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

foreign policy • revolution in the arab world • Tunisia
cized his rule. A cautious journalism professor who had declined to meet
me in 1999, explaining that such a meeting would bring police interrogation,
began receiving me openly and attending the little gatherings organized
by the beleaguered human rights community.
This outer circle also included families of political prisoners. In the mid-
1990s, these families had hung up on me in fear, but five years later they
decided they had nothing more to lose.
So, too, did some former political prisoners, who had concluded that remaining
silent got them nowhere because the state’s policy was not to rehabilitate
but rather to crush them, through harassment, surveillance, and
effective bans on employment and travel.
Long before street-cart vendor Mohamed Bouazizi immolated himself
on Dec. 17 in the town of Sidi Bouzid, setting off weeks of protests that led
to Ben Ali’s ouster, more than one former political prisoner had sat down
in public holding a sign that (ironically) offered to sell his children because
the government had kept him from working to support his family. One, Slaheddine
Aloui, an agricultural engineer from Jendouba, left prison in 2004
after serving 14 years on political charges, only to face a 16-year term of
administrative restrictions that crippled his chance to resume a normal life.
Joining this outer circle was the occasional member of the business elite
who had discovered that it wasn’t only dissidents who could fall victim to
the regime’s strong-arm tactics. Mohamed Bouebdelli, the founder of a
group of respected private schools in Tunis, is a dapper entrepreneur who
had no interest in politics—until presidential cronies demanded special
treatment for their children, which he refused to give. Facing their reprisals,
Bouebdelli publicly criticized the regime’s strong-arm tactics—only to have
a court seize, on spurious grounds, a private university he had built and operated.
Bouebdelli, who had educated many of the country’s elite and their
children, was thus transformed overnight into an impassioned dissident.
But beyond this somewhat widening circle there still seemed to be a politically
neutered majority of Tunisians who lived in relative comfort—and
in keen awareness of the power of the secret police and of the ruling-party
apparatus that dispensed or withheld services and favors. Tunisians had always
told me that their country was ripe for democracy because its people
are moderate, tolerant, educated, and middle class. This self-image explains
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