Young people fan the flame of revolution in Tunisia

The human rights activist Hamza Nasri, 27, tries to digest these days one of the hardest lessons for an activist.

On Thursday he left the Buchucha detention center, in the capital Tunis, after spending three nights in detention, between January 18 and 21.

On the morning of Friday, January 22, he was already in his small office of the Tunisian League for the Defense of Human Rights, located in an old building.

Nasri is arguably one of 1,200 youths, most between the ages of 15 and 25, who have been detained since January 14, after dozens of nightly clashes broke out across the country between police and youth.

But Hamza Nasri is not one of them.

He feels privileged, because he has managed to get out of jail before many of his cellmates.

Some of these young people looted shops and stoned the police.

Many others just protested and asked for "dignity."

"They detained me because I tried to help a fellow detained in a demonstration," says Nasri.

“I was not attacked by the police.

But suddenly, in the middle of the pandemic, they put me in a cell five times the size of this office, where we were 84 people, without any mask.

We slept like in sardine cans, without mattresses or blankets.

Most of the detainees were kids from the most deprived neighborhoods.

I was able to talk to them during those three days.

And many do not even know the name of the head of government or of any minister.

I told them that they had the right to a lawyer and they told me that this only works for people like me, not for them ”.

Reality, according to Nasri, seems to have proved his cellmates right.

“I was able to leave after three nights thanks to all the calls my association has made to the Ministry of the Interior.

But they are still incarcerated.

And many of them had even less reason than I to be in prison.

I have met a 15-year-old boy there who was arrested for crossing a street.

Two minors told me that the police threatened to rape them.

They even lowered their pants.

They have detained many minors to scare them and thus expose the alleged leaders of the riots.

But there were no leaders.

That Buchucha detention center was famous for its cruelty during the dictatorship.

And nothing has changed in ten years ”.

“One of the detainees”, continues Nasri, “who was in his 30s and must have been psychologically ill, tried to commit suicide with a rope that had been made from a blanket.

The rope broke and he fell on me.

I called the police and instead of giving him health care they kept him up all night, handcuffed against a door, to prevent him from committing suicide.

Nasri feels guilty about being free.

“All those kids who are still in detention are anti-establishment.

And for them the system is not only the government and the authorities.

So are the opposition, trade unions and civil society, of which I am a part.

I have given you the emergency number of the association and my Facebook address.

In La Liga we take turns so that there is a person on duty these days 24 hours a day.

But these young people have also lost confidence in us.

"I was the only one in that cell who was wearing shoes," Nasri continues.

“I asked them why almost all of them were wearing slippers and they told me that they only wear their shoes when they leave their neighborhood, when they have to go to work or to do some paperwork in a local state.

I spoke to them about their rights, about the possibility they have to report abuse.

And they looked at me in disbelief.

I feel like the revolution, society in general, has failed those kids. "

The clashes began on January 14, the most marked date in the minds of the 11.5 million Tunisians.

January 14, 2011 was the day the people managed to expel the dictator Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, who after 23 years of robbery and despotism fled on a plane to Saudi Arabia where he died in 2019, aged 83.

Again, the humiliation

The trigger for the revolution was the street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi, who blew himself up on December 17, 2011 when several agents took away his mobile cart and a police officer slapped him.

Finally, Bouazizi died in hospital on January 5 of that year.

The feeling of humiliation and powerlessness in the face of the abuse of the powerful is known in Arab countries as the

hogra

(pronounced

jogra

).

And the word

hogra

once again inflamed social networks on January 14, when a municipal policeman beat a shepherd in the city of Siliana, a two-and-a-half hour drive northwest from Tunis.

The shepherd had just passed with his sheep in front of the City Hall building.

This same January 14, the protests began in Siliana.

And then they exploded in the Ettadhamen neighborhood, the most deprived in Tunisia.

From there they spread to the rest of the country.

Mahdi Jlassi, president of the National Union of Tunisian Journalists, 34, points out that among the young protesters there is a mixture of everything: “There are those without training, ultra football fans, high school students… And young people from political parties manifested as well.

But they have done it three or four days after the others.

They are political leaders, but they are a minority, they do not have the strength of the others.

Because the others are free, aggressive and radical ”.

Osama is one of those young people who participated in two protests in his neighborhood, Douar Hicher, next to Ettadhamen.

The vast majority of the inhabitants of these neighborhoods walk without a mask, despite the fact that the pandemic is ravaging the country and there is a curfew since eight in the afternoon.

Osama wears slippers, like all his friends.

“I was nine years old in 2011. Many of those young people who made the revolution are now policemen.

The Ministry of the Interior hired them and they have been repressing us these days ”.

He tells that there are three unemployed in his family;

that he spends the day in a cafe or looking for work, that in the neighborhood there is hardly any space to practice sports or to have fun, that the culture center closes on weekends, that the only roads are drugs and crime.

“Nothing will change if we don't protest.

The protests are legitimate.

These politicians have betrayed the revolution, they are corrupt and they have to go.

And the first to use violence are the police ”.

Humanitarian activists criticize the fact that the government only knows how to tackle this problem in a police, repressive way.

The president of the journalists' union asks himself “Who speaks on behalf of these marginalized young people?

Nobody.

They were ten years old when the revolution started.

They have been educated in the streets, in the stands of the stadiums.

His songs are not against the government, but against the regime, against the system.

They ask for hope to live.

It is not a big deal, but it is difficult to obtain ”.

Semi Aydhi is a 27-year-old unemployed from the Ettadhamen neighborhood.

"You have to dissolve the entire Parliament, you have to change the entire system," he proposes.

“Those political parties do not serve us.

Almost all my friends have already emigrated to Europe, here we have nothing to do ”.

In Spain, 700 Tunisians have been blocked in Melilla since 2019, which the Spanish Government tries to repatriate, although it does not finish obtaining the approval of the Tunisian authorities.

Mohamed Damid is a 36-year-old man who has been unemployed for 20 years, lives at the entrance to the Ettadhamen neighborhood and spends most of his life sitting in a cafe, like so many other unemployed.

"The Tunisian media when they report on the protests only talk about vandalism," he complains.

“They only give the version of the State.

But the reality is that the State only remembers them before the elections, every five years ”.

His friend Abdel Kader, 42, adds: “Parliament is only trying to solve its own problems, not the people's.

The solution can only come with transparency and an end to corruption ”.

Alaa Talbi, president of the NGO Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights, 41, assured this Friday that these protests have not surprised him at all, that all the ingredients were there: “Football matches are played in Tunisia at door closed since 2018 due to violence.

In the previous months there have already been harsh repressions against demonstrations by unemployed journalists or young graduates.

Last year, 12,800 irregular migrants left for Europe, especially Italy.

Among them were two thousand unaccompanied minors.

Every year, 100,000 young people drop out of school, in a country where education is compulsory until the age of 16 ”.

"They are telling us that they exist too"

“The result of all this”, Talbi concludes, “is that we have a generation that is saying that they exist too.

They do not immolate themselves, but they protest in their own way.

It's our fault if they don't believe in anything.

The official discourse towards these young people is one of contempt.

Even if the International Monetary Fund lent us all the money in the world, this situation would not be fixed.

Because first you have to end corruption and create public policy projects, which do not exist.

The activist says that what the state has done in recent years is to create “middle class” spaces within the most marginal neighborhoods.

“They are spaces with supermarkets, with banks, with better stores….

They are like islands of well-being within poor places.

And it is those spaces that have been attacked.

Something similar to what happened in the suburbs of Paris in the eighties has happened when young people attacked municipal libraries, because they were the symbol of a power that discriminated against them ”.

This Saturday, at one in the afternoon, a demonstration in support of the detainees was held in the center of the country's capital.

More than a thousand protesters attended, between men and women, most of them young left-wing, committed, belonging to different associations and wearing shoes, not slippers.

They chanted: "Work, freedom and dignity", the same slogan that was heard in 2011. And also: "the people are going to overthrow the regime."

Osama and his friends did not attend.

Neither could one of the best-known faces of the revolution attend.

It is about 40-year-old actress Rim Hamrouni.

She was the first to stand on January 14, 2011 at the headquarters of the Ministry of the Interior, together with the writer Jalloul Azzouna and the militant Radia Nasraoui, to demand the release of her two detained militant husbands.

The image of the three of them in front of the Interior gates has gone down in Tunisian history.

These three were later joined by thousands of Tunisians until they threw out the dictator that afternoon.

Hamrouni was on a shoot this Saturday.

But over the phone he said: “Thanks to the freedoms achieved by the revolution, the people can now protest against the government.

Despite the regression we are suffering, I continue to trust the success of the revolution ”.

Hamrouni says the youth protests are legitimate.

“The solution,” he proposes, “is for the State to listen to the people.

And, above all, the young people ”.

Nostalgia for the dictatorship

The head of state in Tunisia is Kais Said, a 62-year-old professor of Constitutional Law and conservative leaning, who swept the only elections in which he has participated, the presidential elections of 2019. He did it without a professional team of advisers, without the support of the media.

But he had great assets: he is austere, he has not been a member of any political party, he could not be accused of being corrupt.

And, above all, he focused his message on young people.

Almost 90% of those under 35 years of age voted for him.

Although the powers of the president in the 2014 Constitution are limited above all to the policy of Security and Foreign Affairs, Said promised to promote a revolution within the revolution and regain the confidence of the governed.

The jurist unleashed an illusion that had not been seen since the Arab Spring.

But in a year and a few months all that hope has vanished.

Nine men have passed through the head of government of Tunisia since 2011. The Parliament, of 217 deputies, is highly fragmented and the majority party, the Islamists of Ennahda, only has 52 votes.

The current head of government, the ninth since the revolution, is Hichem Mechichi, a 47-year-old politician, without political affiliation, who has been in office since July.

His predecessor, Elies Fajfaj, another technocrat, resigned after being accused of corruption, when he had only been in office for five months and while he stood out precisely for fighting corruption.

Mechichi is at the head of a government made up of some thirty technocrats supported by the three major parties.

On January 16, Mechichi dismissed eleven of his ministers and appointed eleven others, all men.

Parliament must endorse their appointments in the coming days.

In the ten years of revolution, the country has gained freedoms and civil society has lost its fear of expressing itself.

But unemployment stands at 16% and reaches 36% among young people.

Foreign debt is close to 100%, when in 2010 it stood at 39%.

The public debt reached 43% of GDP at the beginning of the revolution and now it reaches 89%.

The Tunisian dinar has depreciated by 50% against major foreign currencies.

Tunisians have noticed the loss of purchasing power.

The country avoids bankruptcy thanks to credits from the International Monetary Fund, which in turn demands cuts in public spending.

The pandemic has only aggravated the situation in a country where tourism contributes 8% of GDP.

Tunisia, with only 11.5 million inhabitants, exceeds 6,000 deaths from Covid-19, well above the 2,856 deaths that Algeria assumed on Friday (with 42 million inhabitants) and about 8,105 in Morocco (35 million) .

The 46-year-old deputy Abir Musi, belonging to the Free Desturian Party (PDL), nostalgic for the Ben Ali dictatorship, only obtained 4% of the votes in the 2019 presidential elections.

But now his party is at the top of the polls, with 40% voting intention, compared to 18% of the Islamists in Ennahda.