Bourguiba was secular, educated, and a visionary man. His authoritative temperament damaged his image. He was, despite his reforms, an unjust president, particularly to those who democratically opposed his politics. But was it a sufficient reason for Ben Ali, a military man married to a hairdresser, to dispose of him like a decaying body awaiting death?
Ben Ali didn’t make radical changes when he first took power. He continued Bourguiba’s reforms, particularly in the field of education. He consulted Mohamed Charfi, a human rights activist, and put him in charge of the Ministry of National Education with the aim to cleanse textbooks of Islamist and fanatical ideology. With a team of about fifty professors, Mohamed Charfi did remarkable work. He rewrote all the textbooks in the spirit of the Enlightenment and open-mindedness. Ben Ali encouraged his work. As soon as the work was completed, though, Mohamed Charfi resigned and disassociated himself from the Ben Ali government.
The fight against Islamic fundamentalists rapidly became one of Ben Ali’s obsessions; it turned into a witch hunt, involving arbitrary arrests and torture at police stations in the worst possible conditions imaginable. Under the pretext of the Islamist threat, Ben Ali became more and more dictatorial, instilling fear in the country, forbidding the foreign press, hunting down opponents, even those who had nothing to do with Islamism. The country’s economic growth and its appearance to the West as a fortress of stability — even at the cost of repression — rapidly framed Ben Ali as a reassuring “rampart against Islamism.” That’s how, during three decades, Ben Ali was able to subject his country, without any opposition, to a dictatorship that strictly denied Tunisians any rights. Tunisia became his private affair. His family, in the strict and broad senses, profited from the country excessively and shamelessly. Paris officials released one of Ben Ali’s brothers, caught red-handed trafficking drugs in France; he calmly returned to his golden villa in Tunis. At the same moment, activists were getting arrested. Graduates, young and jobless, roamed the streets rather than swell the ranks of illegal immigrants.
Tunisia and its president, who got himself reelected every five years with up to 90 percent of the vote, always enjoyed good ratings from Western embassies. During his official visits to Europe, Ben Ali was applauded and celebrated, and his country was recognized as an optimistic example of “making progress toward democracy.” It was beyond belief. When he fled as a thief from Tunisia (because he was a thief), TV channels rebroadcast talks by Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Silvio Berlusconi, and others. It was frightening to hear what these people said in front of Ben Ali, and baffling when they were at a loss for words when the thug ran away. This is called “realpolitik.”
Thanks to Tunisia’s positive image, the country gradually became a popular tourist destination. This helped boost the country’s economy and employment. Tourists couldn’t see any of the regime’s scandalous aspects; it took an informed journalist or an attentive writer to see these traits. I first experienced them in 2005. I was invited to give a talk to university and high school students at the invitation of the French Cultural Center of Tunisia. Before long, I noticed that civilian-clothed police officers were continuously following me. The students asked strictly literary questions, but as soon as the talk was over, they came to see me and spoke in whispers. I hated this trip and the leaden atmosphere. Journalists who dared denounce this hyper — police state were simply imprisoned. The best known among them, Taoufik Ben Brik, spent six months in prison during 2009 and 2010 after a trial built totally on lies. The regime found intolerable his outspokenness and criticism against the regime, especially regarding torture and disappearance of opponents.
The bombing of the synagogue in Djerba on April 11, 2002, that left twenty-one dead made the most vigilant observers realize that even though Ben Ali managed to keep the Islamists at bay in his country, his police didn’t succeed in stopping al-Qaida from committing bloody acts on his land. The suicide bomber came from an immigrant family in France and had connections with a German who had converted to Islam…
The Spark
I had never heard about the small town of Sidi Bouzid. Yet, it’s there that it all started. Even though the incident was common and banal, this time it ended by triggering the irrevocable.
There was once a young man of twenty-eight, who had degrees but no job. He lived with his mother, brothers, and sisters. To make a little money, he got himself a fruit stand, a kind of cart on which vendors put seasonal fruit and vegetables to sell. Street vendors. We see them everywhere in Maghrebi cities. Often, cars stop or double park in front of them to buy last-minute fruit as dessert for lunch. These vendors can’t afford to have a store. They are poor and live from day to day. Sometimes their carts get in the way of the traffic, but everyone makes do. And, if a vendor “buys” the neighborhood police officer’s favor, he is left in peace and can sell his produce without being harassed. At times though, the same police officer, eager to demonstrate his strictness to his supervisor, is excessively zealous and forces the vendor to sell his produce elsewhere. Some spots are better located than others — those with more traffic are obviously better for selling. For these spots, one has to “pay.” Slipping one or two banknotes to a police officer is indispensable. The relationship between the police and vendors is one of the dominating and dominated, not unlike the small neighborhood mafias in Italy. You want to work? Well, you have to pay. If the vendor refuses, his cart is knocked over or confiscated for causing “trouble in the public thoroughfare.”
The amount of money a street vendor makes is not huge. It’s hardly enough to feed a small family. No one has ever seen a fruit and vegetable street vendor make a fortune. Mohamed Bouazizi was one of these people who toil every day to try to live in dignity. He refused to beg or accept the mafia compromises, to steal or do anything that is illegal. He could see very well how Ben Ali and his large family, his own and his wife’s, took advantage of the country shamelessly. Like all Tunisians, Mohamed knew about the lawlessness of Ben Ali’s in-laws, brothers, brothers-in-law, cousins, and friends, and how this pack’s members didn’t bother hiding while they made millions. All the big businesses, all big companies, and all foreign investments had to go through the “Ben Ali — Trabelsi law.” Everyone knew about this system; they talked about it, and then said, “We’ll close our eyes to it because Tunisia is finished with Islamists.” The well-off, middle-class people of Tunis, La Marsa, Sidi Bou-Saïd, and Hammamet boasted of living in a country “with perfect security,” “without robberies or attacks in the streets, where the police do their job really well.” People who collaborated with the regime enjoyed remarkable comfort and well-being. They were grateful to Ben Ali, this former military man, who knew so well how to capitalize on his country’s wealth. French and Italian politicians often viewed Tunisia as exemplary in the Arab-Muslim world. The Islamist leader Rached Ghannouchi took refuge in London. No one heard about him or his Ennahda movement anymore. Islamism was buried.
Mohamed Bouazizi had to stop his studies because his father died. Mohamed’s father was a farmworker. Mohamed has to take care of his entire family of seven. He buys a cart to sell fruit and vegetables in the street. However, he doesn’t have authorization from the police. The police harass him, but he refuses to give in to corruption. In any case, he doesn’t have the means. The police don’t leave him alone. As soon as they see him, they go after him, threatening to confiscate his cart and weighing scale. On this morning of December 17, 2010, he comes across a group of particularly mean police officers who confiscate his cart. One of the officers is a woman; she slaps him, and another spits on him. Supreme humiliation. He tries to get his cart back, explaining that he has seven people to feed and that he hasn’t done anything wrong…. The police officers’ aggressiveness doubles in ferocity. Mohamed’s anger rises, and he decides to talk to someone in the town hall; no one wants to listen to him. He then goes to the governorate…. At that moment, no one knew that this humiliation would lead to the spark of a revolt with immeasurable consequences…