Arab Spring: Tunisia
Mohamed Bouazizi, a twenty-six-year-old fruit seller in the town of Sidi Bouzid, set himself on fire outside the governor's office on 17 December 2010 after municipal officials confiscated his cart and, by the family's account, humiliated him. Protests began in the town that day and spread through the interior, where unemployment was high and the state's development promises had never arrived. Zine El Abidine Ben Ali had ruled Tunisia for twenty-three years through a single party, a pervasive police apparatus, tight control of the press and a family whose corruption American diplomatic cables — published by WikiLeaks weeks earlier — described in detail. The security forces killed over three hundred people. The protests grew anyway, joined by the powerful trade union federation UGTT, by lawyers and by the urban middle class, and reached Tunis in January. The army, small and deliberately kept weak by Ben Ali, declined to fire on crowds. He fled to Saudi Arabia on 14 January 2011, twenty-eight days after Bouazizi's self-immolation. The example detonated across the region within weeks — Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria — and the term Arab Spring was applied to all of it. Tunisia is the one case that produced a democracy. A constitution was agreed in 2014, the Islamist Ennahda party ceded power after losing an election, and a quartet of civil society organisations won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2015. President Kais Saied suspended parliament in 2021 and has ruled by decree since. Ben Ali died in exile in 2019 and was convicted in absentia several times over. Bouazizi's family left Sidi Bouzid, which remains as poor as it was.
- Year: 2010 CE
- Category: Political
