Tunisia: The jobless revolution | Tunisia |Axisoflogic.com

SIDI BOUZID, TUNISIA—From his sidewalk stall, brimming with pomegranates, grapes, garlic and bananas, Ammari Sassi ponders the political and economic landscape since a fellow fruit vendor died by fire and sparked a revolution.

“Nothing has changed; it’s still the same,” said Sassi, who has five children. Only one has a job. Another is still in school, and the prospects of employment in this dusty farming town in the heart of Tunisia remain grim.

It was here that Mohamed Bouazizi, 26, set himself on fire almost a year ago, a young man bereft of hope and despairing of the future. He was one of the many, and he became a powerful symbol.

After his death in hospital on Jan. 4, protests cascaded across the country and 10 days later, president/dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and his extended — and much-despised — family fled.

The first of the Arab states to overthrow the dictator, the first to hold elections — on Oct. 23, with a stunning voter turnout — Tunisia remains first on the most-likely-to-succeed lists. But that will take time and test the patience of Tunisians, who have risen up once already and will no doubt do it again if they don’t like what they see.

Across the country, young men gather in their places — in Sidi Bouzid, they call it Area 17 — to talk, drink and numb feelings of hopelessness, as they did before the revolution.

Unemployment sits at 18 per cent. Among those under 25, it is 30 per cent, even though young people here are highly educated. What jobs there are pay poorly.

Tourism has tanked and Tunisia has yet to receive much from the $80 billion in aid and loans promised by the likes of the G8 and the World Bank to Arab countries that toppled their regimes.

As they did before the revolution, tens of thousands of men squander borrowed money to pay smugglers to take them to Europe aboard unsafe boats, called “broken vessels,” which often don’t leave and rarely succeed. Many have died trying. Many more have landed in Lampedusa, an Italian island and nearest European port, only to be turned around and sent home.

From his fruit cart, Sassi could launch a pomegranate to the spot where Bouazizi went up in flames.

“Inshallah, after the election, something will change,” he said.

God willing.

After decades of corruption, many chose a party guided by God: Ennahda (Arabic for renaissance), a once-banned moderate Islamist party.

The election, by most accounts, was a success. Nine out of 10 of the 4.5 million registered voters showed up, waiting in line for hours to cast ballots.

Ennahda promised it would lead a democracy and, to ease the fears of women and liberals, vowed human rights would be respected. It won 89 of the 217 seats in the constituent assembly. A nearly equal number of seats were split among four parties (some of which no doubt include members from Ben Ali’s old party) and the remaining seats were scattered among 23 lesser parties.

At a sidewalk café on Avenue Habib Bourguiba, beside a hotel where wounded Libyan rebels convalesce and celebrate the death of Moammar Gadhafi, Lina Ben Mhenni, 27, taps away on her MacBook Pro.

Ben Mhenni was one of the bloggers who spread the news of the uprisings and, as a result, was said to be on the short list for the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet even before the election, she was worried.

In an online essay for the Guardian, published on the eve of the election, Ben Mhenni wrote “Tunisia is once again a police state. Take a walk on the main streets of the capital and you will be shocked by the presence of the police. Police officers who apologized to Tunisians after 14 January are back to the old verbal and physical harassment.”

Young people see no changes, she wrote.

Ben Mhenni, a teacher at the University of Tunis, chose not to vote.

Too many members of Ben Ali’s old party have resurfaced, she explained. There must be a clean cut, she said, and that means none of the old regime should be playing politics.

As for the Ennahda victory, Ben Mhenni said she is “frightened” the rights of women will be tampered with.

“Of course, now I am worried about the future of Tunisia, what’s going to happen next,” she said.

“Hopefully the people who will draft our constitution will respect our freedoms, our human rights, and think of Tunisia and not think of something else. Think of the citizens who did the revolution, because I think that these people have given them this power. They have to respect them.”

Ennahda and two other main parties — Ettakatol and Congress for the Republic Party, both secular and centre-left — struck a deal last week to split key government postings and form a coalition.

Ennahda leader Rached Ghannouchi has pledged a model democracy that “reconciles Islam, modernity and democracy.” In a Muslim country where the wine flows with dinner and the beach beckons, there will not be a ban on bikinis and beer, the party has vowed.

To be sure, Ennahda is the farthest thing from the Ben Ali regime, which no doubt caused even secular voters to give the party a try.

“I don’t believe in God, I drink every night, I don’t pray, I don’t do Ramadan, but I voted Ennahda,” said Karim Manai, 30, who works at a telephone call shop in Ettadhamen, a gritty blue-collar town near Tunis.

“All around the world, we hear that Ennahda is not good, so we chose Ennahda to prove maybe they are wrong.”

Manai has had his job for four years, before that he was unemployed. He takes home less than $5 a day, which, after milk and cigarettes, leaves precious little.

Married? Children? Apartment?

“How can I get married? I don’t have money for that. I can’t afford children. We just hear about apartments. If I had one, there wouldn’t have been a revolution. I live with my parents.”

Manai said his family lives in two rooms about as “big as the toilets” in Ben Ali’s former residences.

As he spoke outside the call shop, other men gathered and shared similar stories of hopelessness.

Nabil Rezgui, 34, offered a tour of the open-air and indoor markets, where he once sold fruit from a stall. He gave it up when he could no longer afford to pay the rent.

He has just returned from his six unsuccessful attempts to leave Tunisia, spending close to 10,000 dinars — $7,150 Canadian — and owes money to friends and family.

“I saw death,” said Rezgui, referring to fellow Tunisians who died trying to leave, “and I never gave up. I will never give up.

“It’s very important to go to Italy and Europe because, here, I have never felt useful as a man. I need to have dignity to exist, and there’s no way to do that in Tunisia. I’m Tunisian but I really don’t feel Tunisian, because I’ve never had anything all my life.”

For now, he is unemployed and lives with his parents. One sister, who trained to be a lawyer, is also without a job. Another sister is in school. A brother moved away after finding work at a car parts factory.

“All that I want is to have a job, even as a gardener,” said Rezgui. “I just want to work, be a citizen. I am tired.”

In Sidi Hassine, a poor neighbourhood near Tunis, at a crowded café filled with men who drink tea and smoke cigarettes, Ali Ben Khalifa and Tawfik Lamiri tell their stories, two more who have tried to leave.

Khalifa, 25, is an unemployed carpenter who shares a bedroom with four brothers in his parents’ home. He was arrested by Tunisian police during one attempt and fled when another try went awry.

“Maybe if things really changed here, I would change my mind,” said Khalifa. “Otherwise, I will try again.”

Lamiri, 40, started trying to leave in 2002 and in some years made as many as three attempts. “It was hard for me because I was in the same situation as many Tunisians. I finished school and then was out on the streets with no job.”

He tried many times by “broken vessels” but his most successful attempt was by air. He booked a trip to Syria, via Italy, and tried to walk out from the airport in Rome. Six hours and a strip search later, he was put on a plane back to Tunisia.

“I improved the quality of my travelling,” said Lamiri, smiling.

Why, with a revolution, do men continue to leave?

“You know how men are,” said Lamiri. “They get used to doing this thing if nothing is good around them. They have lost a lot and have nothing to lose. They don’t have hope or optimism because there was no hope before. They wasted a lot of time, so, they don’t want to waste any more.”

Last year, Lamiri, who paints houses but has little work, got married. “I have a good feeling that things will be better, but I can’t see far,” he said. “God willing, if I have money, I will stay.”

In Tunis, we returned to three sisters who live with their children on a rooftop, in squalid conditions, to see if their situation had changed since we first met them in February. There was still no running water and no word on better housing. They were still, said Latifa Atti, one of the sisters, “living in misery.”

But there was news. Atti’s oldest son, Helmi Zakraoui, 17, had just tried to leave Tunisia.

Zakraoui emerged from a doorless laundry room that is his bedroom and rubbed sleep from his eyes as the younger children played around him. He talked of a better life in Italy or France. He said he has seen on TV many Tunisians who have left for Europe.

“I will do the same thing,” he said. “I would like to work and study and to work at anything. The most important thing is work. I don’t care what.”

What he was too shy to say is that he had already tried to leave. In fact, his mother explained, he had just come home after his first attempt ended badly. He spent two nights in a safe house in Tunisia without food or water and fled after hearing that someone had died.

“When he left, he was really crying. He didn’t want to go but he felt he had no choice,” said his mother. “Thank God someone was killed and it wasn’t him. I’ve given 17 years of my life to raise him and I don’t want to lose him this way.”

Back in Sidi Bouzid , two underworked notaries public — dressed nonetheless in suits and ties — held court on a sidewalk and discussed the state of things in this town, where unemployment rates are much higher than the national numbers.

“The people who made this revolution are very hard workers,” said Ahmadi Lamine, 59. “This revolution came of misery. We lost our dignity, and now nothing has changed. We still have the same administration, we still have the same corruption. Ben Ali left and all the rest is the same.”

Mohamed Bouazizi’s family has also left town. The police woman who questioned Bouazizi and was alleged to have slapped him was arrested, jailed and later freed after Bouazizi’s mother dropped a complaint, saying she sought reconciliation, not retribution. The police woman, who denied she slapped Bouazizi, has also left town.

Food prices are higher than before. There have been no new jobs. Political leaders don’t visit.

Hajlaoui Nebil, young and single, said he drives a cab but makes no money. The work is about keeping a piece of his dignity, he said.

“We are very kind, nice gentle people but the government never paid attention to us,” said Nebil, who had a message for the new government. “Have just one look at Sidi Bouzid and my people. The most important thing is employment. We need to work. We want to work. We ask the international businesses to come here. We are rich in human resources. Give us jobs, and you’ll see.”

One thing that has changed is that Sidi Bouzid is on the map, and any government that ignores conditions here does so at its own peril.

But some patience is required, said Issa Jabli and Hanane Rhimi, both 31. The two high school teachers, who are married and have a 4-month-old son, are optimistic but say their young students need to pursue their studies knowing there is an end goal.

“We have here in Tunisia a lot of people who have degrees and studies but they have no value anymore,” said Rhimi. “They used to study with no goal, and that has to change.”

Despite the economic challenges, no one is going hungry in Tunisia, said Jabli, who served as an election observer and was “very, very proud. We had an honest and very successful voting day.

“Our main problem was about freedom and, thank God, we got it.”

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