‘The revolution was a mistake’: Tunisians struggle with Arab Spring impact

The mosque was closed and reopened by force twice in one weekend, locals said. When Tunisian President Beji Caid Essebsi announced a national state of emergency against terrorism, security forces placed a padlock on the gate. Salafi youths ripped it off several hours later. Police raided Hayy Sourour at night, arresting the youths and relocking the gate. More youths — not religiously driven, just kids zealous to protect their neighborhood, Atef said — removed the main door. Authorities then cut off power and water to the mosque. At sunset prayer time, armed personnel carriers patrolled the road between Sbeitla and the town of Kasserine. Hayy Sourour was quiet. “Without electricity, there’s no call to prayer,” he said.

The fight over this one mosque symbolizes a swath of broader societal tensions and fault lines now running through Tunisia, the birthplace and ostensibly the only success story of the 2011 Arab Spring. Four years later, the country has a new constitution and unprecedented civil liberties and has had two free and fair elections. But it has also become the world’s top contributor of fighters to the intractable conflicts in Syria, Libya and Iraq.

Not only are Tunisians joining radical groups abroad, but they’ve also radicalized at home, carrying out massacres of tourists at the Bardo Museum in March and on the beach in Sousse in June. Meanwhile, the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Okba Ibn Nafaa Brigade is training on Kasserine’s Mount Chaambi and attacking security forces nearby. While the state attempts a security crackdown, residents of interior regions like Kasserine, Gafsa and Sidi Bouzid say they are more marginalized than before the revolution. Political exclusion and socioeconomic desperation, they say, are combining with strict police tactics to drive young people toward violence. 

Behind the Hayy Sourour mosque, graffiti on one wall read, “Fuck the police” in English, with “the government” added in Arabic. It has been there since ousted President Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali’s days, Atef said, but the revolution neither improved life in Sbeitla nor changed people’s view of the authorities.

Neighborhoods like Hayy Sourour and Hayy al-Khader are “hard,” said Habib Dalhouni, 50, an Arabic professor and community organizer in Sbeitla. “People here despise the government,” he said, pointing at the dusty unpaved streets, empty under a blazing Ramadan sun. At night these streets are full, he said, and police rarely enter, despite rampant drug abuse and petty crime.

Now that Tunisia is in a state of emergency, arrests are increasing. Citizens feel trapped between Salafi agitation and state-imposed violence, he said. They don’t want their sons recruited to fight in Chaambi or Syria, but they also resent the heavy police presence and seemingly arbitrary raids. “The state needs to persuade citizens to join their fight against terrorism,” he said. “But people think the state is going to war against Islam.”

Unrest in the interior regions is nothing new, said 62-year-old Noureddine Ichaoui, a retired school inspector who volunteers with Amal, an organization promoting active citizenship. “Kasserine has been like this for centuries. People are always hungry and poor,” he said, listing examples of bread riots, farmers’ uprisings and other economically driven protests from the early 20th century. “The state was using machine guns and Kalashnikovs in 2011, but our youths confronted them barechested. They inherited oppression from grandparents and parents. People here were already dead two generations ago. They had nothing to lose.”

In Sidi Bouzid — where the vegetable vendor Mohammed Bouazizi famously set himself on fire in 2011, sparking Tunisia’s uprising and subsequent revolts across the Arab world — people laughed off the idea of revolutionary success.

“It started as a revolution and became a catastrophe,” said Rachid Fetini, 52, a textile merchant and the head of a business center in Sidi Bouzid. Postrevolution governments brought no development to internal regions, he said, adding that authorities were busy writing the constitution and navigating between religious and political identities. But the anger and neglect that pushed people into revolution in the first place has grown. “There’s no encouragement for investors — local or international. Now we’ve been branded as a terrorism hub,” he said. “Who will ever start a business here?”