Tunisia: Understanding Conflict 2012 - Johns Hopkins School of ...

undesirable organizations, stifle dissidence, and deny international access would have
required many fewer police officers. However, to allow human-rights and civil society
organizations to function, while impeding their operations, to condone social media
platforms while monitoring their contents, and to subtly silence unwelcome voices
required a massive exertion of human resources.
Although the security apparatus contributed positively to national employment, it
could hardly be considered gainful to the larger economy, as it constricted the activities
of the general population and occupied national resources without providing any valuable
service or contribution to society. Additionally, the surplus employment of personnel
meant inadequate salaries for police officers and thus contributed to their corruption.
On a fundamental level, the problem with the security apparatus, as with Ben Ali,
was its lack of legitimacy. Although its tactics were severe and in some cases brutal, they
were certainly not internationally unique; one could point to numerous examples of
regimes employing similar means elsewhere in the world yet avoiding collapse or
overthrow. The reason, then, that the internal security forces were so universally despised
had to do with their lack of coherence to any larger publicly accepted narrative; they
were, in the case of the political police, solely for the preservation of Ben Ali’s position
in power. The administrative police, on the other hand, seemed to be more concerned,
justifiably or not, with personal enrichment than contributing in any positive way to
public safety. An exacerbating factor was the level of civil development Tunisia had
attained; it is conceivable that such flagrant repression would have encountered less
resistance in a less developed, less educated population.
Role of Police in the Uprising
The events leading up to 14 January 2011 will already be familiar to readers. However, it
is worth highlighting the role of the police in igniting the upheaval that followed
Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation. Bouazizi, a young fruit vendor in Sidi Bouzid,
was publicly assaulted by administrative police officers on 16 December 2010, ostensibly
for his lack of a vendors license. In fact, no such license is required in Tunisia, and the
necessity of the license was presumably the pretense under which the police justified
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