Shed a Tear for Mohammed Bouazizi
Tunisia, the last vestige of liberal democracy from the Arab Spring, falls to Dictatorship
Eleven years ago, I wrote this…
Mohammed Bouazizi is my hero. This man should be Time’s Man of the Year or a Nobel Peace Price winner, even though he lived to see only 4 days of 2011. Everyone in the world should know his name and his story.
If you never heard of him, I would not be surprised. He was young (only 26) and lived a very modest life, in a place few go or care about. He never appeared in the news or a history book and never sought fame or fortune. He was not considered an intellectual, and didn’t even finish high school. While he was well respected in his neighborhood, he did not stand out in any particular way and was not regarded with any notoriety more than a few miles from his home. What he did, while brave, would generally not be characterized as heroic. Nonetheless, this largely inconsequential person did something of profound consequence that impacted every person living today.
On December 17, 2010, he started a fire.
If that is all you knew about him I would completely understand why you would dispute his relevance to 7 billion people right now. Attempted suicides seldom cause change to the outside world, particularly those of nobodies living in relative squalor in some third world nation. However, it isn’t just what he did, it’s the how and the why that counts, and how that inspired others.
Mohammed was a vegetable seller in a small town in Tunisia. The unemployment rate in Tunisia was over 30%, and he was lucky to be able to find work, even for the paltry sum of $140 per month selling produce provided. Yet with that money, he supported his mother, uncle, younger siblings and was paying for his sister to attend college. He would even provide free fruit and vegetables to very poor families when he could. By all accounts, he made his little slice of the world a better place as much as he could.
For years, Tunisia had been ruled by an oppressive autocrat, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who also led a very corrupt police force. To be a street merchant often required bribing local officers who seek to extort what they can from vendors. Mohammed, had incurred a $200 debt to be paid back at the end of the day with the proceeds of his daily sales. When the police came, he had no money to offer them, so they harassed and humiliated him. According to reports the officers slapped him, spat on him, a female officer degraded him, and they slurred his deceased father and then beat him. The officers then confiscated his produce cart and scales.
When he went to the local Governor’s office to complain, the Governor would not even see or listen to him. Humiliated, deprived of all he had to earn a living, and ignored, he went to a local gas station, acquired a can of gasoline, returned to the street outside the Governor’s office and lit a match. Less than an hour after his initial altercation with police, Mohammed Bouazizi self-immolated.
He was taken to the hospital and as the story of what happened grew, local politicians took to his cause for their own self interest. President Ben Ali even promised to send him to France for treatment, but no transfer was ever arranged. Eighteen days after lighting himself on fire, he died on January 4, 2011.
Then something happened the politicians did not expect. These local patrons, all who knew Mohammed personally and identified with his frustrations of poverty, dealing with corruption and sacrifice, began to stand up in support of each other. One life touched so many.
At first, after Bouazizi was taken to the hospital, small protests began in relatively poor neighborhoods. When he died, the protests expanded and became more widespread. The crowds became so intense and so prevalent that on January 14th, a mere 10 days after Mohammed passed away, the powerful President of Tunisia had to flee the country.
But it did not stop there. Other people, in similar situations of poverty and corruption took notice in other countries. Whether it was the inspiration of this simple produce vendor or the shame of having endured decades of ridicule at the hands of despots, people who identified with Mohammed Bouazizi began taking to the streets throughout the Middle East. In Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Bahrain, Algeria, Morocco, Qatar, Syria and elsewhere, thousands rose up to demonstrate and protest the conditions in which they live, a majority of 99% suppressed economically and socially vrs. a dictatorial minority of less than 0.1%.1
The point is that one little man, who never asked for anything but someone to listen to him, stood up for himself and said he wasn’t going to take it anymore. One little man, who spent his days trying to help locals in his neighborhood made a profound impact on those around him who remembered him. One little man, who woke up each day doing a small mundane, thankless job that paid and offered little but pride, brought down powerful leaders. One little man, who died almost a year ago is still inspiring uprisings all over the globe.
One little man changed the world.
So it was with a heavy heart this morning when I read this:
Tunisian leaders had genuinely tried to move onto a liberal democracy. They even won the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts. But liberal democracy is fragile, everyone has to buy into it. The wrong person with the wrong motivations can ruin it forever. It’s what we saw in Russia as Yeltsin and the new democratic nation turned over to Putin in the early 2000s. It’s what we see in Turkey with Erdogan, and Hungary with Orban today. It’s what we can see closer to home staring us in the face.
Tunisia used to be the brightest beacon to the world that it was good and can provide help and representation to its masses. Now, it’s become a warning of what can happen if we are not careful with our own democracy.
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People around the world saw much of this slowly happening. Here is the Brookings Institute from last year pushing ideas of what the US could do to help Tunisian Democracy.
And here is the Guardian last summer.
People neglect to realize how rare liberal democracy is in history. We kind of take it as a given in modern society, but it really is anything but. It requires the ability to potentially hand over power to an adverse party with the trust that in the future, they will do the same. All it takes is one bad actor to kill it. It calls to mind probably the most underappreciated moment in American history when John Adams lost the election to Thomas Jefferson resulting in the first organized and planned transition to a hostile party in history. A great book on this is “What Kind of Nation,” which also gets into John Marshall’s role and the emergence of the Judicial Branch as a result. You can find it here:
https://www.amazon.com/What-Kind-Nation-Jefferson-Marshall/dp/0684848716#:~:text=Back%20to%20James%20Simon's%20What,the%20latter's%20death%20in%201826.
PurpleAmerica’s Obscure Fact of the Day
It may surprise a number of you, but Tunisia was where George Lucas shot many of the “Tatooine” scenes in the original Star Wars film (Renamed “Star Wars: A New Hope”). When they created “Star Wars Episode 1: The Phanton Menace,” they returned to the original location to film the scenes. It’s now a tourist spot for Tunisia.
Outstanding Tweet
Please read Brian Klaas’s full thread on what is currently happening in Tunisia.
Footnotes and Parting Thoughts
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This event, nicknamed “the Arab Spring” directly led to the overthrow of Mubarak and Qadaffi in Egypt and Libya respectively, and a host of others. Some, like King Hussein in Jordan, adopted reforms to stay in power. Others, such as Bashar Al-Assad in Syria, maintained power through outright force and will. The collapse of many Middle Eastern governments seems more now like a generational transition between dictators and despots than it does a democratic awakening that was widely hoped for at the time.