SIDI BOUZID LETTER:EARLY EVENING'S crimson light moves across a dusty graveyard in central Tunisia, mirroring the red fruit of hundreds of prickly pear cactus plants that enclose this remote, silent outcrop.
A lone shepherd in robes pays no heed to the dead as he wanders past, even though the remains of a young man hailed as a martyr lie here beneath a new whitewashed tombstone – a martyr credited with striking the match that literally sparked the Arab Spring.
That the grave of Mohamed Bouazizi (26) is conspicuously bereft of visitors paying their respects may have something to do with the reluctance shown by locals to direct people here.
Located deep in the countryside outside Lessouda, some 8km north of the city of Sidi Bouzid, the cemetery is not easily found. Several requests for directions were met with a vague wave into the distance and advice to ask someone else.
The reason becomes apparent only later: facilitating a pilgrimage by outsiders and tourists would inevitably confer even greater heroic status upon the young street vendor who, global legend would have it, died of burns last January after setting himself alight 18 days previously in desperation and protest following a humiliating public slap from a policewoman as she confiscated his vegetable cart.
As visitors to this economically depressed region eventually realise, the people of Sidi Bouzid have heard enough talk of heroes and are wary of propagating a myth they say is unwarranted and downright inaccurate.
Certain facts are indisputable.
While he was not the first to defy Tunisia’s dictatorial regime and die as a result, Bouazizi’s protest and later death were undeniably a catalyst for a wave of anti-government demonstrations.
These led to the downfall first of the country’s dictator of 23 years, Zine El Abidine Bel Ali, then of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Libya’s Muammar Gadafy. It brought the people of other Arab nations including Bahrain, Syria, Yemen and Jordan on to the streets and into the history books.
However, crucial details of the internet-propagated legend of Bouazizi are at variance with the version recounted in his home city of 42,000 people. Even the nature of his death is disputed.
“I was a block away when it [Bouazizi’s self-immolation] happened and, when I came on the scene, people told me they had seen Bouazizi shouting on the street,” says Hichem Amri (31), an engineer and teacher at Sidi Bouzid’s technology institute.
“He had been drinking and he poured a few drops of kerosene from a bottle on to himself and then lit the lighter – but it was only supposed to be a threat, because he was so angry at the police and the authorities.
“When he went on fire, they said it was an accident – he held the lighter too close to the bottle. By all accounts it was not planned.”
The same story is repeated across the city and region.
“Everyone says it was an accident,” says hotel worker Fawzi Haythem. He, like many university graduates in Sidi Bouzid, took exception to the Bouazizi family’s description of their son and brother as a graduate whereas in fact he never passed his baccalauréat at the end of secondary school.
With so many genuine graduates facing a life of unemployment and hardship – 25 per cent of male graduates and 44 per cent of female graduates from the region are jobless and without prospects – the misnomer hits a raw nerve.
So, too, does the fact that Bouazizi’s mother accepted a compensation payment of 20,000 dinars (€10,000) from the very regime her son supposedly died fighting against. (The minimum monthly wage is about €120.)
After his death, the family moved from Sidi Bouzid to the chic coastal town of La Marsa outside the capital Tunis, leaving a strong sentiment that while the Bouazizis benefited unjustly from events, the people of Sidi Bouzid have once again been left behind.
“The saying here now is that the Trabelsis may be gone, but the Bouazizis have arrived,” says Fawzi. The name of Ben Ali’s wife, Leila Trabelsi, is synonymous with the corruption that permeated Tunisian society throughout his reign – she reportedly fled the country with 1.5 tonnes of the central bank’s gold.
Today in the centre of Sidi Bouzid, the local memorial to Bouazizi has been torn down, as has a sign that once indicated that the main Avenue du 7 Novembre (the date of Ben Ali’s own coup in 1987 against Habib Bourguiba) was to be renamed after him.
The only references to the revolution are to be found in graffiti scrawled on walls along the same avenue – but Bouazizi’s name is noticeably absent.
Instead, it announces only the date of his protest – December 17th, 2010, as opposed to January 14th, 2011, the day Ben Ali was ousted and that is cited by people of Tunis as the “real” date of the uprising.
Another controversial aspect of the Bouazizi legend relates to the now infamous slap that purportedly gave rise to his protest. On April 19th, the county court in Sidi Bouzid ruled that no such assault had taken place and in doing so cleared policewoman Fayda Hamdi, who had spent four months in prison – one of them on hunger strike – in a bid to have her case heard.
Even the activists who ran with the initial story and encouraged crowds on to the streets in protest against the regime now admit they used Hamdi as a scapegoat to serve their wider cause of ousting Ben Ali.
“The whole story was invented within an hour,” union militant Lamine al-Bouazizi (no relation of Mohamed) told French paper Libération in June. “We said he was a young unemployed graduate so as to move people . . . In order to get the uneducated people on to the streets, we invented Fayda Hamdi’s slap. This is a rural, traditional region and these kinds of things shock people.”
When Hamdi’s trial came up, the same crowds took to the streets in her defence, their main objective achieved.
The inclusion of Bouazizi on the list of five joint recipients of this year’s European Parliament Sakharov prize for freedom of thought has also proven contentious.
“People who have spent their entire lives struggling for justice are usually awarded this prize – for instance, this year two Syrians, Razan Zeitouneh [a lawyer] and [cartoonist] Ali Farzat,” says Belgium-based specialist in Islamic culture Matthias Biesemans, who visited the region during the recent elections.
“This to me is very understandable, but for Bouazizi to be given this honour is grotesque.”
Back at the cemetery, at some distance from Bouazizi’s grave, a low wall bears a line of graffiti in Arabic: “Mohamed from Libya was here”. It is the only sign that the world beyond this field has taken note of a young man’s actions, deliberate or not, and interpreted them in a way that has changed millions of lives.