People Power Series
Roger Cohen
The New York Times
January 24, 2011
SIDI BOUZID, TUNISIA — This is where an Arab revolution began, in a hardscrabble stretch of nowhere…
The spark was an altercation on Dec. 17, 2010. It involved a young fruit-and-vegetable peddler named Mohamed Bouazizi and a policewoman much older than him called Faida Hamdy. What exactly transpired between them — who slapped or spat at whom, which insults flew — has already entered the realm of revolutionary myth.
Soon after — this at least is undisputed — Bouazizi set himself on fire in front of the modest governor’s building where protesters now gather around portraits of the martyr. Bouazizi would live another 18 days. By then, an Arab dictatorship with a 53-year pedigree was shuddering. Within another 10 days, it had fallen in perhaps the world’s first revolution without a leader.
Or rather, its leader was far away: Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. Its vehicle was the youth of Tunisia, able to use Facebook for instant communication and so cyber-inspire their parents.
Anders Colding-Jorgensen, a Danish psychologist, conducted an experiment in 2009 in which he implied that Copenhagen’s Stork Fountain was about to be demolished and started a Facebook group to save it. The threat was fictitious but the group soon had two new members joining every minute.
The Tunisian revolution was that experiment on steroids. Castro spent years preparing revolution in the Cuban interior, the Sierra Maestra; Facebook propelled insurrection from the interior to the Tunisian capital in 28 days.
How could a spat over pears in Nowhereville turn into a national uprising? No Tunisian newspaper or TV network covered it. The West was busy with Christmas. Tunisia was the Arab world’s Luxembourg: Nothing ever happened. Some poor kid’s self-immolation could never break a wall of silence. Or so it seemed.
That day, Dec. 17, a dozen members of Bouazizi’s enraged family gathered outside the governor’s building. They shook the gates and demanded that the governor see them.
“Our family can accept anything but not humiliation,” Samia Bouazizi, the dead man’s sister, told me, sitting under a bare light bulb in a small house near a trough where sheep were feeding.
Humiliation is an important word in this story. It was the “hogra,” or contempt, of the dictator’s kleptocracy that would cyber-galvanize an Arab people.
The protests soon swelled. Participants uploaded cellphone images onto Facebook pages.
“My daughter, Ons, who’s 16, started showing me what was going on,” said Hichem Saad, a Tunis-based entrepreneur.
Al-Jazeera, the Arab TV network, was alerted through Facebook. Along the way, Bouazizi, who did not even have a high-school diploma, cyber-morphed into a frustrated university graduate: that resonated in a nation where many graduates are jobless. This myth went round the world. Information moving this fast is inspired, rather than bound, by facts.
When Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, the now ousted dictator, addressed the nation, as he would three times, Facebook-ferried fury was the response. Ben Ali might have 1.5 million members in his puppet party; he soon faced two million Facebook users.
[…]“He hadn’t understood a thing,” Ben Khamsa told me. “This was about dignity, not bread. His political autism was terminal. Everyone was live-commenting the speech on Facebook.”
The next night, Ben Ali fled after 23 years in power, short of his predecessor’s 30 years. It’s said the average age of a Tunisian is one dictator and a half. That nightmare is over.
Now the new youth minister, a 33-year-old former dissident blogger, tweets from cabinet meetings. Everyone is talking where everyone was silent. “Every Arab nation is waiting for its Bouazizi,” his sister told me. […]
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