She talks here about what she has heard, seen, and experienced of revolution and counter-revolution at the epicenter of the Arab Spring. Since the revolution she has spent eight months there, returning here most recently in August.īack in Seattle, Gharbi remains glued to the phone and computer, in the way of expats when great events shake their homelands. She has lived and worked in Seattle for 30 years but returned to Tunis each year in the last two years she has resumed publishing her work there. But for Rajaa Gharbi they are an unrelenting source of anger, apprehension, and even now excitement and hope. Tunisia’s travails have been overshadowed by similar upheavals in Egypt. Police met them with tear gas and birdshot, injuring hundreds and blinding some. Tens of thousands have taken to the streets there, protesting impoverishment, corruption, and vanished development funds and demanding the local governor resign. This time Siliana, another town in Tunisia’s hardscrabble interior, has become the flashpoint. Once again mass protests erupted across the country. press, assured the world of their commitment to democracy, pluralism, and the rule of secular law.īut the government failed to draft a new constitution and refused to step down this October when its one-year deadline tolled. Its leaders, routinely labeled “moderate Islamists” by the U.S. When elections were held in October 2011, the Ennahdha (Renaissance) party, a formerly banned Islamist movement inspired by Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, won a plurality and formed an interim government with two secular partners. There, as in Egypt, the progressives and secularists who peopled the protests and brought down the dictator failed to cohere at the polls. In Tunisia, where the Arab Spring began, the course seemed smoother. A Bahraini poet was recently sentenced to life in prison for a poem declaring, “We are all Tunisia.” More dictators fell, but the Arab Spring led to long, hot summers and winters of discontent: civil wars in Libya and Syria, new mass protests following the recent assumption of dictatorial powers by Egypt’s elected Islamist president, continuing repression by the Saudi-backed Bahraini regime. Inspired by Tunisia’s example, thousands took to the streets and barricades in Libya, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, and Bahrain. It was the first such successful exercise of mass people power in the Arabic-speaking world. Four weeks after Bouazizi immolated himself and 10 days after he died in hospital, Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia. Sympathetic street demonstrations erupted in Sidi Bouzid and spread throughout the country, morphing into a massive popular protests against the 23-year-old dictatorship of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. It was the smallest country in North Africa (in area) and the most secular, unencumbered by the Faustian gift of oil, stable and pro-Western albeit ruled from 1987 on by an increasingly repressive dictatorship.Īll that changed on Decemwhen Mohamed Bouazizi, a young produce vendor in the provincial town of Sidi Bouzid incensed at years of harassment, extortion, and humiliation inflicted by municipal authorities, set himself on fire. In geopolitics as in tourism, Tunisia seemed an afterthought amidst the storms and perils erupting in Libya, Egypt, and the true Middle East to the east. “Alors, vous n’êtes pas americains?!” they’d finally exclaim: We never see Americans here.Īt that time a million Europeans and just a thousand Americans visited Tunisia each year. Everywhere people would ask us, “Vous êtes français?” Non. I got an inkling of how far Tunisia lay off American mental maps 28 years ago, when my brother and I detoured there from Sicily and spent two heady weeks crisscrossing the country. For most Americans it is just another of the far-off little countries that occasionally emerge to shake the world order and then fade back into obscurity. For Rajaa Gharbi, who grew up in Tunis but has shuttled between there and Seattle for the past 30 years, Tunisia is a raging fever, an urgent crisis, and a thrilling hope.
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