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A reporter from the German magazine der Spiegel traveled to the town in Tunisia where the Arab revolt started in December.
She kneels at her son’s grave in the dust of the Tunisian steppes, a black hijab framing her deeply wrinkled face, as she rocks back and forth and speaks loudly to herself.
“God have mercy on your soul, and may your blood not have been shed in vain.” A woman walks up to her and says: “You gave us a son who liberated us all.”
It is a simple grave marked by a gray block of cement on the edge of a family cemetery. The grave points toward Mecca, and a Tunisian flag next to it is fluttering in the wind. Her husband, gaunt and silent, has mixed a batch of cement to attach a marble plaque to the grave. The inscription reads: “The martyr Mohamed Bouazizi, born on March 29, 1984, died on January 4, 2011.”
When Bouazizi, a Tunisian fruit seller, set himself on fire, he inflamed the entire Arab world. Bouazizi’s mother and her husband have come to install a headstone and paint the grave white, as is customarily done after the 40th day after death. They are three weeks late. A lot has been going on in recent weeks.
A television crew drove the parents to the gravesite, she almost never leaves her home without a camera following her. As each day passes, Bouazizi’s mother becomes less and less like a real person. She seems to be in the process of transforming herself into a monument of grief, the mother of a holy figure.
An Icon of Freedom
Her son’s face appears on banners throughout the country, as an icon of freedom and a symbol of the origin of the revolution that brought down the Tunisian dictator, his Egyptian counterpart, and triggered uprisings in Algeria, Yemen, Bahrain, Jordan and Libya.
Anyone who follows Manoubia Bouazizi, the mother of the dead fruit seller, is hoping for answers to questions that all the images of street battles and cheering revolutionaries cannot provide. Why did it all begin in a dusty town in Tunisia? And how does a revolution affect the people in the place where it began? How does it change their lives? What does a democracy in its infancy look like?
Mohamed Bouazizi lived in Sidi Bouzid, a small city of 40,000 people about 200 kilometers (125 miles) south of the capital Tunis in the highland steppes. Its residents, who complain that Sidi Bouzid doesn’t even appear on the television weather report map, feel forgotten by their country and the rest of the world. …
… The fact that they are part of the same family, Mohamed, the icon of the revolution, and Ridha, the handicapped fruit seller, doesn’t make his life any easier. Sometimes, when Ridha is standing behind his cart, the other vendors come to him and say: “You made a pretty penny with that story about your nephew. We saw how the journalists invited you to their hotels and gave you money. Maybe you can finally afford a prosthetic leg now.”
A new spirit has taken hold in Sidi Bouzid, a spirit of envy and malicious gossip. Those who knew Mohamed Bouazizi are seen as profiteers of the revolution, while those who didn’t know him ask themselves when they will finally profit from the changes that have taken place.
Ridha sits on both sides of this fence. When he feels the need to defend himself, he talks about his sister, the mother of the victim, a woman whom he thinks has made money from the death of her son. He hasn’t spoken with his sister since she was invited to Ben Ali’s palace at the end of December. He wasn’t allowed to go along, because he wasn’t deemed important enough. Mohamed’s death brought him a new spot for his fruit cart and brought his sister 20,000 dinars, which the dictator promised her as compensation. Ridha sees no justice in democracy.
His sister is now the new elite in the town, as evidenced by the fact that she is now the target of malicious gossip. There are rumors of rich donors from Gulf countries and tales of her arrogant behavior at the supermarket and in the bank.
Manoubia Bouazizi, the mother of a hero, is sitting on a bench, warming her hands with a pot, in the inner courtyard of her narrow three-room house, which includes a kitchen and an entry hall. She says no one gave her money. A new computer with an Internet connection is visible in one of the rooms. Basma, the 15-year-old sister of Mohamed Bouazizi, is sitting in front of the computer.
She is now a member of Facebook.
Mary Anastasia O’Grady writing in the Journal says the trip to Brazil is important.
President Obama’s trip to Brazil, Chile and El Salvador this week, while war rages in Libya, has been sharply criticized as proof of dangerous detachment from a world that badly needs U.S. leadership.
Yet there is a case to be made for going—to Brazil anyway. Arguably Santiago and San Salvador could have been postponed. Chile is already a stable ally and the stop in El Salvador, to mouth platitudes about hemispheric security while Central America is going up in narco-trafficking flames, only highlights the futility of the U.S. war on drugs.
Going to Brasilia to meet with Workers’ Party President Dilma Rousseff on Saturday, on the other hand, was important. …
Jennifer Rubin has kind words for Marco Rubio.
The 2012 presidential field is not all that impressive. Romney has RomneyCare. Newt Gingrich has Speaker Gingrich. And Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour has a race issue and a does-not-know-anything-about-important-topics issue. But if we look beyond the field, there are plenty to impress.
Gov. Scott Walker is gaining popularity within the GOP for standing up to public-employee unions. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has mastered the art of governing and the game of playing the national media like a violin. And then there is Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).
He has eschewed national media. He has become an expert at grilling nominees (mostly recently the State Department’s William Burns on Libya and our hapless trade representative). And he has focused on rather few issues that have importance in his home state as well as for the nation as a whole. …
Interesting New Yorker piece on post disaster growth.
… In a study of eighty-nine countries, the economists Mark Skidmore and Hideki Toya, after controlling for every variable they could think of, found that countries that suffered more climatic disasters actually grew faster and were more productive. This seems bizarre: it’s close to the broken-windows fallacy identified by the nineteenth-century economist Frédéric Bastiat—the idea that breaking windows is economically useful, because it makes work for glaziers. But Skidmore and Toya argue that disaster-stricken economies don’t simply replace broken windows, as it were; they upgrade infrastructure and technology, and shift investment away from older, less productive industries. (After the Kobe quake, the city’s plastic-shoe factories never returned.) In Horwich’s somewhat ruthless phrase, disasters can function as a form of “accelerated depreciation.” Something similar often happens on the level of the individual consumer: homeowners rebuilding after a disaster take the opportunity to upgrade, a phenomenon known as “the Jacuzzi effect.” In ordinary times, inertia keeps old technologies in place; it may be easier to make dramatic changes when you have to start from scratch.
Still, the impact of any given disaster depends on a variety of factors. Skidmore and Toya have found that geological disasters don’t seem to have the same effects on growth rates as climatic disasters. And growth rates seem to be resilient only for relatively wealthy, well-run countries …