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

foreign policy • revolution in the arab world • revolution makers
ernments took.
“This decade of underachievement by educated Tunisians, especially,
created a humiliated” generation—now no longer in their first youth, but in
their disillusioned late 20s and early 30s, Yousef pointed out.
The grievances of the young—and now not-so-young—have been building
for years. In the Libyan capital, Tripoli, I met a 31-year-old man, Abdel
Basat al-Asady, who daydreamed about marriage with the eagerness
of a teenage consumer of Brides magazine. It was a pipe dream for Asady,
though. With jobs and housing as short in Libya as elsewhere, he had no
prospect of launching his adult life.
He took me to his parents’ house, where he and his five grown brothers
and sisters, all unemployed or underemployed, pulled from their closets the
plastic-and-cardboard wrapped wedding clothes they had already bought
in hope of the day each could begin a family. Wedding expenses in the Middle
East, with their feasts, gifts, and mandated dowries, run about two and
a half times a family’s annual income. Absent some unlooked-for boon, no
one in Asady’s family would be wearing their wedding clothes for years.
In Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen—everywhere in the Middle East and North Africa
where I went the subject came up—people complained of the corruption
that crushes even their last hopes. Getting a job takes wasta—connections—to
a country’s ruling party, tribal leader, or a powerful businessman.
In all those countries, frustrated job-seekers I’ve talked to say, it takes
money, too.
“I would bribe, but I don’t know anyone high up enough to bribe,”
Dhouibi said.
“I don’t have money, but if we just got the chance, I would get the money,
to get him a job,” Dhouibi’s kerchiefed mother said, serving me fruit juice
in her home of stucco-covered concrete blocks, with a weathered red geranium
pushing out of the packed-dirt courtyard outside.
Bouazizi himself, the oldest of six children, never complained of his lot in
life, Bouazizi’s mother, Manoubia, told me.
Bouazizi was 3 when neighbors carried into the house the body of his
father, dead of heart troubles on the job as a low-paid laborer in neighboring
Libya. Mohamed Bouazizi was 12 when he started working part time,
studying by school at day and working for fruit vendors by night. He was
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