Making Herself Heard, Before and After Tunisia’s Uprising

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/08/world/africa/tunisia-trials-of-spring.html

Version 0 of 1.

TUNIS — In December 2010 a fruit-vendor in Tunisia, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself alight in a protest against the police who stopped him from setting up his stall and earning a daily wage. His act of self-immolation — he died three weeks later — triggered a popular uprising around the country, where thousands of Tunisians seized on Mr. Bouazizi’s singular act and took to the streets to stand against state oppression and government corruption.

Within weeks, the dictator of 23 years, President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, and his family, fled the country and the Arab Spring movement had spread to challenge authoritarian governments across the Middle East.

Tunisians had lived for 50 years under dictatorship since gaining independence from France in 1955. This small North African country of 11 million inhabitants led the Arab world in some ways, such as universal education and women’s rights, but it remained an unequal society under an authoritarian system that suppressed all political opposition and censored the media.

Development was uneven. An elite based in the coastal cities and the north of the country prospered, but the inland and southern regions suffered neglect and poverty. Protests and riots broke out sporadically, in particular in 2008 around the phosphate mining basin at Gafsa, when workers protested a lack of jobs and corruption in distribution of opportunities. The protests, which are often seen as a forerunner of the 2011 uprising, were brutally suppressed and opposition activists and trade unionists were imprisoned and tortured.

President Ben Ali had seized power in a bloodless coup in 1987, from the ailing first president, Habib Bourguiba. Under Mr. Ben Ali’s rule, Tunisia became a pervasive police state and increasingly corrupt. The president’s family, and especially his wife, Leïla Trabelsi, and her relatives, acquired great wealth. Political opponents, leftists and Islamists were persecuted and imprisoned and the poorest regions of the country became increasingly marginalized.