If It Bleeds, It Bores

Unlike E.J. Dionne, I don't have any particular animus against Eric Goldstein. But his column of today is bizarre to me, strangley formulaic and and bereft of real argument. So I'm going to fisk it, if for no other reason than to keep my claws sharp.

A Tunisian revolution that's more bloody than jasmine

What a powerful headline! So challenging in its assertions, so evocative in its construction, so tasty the bourbon at the hotel bar!

QASSERINE, TUNISIA

In this hardscrabble corner of southern Tunisia, near the Algerian border, "Jasmine Revolution" seems a misnomer for the popular uprising that ousted President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.

"Well, the girls like it, but the boys think it sounds queer."

Jasmine suggests the middle-class villas in greater Tunis, their outer walls covered with sweet-scented vines. "Jasmine Revolution" suggests intellectuals, artists and professionals bringing a police state to its knees by marching arm-in-arm.

Note the delicately-juxtaposed contrasts: hardscrabble corners where names for things seem misnomers vs. sweetly-scented middle-class villas, filled with intellectuals and artists who link arms against oppression. You'd have a hard time telling that the poor and the middle-class were on the same side in this non-Jasmine Revolution.

Tunisia indeed has a large middle class, and educated, relatively well-off Tunisians played a key role in toppling the regime. But in Qasserine and several surrounding cities that consider themselves the cradle of the revolution, the story has been more about blood than jasmine.

Oh, the bourgeois played their part, made it look good on the TV, you know. But in its dark cradle, the revolution was about blood. As revolutions tend to be. Heads-of-state and the men with guns who love them often require some violent persuading afore they throw in the towel.

Human Rights Watch collected the names of 17 residents of Qasserine whom police gunned down during street protests Jan. 8-10. Six died around the same period in the smaller city of Tala, about 25 miles north. These two cities lost more than the official number of 21 dead nationwide that the Ben Ali government gave shortly before collapsing; the exact toll is not yet known. But to the west, five more died in Regueb and two in Menzel Bouzaiane. In the center of this region lies Sidi Bouzid, the city where the peddler Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire on Dec. 17, triggering the revolt. Police also shot protesters in the capital, but this southern region bore the brunt of the casualties.

Ah. So it would seem that the blood in Qasserine was shed by the police, who viciously gunned down 17 of the 76,243 people who lived there. But there were others! Five in one place and two in another! We scoff at your "official tally," defunct government of Ben Ali! We scoff at it most scoffingly!

[History Sidebar: The Qasserine Governerate appears to be home to the Kasserine Pass where, on Feb 19-25th, 1943, the Allies got their teeth kicked in by Rommel in the first major American showing in the Eastern Theater of WW2. Allied casualties were about 10,000, of which 6,500 were Americans. Soldiers dubbed it "Bloody Kasserine" thereafter.]

The provisional government says 78 died nationwide and has declared three days of mourning.

Qasserine is the other Tunisia, where most people say their main demand is jobs, and the most-chanted slogan was "Khoubz wa ma', Ben Ali la!" ("Bread and water, Ben Ali no!").

So we've gone from a sacrifice of 21 to a grim butcher's tally of 78 people killed over the course of the Revolution. I hate to sound callous, but revolutions tend to be...bloodier than that, and they tend to involve revolutionary violence on the part of the revolutionaries. So far, the actual revolutionary violence seems missing in action.

The frustration here was not well known because until Ben Ali fell, virtually no foreign journalist or human rights researcher could usefully visit this inland region. If the secret police did not spot and turn you back, you would have found almost no resident willing to speak honestly, for fear of a harsh interrogation or worse. This was confirmed to me by several residents, now basking in the sudden profusion of television crews profiling their revolt and poverty - including reporters from Tunisia's reborn state television, who during Ben-Ali's 23-year authoritarian rule came here only to film ribbon-cutting ceremonies.

Thank goodness for that. How would I have known that the inland areas of an arid North African country guarded by secret police was poor frustrated without a j-school grad getting confirmation from the residents?

Qasserinites earned this attention the hard way. My colleagues and I spoke with families, eyewitnesses, medical officials and others here and in Tala last week who told us how riot police units brought in from elsewhere fired live ammunition at protesters, hitting them fatally in the groin, abdomen or head, and striking several in the back. Most protests were peaceful; in others, youths burned tires and threw rocks and in some instances Molotov cocktails. But the accounts we heard suggest that security forces routinely shot to kill, including in situations that could not be considered life-threatening, such as when youths hurled stones and set tires aflame after police used tear gas to disperse residents marching in a youth's funeral procession Jan. 10.

There's no way to make any of this funny, but I can't help but noticing how routine it all sounds. Overzealous police in a repressive state shooting to kill at protestors that soon learn to drop the placards and start making with the hand-missiles? Why do I feel like you could dateline this just about anywhere?

The fatal shootings enraged Tunisians nationwide. It is one thing to know that you live in a police state, another to see the police mow down your countrymen. In the bread riots of 1984, Qasserine residents - now the parents of the youths who revolted this month - took to the streets and paid a heavy price. Since Ben Ali became president in 1987, Tunisians have had no experience of the police killing demonstrators on this scale - for the simple reason that the police rarely allowed demonstrations to get off the ground.

Silly question, but how exactly did police stop demonstrations in the old days, without killing anyone? Informants? Bribery? Asking the demned rebels why don't they disperse?

When police repression did not end the recent unrest, Gen. Rachid Ammar, commander of the army, reportedly refused to order his troops to fire on protesters. Qasserine residents say that on the afternoon of Jan. 10, the army suddenly replaced the anti-riot police in the city. Soldiers have since handled the continuing demonstrations without major incident.

So, in the midsts of this Bloody and Savage Revolution, when the police were overmanned, the military took over, and promptly...stopped all the violence. At which point Ben Ali left the country?

You know things are bad when the soldiers of a violently repressive regime miss a golden opportunity to start killing people, after the police have warmed everything up.

Note the date of the transfer: Jan 10th. Apparently, the same day that the police were shooting at the funeral, they were giving power over to the army. They get more incompetence done before the afternoon than most people do all day.

In Qasserine, a well-informed medical source laid out the forensic evidence that the police had shot to kill, then asked me not to cite him by name. "We don't know where this [revolution] is going," he said. "The agents who killed all these people are still out there, with their guns."
The residents of this region are breathing easier, but many voice a second demand alongside their continuing call for more jobs: punish those who killed their sons and brothers.
It is not only grieving families who have an interest in accountability. If Tunisia is to erect a rights-respecting security apparatus to replace one based on torture and intimidation, it needs to bring perpetrators to justice and establish a full, public record of the price paid in blood for the "Jasmine Revolution."

By the way, jasmine is the national flower of Tunisia, as it is for several other countries. So the name "Jasmine Revolution" might have something to do with geography and culture, and less with feeble, tendentious claims of class division by a Human Rights Watch director seeking to plump his relevance.

I mean, the guy is pointing out that people did get killed, which is perfectly fair and just. But the suggestion that the Tunisian Revolution has thus far been all about blood, rather than a remarkably quick and painless government collapse (especially compared to Qasserine's Algerian neighbors) is simply not born out by the facts. It's sloppy, dull editorializing over a matter that has not yet run its course, an almost bureaucratic squeezing of real people's lives into a pre-approved narrative, from which few people actually benefit.