Tunisia protest town fears for unfinished revolution
Kasserine helped spearhead an uprising that led to Ben Ali's fall, but as the world focuses on Egypt his party is stirring up violence
Kasserine residents protest in the capital Tunis last month. Photograph: Fethi Belaid/AFP/Getty Images
Zohra Mejri shivered from the damp and rot spreading along the cracked ceiling of her makeshift concrete home. Outside, as raw sewage trickled past children playing, men were discussing renaming the desolate, windswept road "Martyr Street".
Mejri's son, Muhammad, 23, was shot dead by a police sniper as he walked home during the rural street demonstrations that led to Tunisia's revolution and the toppling of the dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.
"We just don't want him to have died in vain," she said. "Nothing has changed in people's miserable lives here in this forgotten corner of Tunisia. And if the old faces of the regime keep terrorising us, then what was it all worth? People will rise up again."
Few places better illustrate the problems of Tunisia's unfinished revolution than Kasserine, a lawless and poverty-stricken border town nestled below mountains on the Algerian frontier, nearly 200 miles south-west of Tunis. For centuries a bastion of rebellion and unrest, the rural town of 100,000 people had the highest death toll of the revolution after Ben Ali's police snipers were ordered to shoot to kill to quell street demonstrations. Far from the golden tourist coast, Kasserine has the highest unemployment, crime rate, suicide levels and divorce figures in Tunisia.
Jobs are so scarce that much of the population survives from the smuggling of petrol, cigarettes and hashish over the Algerian border. Makeshift stands sell jerrycans of contraband fuel for £1 a throw.
Kasserine was at the forefront of Tunisia's historic January uprising, the first time in the Arab world that people on the streets have ousted a brutal dictator. The country's hope of becoming the first true Arab democracy spread across the region, inspiring Egypt's revolt. But as the world spotlight turns to Cairo, Tunisia's rural interior fears its revolution could disintegrate.
The town now finds itself at the heart of the attempts by Ben Ali's former ruling RCD party to stir fresh violence to disrupt the revolution. In the past three days, at least five people have died in Tunisia in the worst violence since Ben Ali fled on January 14. The interim government has blamed the wave of violence on a plot by old figures in the RCD party to stir panic and damage the revolution.
Last week in Kasserine at least 1,000 thugs descended on the town centre, ransacking schools, smashing buildings, attacking the court-house and robbing at knifepoint, left to run riot through the town by the lack of police. "This was a war of terrorism," said local lawyer Bedma Askri. "The RCD paid criminals and thugs around 15 dinars each [£5] to do this.
"In some cases, they just plied them with alcohol in exchange for violence. That's poverty for you, when someone will smash up a town and terrify people in exchange for a drink."
Anti-RCD demonstrators took to the streets of Kasserine and the chaos spread. Further north along the Algerian border in Kef, crowds rose up this weekend after police shot dead two demonstrators protesting against security forces. Government buildings were ransacked and burned inprotest at the deaths. In Kebili, in the south, a youth hit by a teargas canister was killed as anti-police demonstrations were violently put down. Protests spread to Sidi Bouzid, near Kasserine, where the revolution began in December when an unemployed graduate set himself alight.
Elsewhere across Tunisia, from Sfax on the coast to Bizerte north of Tunis, crowds protested against the appointment of new local governors they said were RCD cronies. In a desperate attempt to calm tensions, the interim government finally caved in to demands to dissolve the RCD party, symbol of the old regime, taking the first steps to suspend party activities.
Protesters today crowded outside the Tunis parliament building during the first meeting of MPs since the revolution, demanding that the assembly, dominated by the RCD, also be dissolved. The country is still under a midnight curfew which the government is nervous about dropping.
"The revolution isn't over yet," said Abdelaziz Bouazi, a Kasserine trade unionist and history teacher. He had been up until 4am patrolling his street as part of a neighbourhood vigilante group. Hundreds of prisoners, including convicted murderers, had escaped in Kasserine during the chaos of the revolution and were still at large.
"Men aged between 15 and 35 don't sleep at night here, they're up protecting the streets. There's no rule of law – the judges are still corrupt, so there's no justice."
For lawyers, trade unionists and opposition politicians, Kasserine will be the true test of Tunisia's revolution, which has seen more than 200 dead and more than 500 injured, as well as rapes and disappearances. "It's only here, in this forsaken region, that you'll be able to judge whether it has worked, whether the acute inequality of Tunisia is over and the old regime finally finished," Bouazi said. "The regime's head has been cut off but the beast is still breathing. For now, the demonstrations will continue."
Kasserine's trade unionists are planning more local protests against the interim government's appointment of regional governors seen as still craven towards the old regime. In the mining heartland of Gafsa, one new governor has already been forced from his offices under army escort after locals rose up in revolt.
Tunisia's population of 10 million, seen as one broadly united front against Ben Ali, does not face a problem of breaking up along tribal lines. But the rural regions, far poorer than the tourist coast, insist they will revolt again if their problems of acute unemployment and corruption are not addressed.
In Kasserine, students picked through the charred remains of the former secret police headquarters, where torture was routine. The floors were strewn with files detailing which locals had been given numbers and spied on.
Upstairs, a fetid cell still stank of human excrement. "We're watching events, but if nothing real changes in people's lives here – no equality, no opportunities, no chance to work, the stranglehold of the RCD party – we'll stage a new revolution," said Aymen Fakraoui, an engineering student. The young men were in touch by internet with youths across the border in Algeria on how to stage their own revolt – an opposition protest rally is planned in Algiers on Saturday, although they felt it was unlikely that the vast Maghreb country would follow Tunisia's revolution.
In the run-down Ezzouhour neighbourhood of Kasserine, Ali Nasri looked at a photograph of his son Muhammad lying dead from a wound to the stomach. He was shot by a police sniper as he walked home from work during Tunisia's protests last month. "In Kasserine, we are the dispossessed, a place of inequality where nothing ever changes. I'd like justice for my son, but most of all it would be good if post-dicatorship Tunisia finally learned that human life has some value," he said.
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