Did he die in vain? Ten years after the flames that transformed the peddler Mohamed Bouazizi into a human torch, the match of the Jasmine Revolution and the detonator of the Arab Springs, a decade after that January 2011 in which the dictator Ben Ali got on a plane and fled in Saudi Arabia, there is an impoverished, frightened and inflamed Tunisia that no longer asks questions and has only one answer: Yes, Bouazizi died for nothing and his protest did not help much.
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Ten years later, the jasmines have rotted. According to a poll, 58 percent of Tunisians think they were better off when they were worse off. on the 28th he feels frustrated, on the 84th he hates all politicians and only 2 per cent still honor the memory of Bouazizi and his sacrifice. The tenth anniversary of the first of the Springs, those that later extended to Mubarak’s Egypt, Gaddafi’s Libya and Assad’s Syria, not a party: today the country sealed by Covid, the economy walled up by the crisis and the fists are closed in protest. Saturday was a night of iron and fire, stone throwing and tear gas from Tunis to Sousse, from Hammamet to Tozeur, from Monastir to Djerba, thousands of young people in the square and gangs of kids looting shops, houses, banks, even a municipal kennel. Police arrested 242 people, even 12-year-olds. Barricades, tires in smoke, Molotov cocktails, petrol cans, a protester stopped while brandishing a machete. Dozens of officers injured and cars set on fire.
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The government speaks of “contemporary and organized” demonstrations in the popular areas of the capital, from Kram to the December 5th district, all taken as soon as the health curfew began at 4 pm. And the feeling, however, that it will not end there. Our political lockdown has been going on for ten years! The crowds shout. The coronavirus emergency – 5,528 deaths, 175 thousand cases, record figures last Friday – only added to the thousand of this decade: youth unemployment at 35 percent, one in five Tunisians below the poverty line, the collapse of tourism, exports and foreign investments, a public economy close to bankruptcy. The migrants to Italy, who again set sail with boats from Sfax, Zarzis or Mahdia, are a precise thermometer of the crisis: they were 5,200 two years ago, 2,654 in 2019, they were more than 13 thousand in 2020. The largest group of asylum seekers in our country, explains the Italian Minister of the Interior, Luciana Lamorgese, precisely that of Tunisians. The riots of the last weekend are the echo of a generational protest, also pushed by the restrictions for the virus, which is affecting a bit all of Africa (in Algeria as in Namibia, in Chad as well as in Uganda, in Zimbabwe as in Angola). And they add up to a thousand protests in the last three months, says the Tunisian Forum for the Economy and Unemployment: perhaps more for this than for Covid, if the celebrations for the tenth anniversary of the Jasmine Revolution have been canceled.
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The government is seriously late on the emergency and here, as opposed to neighboring Morocco and Egypt, the vaccines have not yet arrived. Four days of total lockdown have been set, just Thursday 14, so as to make the Avenue Bourghiba in Tunis ghostly, usually a swarm of processions. More than the failure of the ninth government in ten years, the failure of a state. Prime Minister Hichem Mechichi promises the reshuffle of twelve ministers, starting with those of the Interior, Health and Justice, but for 68 percent of Tunisians he and all the others should go home: even the powerful leader of the Islamists of Ennahda, Rashid Gannouchi, now president of the Parliament; also populist president Kais Saied, a university professor who was elected less than two years ago because he was out of the game and who, in the last six months, has lost 46 points in the polls. The absence of reforms, the lack of prospects, terrorism, the crisis of neighboring Libya: too many failures after Ben Ali weigh on the achievements of the Revolution – from the new Constitution to freedom of speech, from the elections to the Nobel Peace Prize – which the whole world has recognized in Tunisia.
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For the 132 dead and 4 thousand wounded in the days of the repression ten years ago, no one has ever been sentenced. The local policemen and politicians who exasperated poor Bouazizi, pushing him to set himself on fire, have largely returned to their posts. The treasure of Ben Ali, who died in 2019 with all his secrets, remained abroad. And the aid promised by the West to one of the few true democracies in the Arab world has remained a rumor: we live on EU, American and World Bank alms, but no development plan has been adopted to prevent this small country from ending up in chaos of jihadism. The tires still burn in the night, on the Tunis ring roads. The streets are empty of fear and the virus. The murals dedicated to Bouazizi are covered with posters and advertisements. Did he die in vain? Yes, maybe yes.
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January 17, 2021 (change January 17, 2021 | 21:20)
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