands of young people have abandoned the country to work abroad or to join the Islamic State group.
The frustration at that failure has no more gruesome expression than Tunisia’s tide of selfimmolations.
Cases of self-immolation tripled in the five years after the revolution, according to one study. The country’s main burn hospital in Ben Arous, a suburb of Tunis, admitted a record 104 patients who had set fire to themselves in 2016.
The hospital had seen an average of more than 80 cases a year since 2011, the surgeon in charge of the burn ward, Dr. Amen Allah Messadine, said. The public protest is now the second-mostcommon form of suicide in this country of 11 million people. “The problem is that it does not decrease,” said Messadine, who has been at the front line of the trend.
For public health officials, the phenomenon is as perplexing as it is disturbing. But it is also regarded as a profound measure of the unsettling change, economic hardship and lingering sense of injustice that define life in Tunisia, even since its democratic revolution. “This kind of suicide stands more as a dissenting attitude toward the post-revolution society, which deeply changed,” said Dr. Mehdi Ben Khelil, the forensic pathologist who conducted the study showing how the number of self-immolations had increased.
Dridi, the only breadwinner for his mother and family since the age of 14, said he had wanted to do “like Bouazizi” on the morning of May 10, when police officers ordered him to leave, saying he had not paid for his vending spot.
“The police knocked over my stall,” he said. “But it got worse. They spilled my fruit and they took me to their car. Inside, they started beating me hard. I managed to escape and when I saw the gas station in front of me. I did not think twice.”
He splashed gasoline on himself directly from the pump and put a lighter to his neck. He was saved by a bus driver who put out the flames with a fire extinguisher.
Whereas most suicides before the revolution were for reasons of mental health, those since have been driven largely by economic hardship and a desire to challenge the authorities. They are often carried out in front of administration buildings.
Dridi had previously tried to burn himself in public in 2012, but was stopped by onlookers.
Cases like his are a sign of social despair and resentment toward officialdom, medical personnel say. “Most of those who survived told us they just could not take it anymore,” said Nadia Ben Slama, a psychologist at the Ben Arous hospital. “They frequently used two words in Arabic: el kahra, which means helplessness or the feeling of being oppressed, and the word hogra, which means scorn or contempt from others.”
The trend is touching a new, younger generation that has come of age since the revolution.
Ramzi Messaoudi set himself afire on Feb. 15 in the courtyard of his high school, while everyone was studying in class, in Bou Hajla, a small town in central Tunisia. He died three days later from his burns.
He had disagreements with his English teacher, who repeatedly expelled him from class, his father and his friends said. But his family is bewildered. His sister Rimeh, 20, who shared a bedroom with him, mourns over his school books. His father, Nourredine Messaoudi, a minibus driver, still holds on to his son’s burned bus card.