The Middle Eastern revolution seen across headlines started as a small fight over apples in the small and impoverished town of Sidi Bouzid Tunisia. The 2010 declared rate of unemployment in Tunisia was 14 percent but that of Sidi Bouzid was closer to 30 percent. Until Jan. 14 Tunisia was also largely considered a police state run by the President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. A month before President Ali thought it best to flee his country a struggling fruit vendor in Sidi Bouzid was fighting to keep his produce from being confiscated. Mohamed Bouazizi26 was going through a seemingly routine scuffle with municipal police. The legality of selling fruit on the street is ambiguous to most everyone in Sidi Bouzid and police routinely threaten to end vendors’ operations unless they pay a bribe. The shop in question was of particular importance to Bouazizi as it was the sole income of his family of eight. As he struggled in the town square to get his produce back from the threatening officer two other officers beat him and then confiscated his weighing scale. The humiliated Bouazizi attempted twice to gain an audience with officials and retrieve his property only to be denied and further beaten. Desolate and inconsolable the vendor left the square only to return with two buckets of paint thinner and set himself on fire.
The symbol Bouazizi made of himself drew first his fellow vendors his family and his friends to the town center out of rage and despair. They threw their coins at the gate of the municipal office shouting “Here is your bribe The New York Times reported. Over the next few days men and women from all over the town joined the protests. Within a month Bouazizi’s name was being chanted in a revolution that would spread throughout the country, causing the president to flee and sparking political unrest throughout the Middle East. Any thought that the movement would be contained within a country’s borders was dismissed when last Friday an uprising in Egypt forced President Hosni Mubarak out of power.
Currently, the movement has spread to Iran, Yemen, Bahrain, Algeria and Jordan. The Economist recently published a Shoe-Thrower’s Index, which weights the risk of a political uprising in any given country based largely on the percentage of the population under 25 and the number of years government has been in power. In Tunisia those figures are around 40 percent and 23 years. In Egypt, over 50 percent and 30 years. Implicit in these numbers is the fact that a large share of these populations has spent their entire lives under the rule of one autocrat. In some cases, this means a life of dealing with a corrupt police force, censorship laws and restricted civil rights. But Washinton, D.C., Professor Edmund Ghareeb is quick to point out that these uprisings are not led by one demographic. In the instance of Tunisia he claimed, Professionals’ Unions the General Labor Union women and students all combined to overthrow the government in what can truly be said to be a popular revolution.” The common factor among these groups was their access to social media which allowed them to “organize themselves to a higher degree than the regimes they fought.”
Wikileaks also played a major role in providing documented evidence of global suspicion regarding the populace’s sovereignty over Egypt’s and Tunisia’s political systems. Tunisian authorities published that Ben Ali won his last election with a popular vote of 90 percent and a U.S. Embassy cable released in December revealed that Hosni Mubarak was likely to yet again fix his next election. Mubarak also instituted “emergency law” which has allowed the police to impose to a greater extent on the privacy of Egyptian citizens the government to censor news and other media not to mention the authority to shut down the internet. Unchecked oppression allowed those who were attached to the government to prey on the livelihood of private citizens in a time where rising food prices and high unemployment already made life hard. Nowhere was this more perfectly displayed than in the neglect and offense of a few municipal officials towards a poor fruit vendor which resulted in his self-immolation. Social media made it possible for entire networks spread over thousands of miles to capitalize on this sensation and propel a revolution throughout the Middle East.