Ten Years Since the Spark that Ignited the Arab Spring
A decade ago today, Mohamed Bouazizi set himself alight in a Tunisian market and catalysed what's become known as the 'Arab Spring'. In Tunisia, at least, his legacy endures.
Thursday 17 December 2020 marks ten years to the day since the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian grocer, whose subsequent death set off the chain of events that brought democracy to his country.
What followed has since been referred to, at least in the Western press, as the exotic-sounding ‘Arab Spring,’ and though it’s dubious to impose this kind of uniformity on events spanning five thousand miles and half a billion people, there’s no doubt that it was Bouazizi who began it.
The circumstances that led to his death have now become fabled. Aged twenty-six, providing for his family by selling produce from his cart, indebted, and struggling under the weight of rising food prices, Bouazizi was instructed on 17 December 2010 to pay a bribe to a petty official in charge of the local market.
Bouazizi didn’t have the money. His cart and weighing scales were confiscated. He was publicly humiliated and allegedly beaten by the officials.
Outraged, he demanded to see the mayor of Sidi Bouzid. The mayor refused; Bouazizi went to the nearest petrol station, doused himself, and outside the town hall, set himself alight. It was a suicide, but steeped in such political defiance and fury that it reverberated across North Africa and the Middle East.
The story remains emblematic of what are often perceived as the region’s biggest problems: endemic corruption, poverty, a young person driven to despair, an oppressive state wielding unjust power over daily life. Since 2010, another factor, too, has been added to the list: farmers struggled and food prices soared in the run-up to the Arab uprisings, and more recent analyses include climate change as a contextual factor. The correlation can be overemphasised, which risks minimising individual agency and fails to explain different outcomes, but it’s indisputable the hardships Bouazizi struggled against were exacerbated by climatic and water stress. The addition is a corrective to privileged laments that frame climate change as a problem to be dealt with by future generations.
Ripple Effects
What allowed Tunisia to break regional trends in carrying off its revolution is hard to pinpoint. Army conscripts policing the protests were often drawn from Tunisia’s south, a poorer area where mining and resource extraction brings few jobs and sees profits sent elsewhere. To them, change didn’t seem so bad. At higher levels, too, the Tunisian military under the Ben Ali dictatorship had never seen the largesse of the United Arab Emirates or Saudi Arabia – the state to which Ben Ali eventually fled, and where he died in 2019. As such, a shift to civilian rule, and a professionalisation of the military, had potential upsides even further up the chain of command.
Across the region, young activists had early advantages through social media, allowing them to form networks with an ease that dictators the age of their grandparents feared. A decade later, though, the advantages of a smaller, more organic social media have been cannibalised by corporate platforms and the region’s regimes. What was optimistically called the Middle East’s ‘public square’ has been taken over by bots, troll farms, and extreme surveillance technology – most notably NSO’s Pegasus software, which was developed in Israel but now monitors activists across the many remaining Arab dictatorships.
In some ways, you could argue that Tunisia benefited from its modesty. Libya was hindered by its ownership of Africa’s largest oil reserves, in pursuit of which the Gaddafi-era general Khalifa Haftar attacked with the backing of the UAE and France. Egypt, with its hundred-million-strong population and control of the Suez Canal was deemed ‘too big to fail’—failure in this instance meaning democratisation—and the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood government was overthrown by a Saudi and UAE-backed coup led by Abdel al-Sisi.
Making Democracy
Whatever the broader trends, it is wrong, and one of the most common failings in describing regional politics, to be too deterministic. Some things could not have been predicted; they were one-off decisions of the kind that break with the status-quo and in doing so have a capacity to alter history.
If there was any other moment as significant as Bouazizi’s act, it came in 2013, when the zeal of some elected religious voices was curbed by the Islamist Ennahda Party making way for a new government. It was a decision that shielded the revolution from excessive conservativism, and a self-correction that the Muslim Brotherhood failed to make in Cairo – one which saw the Obama administration effectively green-light the al-Sisi coup.
Whatever the reasons, its revolution has earned Tunisia admirers internationally. Closer to home, Turkey’s AKP and the Qatari ruling family (which funds Al-Jazeera) have warmed to Tunisia as a new frontrunner in the effort to construct a region where democracy and Islam coexist. But many Tunisians fear becoming a part of the region’s ideological struggles to the detriment of the struggle for better and fairer lives.
Towards that end – since democracy is intended as a means, rather than a goal in itself – there remains a vital question: did it work?
A Decade On
Though there’s not necessarily nostalgia for the old regime, few Tunisians would suggest the revolution has fulfilled its promise. Poverty and corruption remain rife, opportunities are scarce, and the south particularly remains restive, neglected, and subject to underinvestment.
Tunisia’s fledgling democracy has – with scarcely time to catch its breath – also been met by the new aggression of international financial institutions. The International Monetary Fund continues to demand punishing reforms and cuts to the public sector in return for financing.
No allowance is made for the fragility of Tunisia’s new society and its institutions, nor the extent to which they were generationally defunded and calcified under French colonialism and then Ben Ali – the latter often with Western support. In the paper trail left by the billions of euros disappeared by Ben Ali’s corruption, familiar names appear: Switzerland, HSBC.
As is always the case with colonialism and clientelism, every bit as damaging as the stolen funds has been the corrosion of faith and functioning capacity in Tunisian state systems. For all the fine words, the lack of Western effort to support transition reveals familiar limits in the commitment to democracy in the region.
More ominously, the direct influence of colonialism persists. The new Tunisian President, Kais Saied, visited Paris in June 2020 to discuss bilateral ties with France, with colonial reparations one item on the agenda. Saied went on to cause anger at home by describing French colonialism in Tunisia not akin to the ‘occupation’ of Algeria, but rather as ‘protection’, a word replete with sinister Mafioso undertones, and minimising a suffering that Tunisians struggled bitterly to end.
Domestically, the country still faces a problem in religious extremism, exacerbated by poverty and the fact that Ben Ali nurtured the strictest religious forms for decades, seeing in them a protection against the demand for political reform.
Ten years on, we can only say that Tunisia now represents many things. It’s a one-off success so far – but it’s also a cautionary tale against expectations and on the importance of patience. In one clear win, journalists are now active in the country, and regional press freedom indexes rank Tunisia highly. Journalists were able to protest the arrival of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a reminder to him that democracy has edged closer.
The grocer, Mohamed Bouazizi, died from his burns on 4 January 2011. His story has already been immortalised, and Tunisians continue to build the country he demanded.