Revolution in the Arab World - Observation of a lost soul Blog

foreign policy • revolution in the arab world • revolution makers
ily connections and better job prospects, hung back. But Dhouibi threw
himself into the swelling protest movement. On the second day of the demonstrations,
he pushed to the front of the crowd and helped push a police
car out into the street. He helped set it ablaze.
“I felt frightened of the government,” Dhouibi told me. “But I felt happy.
Very happy.”
“No to youth unemployment,” graffiti newly painted on a statue in the
town’s square says. “No to poverty.”
Dhouibi has gone back to protest every day since then. He turns up
outside the gates of the local union hall, talking to other young men until
the day’s march takes shape. Even after protests built around the country,
reached Tunis, and forced Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, Tunisia’s president of
23 years, to flee the country, Tunisians have kept up the demonstrations to
demand the resignations of the last ministers of a ruling party that brought
economic wealth and political power for the elite, but few jobs or rights for
the middle class and poor.
Of the 1,400 classmates who went to school with Bouazizi, perhaps 4 or
5 percent have found jobs in the years since, estimated Tarek Hajlaoui, an
economics teacher who taught Bouazizi.
“Of course, officially, I encourage my students about the advantages
of education, encourage them to go on to university for the sake of their
futures,” Hajlaoui told me, when I spoke with him at a gas station’s coffee
counter. “But in reality…”
Some political scientists warn of the dark side of the “youth bulge.” A
study by Population Action International asserted that 80 percent of the
world’s conflicts between 1970 and 1999 started in countries where 60 percent
of the population was under 30. (Of course, other factors—such as the
Cold War—also played a role.)
Political scientists and development economists like Tarik Yousef, founding
dean of the Dubai School of Government, saw the Middle East and
North African youth bulge coming for years. They urged Arab leaders to
harness the skilled, eager, and educated labor force flooding on to the market.
The youth bulge could have been “a precondition for problems, or a
precondition for prosperity,” Yousef told me.
The high unemployment rate today suggests the course the region’s gov-
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