The Power of One in North Africa
Recent events in the North African country of Tunisia have become a harbinger of things to come when governments turn a deaf ear to the plight of its long-suffering people. What began as a young man’s rejection of yet another really bad day on 17 December spiralled into a one-man protest that led to 26-year-old Mohammed Bouazizi setting himself ablaze in front of the Governor’s office and culminated in disaster for a Dictator’s regime.
Losing his father at the age of three, Mohammed Bouazizi worked from an early age to support his mother and sister. Unable to find work, Bouazizi sold fruits and vegetables from a cart in his rural town of Sidi Bouzid. However, he frequently got in trouble with government officials who would confiscate the wares of street vendors, which would be released if the appropriate bribe was paid to officials who claimed that a permit was required for street vending. Hamdi Lazhar, who is head of the State Office for SME entrepreneurs and employment clarified that permits are not needed to sell from a cart. Mohammed had taken a loan for his business and could not afford to pay the bribe. Stinging from the public humiliation of the female official who confiscated his weighing scales after spitting in his face and tossing aside his goods, Bouazizi went to the Municipal Office in protest but got no hearing. Depressed and frustrated, Bouazizi left a message on his Facebook page, bought two bottles of paint thinner and set himself ablaze in front of the Governor’s office. The Facebook message originally written in Arabic is translated below:
I’m travelling, mother. Forgive me. Reproach and blame is not going to be helpful. I’m lost and it’s out of my hands. Forgive me if I didn’t do as you told me and disobeyed you. Blame the era in which we live, Don’t blame me. I am now going and I will not be coming back. Notice I haven’t cried and no tears have fallen from my eyes. There is no more room for reproach or blame in the age of treachery in the People’s land. I’m not feeling normal and not in my right state. I’m travelling and I ask who leads the travel to forget.
—Mohamed Bouazizi (Source: Wikipedia)
Although he did not live to see it, Bouazizi‘s violent one-man protest sparked off a chain of events that has led to the toppling of the 23-year-old dictatorship of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Ben Ali fled Tunisia for an unknown destination on 14 January. Bouazizi’s death on the 4th of January from burn wounds led to demonstrations in Jordan, Egypt, Sudan, Oman, Libya and Yemen. Solidarity protests went as far as Canada and continue in Mauritania, Egypt and Algeria, where a 27-year-old Algerian youth Muhsin Butarfif, set fire on himself to protest his unemployment. Three Egyptian men have also set themselves ablaze, one of them for his inability to get subsidized bread. In the wake of the global economic meltdown, Egypt has been implementing austerity measures that lowered subsidies for staple foods and energy, depriving millions of bread and other food items. Following the Tunisia protests, the Damascus-based Syrian government of President Bashar Al-Assad decided to reverse some of its austerity measures and increase food subsidies to bring down prices. Jordan has also followed the Syrian example.
In North Africa, although the poor have a little respite, some are much worse off than others. Poor unemployed rural black populations are enslaved by Arab Muslims – the bidanes, (meaning: white-skinned) who own black slaves, the haratines. The bidanes are descendants of the Sanhaja Berbers and Beni Hassan Arab tribes who emigrated to northwest Africa and present-day Western Sahara and Mauritania during the Middle Ages. Used as sex slaves and for cheap labour, Haratines are forced to become Muslims, take Arabic names and forbidden to speak their native tongue. They are taught that this social hierarchy is the will of Allah and that if they do not obey their masters, they will not go to paradise. In Sudan, captives in the civil war are often enslaved and sold for under $100. Female prisoners are taken as sex slaves, their Muslim captors claiming that Islam grants them permission to do so. In October 2010, the world was shocked by the news that Saud Abdulaziz Bin Nasir Al Saud, grandson of the king of Saudi Arabia raped and beat his male sex slave to death in an exclusive London hotel. Although charged to court in the UK, nothing more has been heard as would have been the case if the attack had taken place in Saudi.
Back in Tunisia, initial speculations that the former strongman had fled to France was met with unequivocal statements from the French government that Ben Ali is not welcome in that country. Survived by his mother and sister, mourners at Bouazizi’s funeral chanted “Farewell, Mohamed, we will avenge you. We weep for you today, we will make those who caused your death weep.” At the Arab economic summit at the Red Sea in Egypt, head of the Arab League Amr Moussa told the delegates: “The Arab soul is broken by poverty, unemployment and general recession.” In Mauritania alone, an estimated 600,000 black Mauritanians remain essentially enslaved to Arab/Berber owners.
