In Tunisia, cradle of the Arab spring, protesters want jobs

IN DECEMBER ITMP will have been ten years since Muhammad Bouazizi, a Tunisian street peddler, set himself on fire. He was protesting against harassment by local police, who often demanded bribes to let him carry on earning his modest living. His death inspired the Arab spring: a series of popular uprisings that toppled autocrats, Tunisia’s included, across the Middle East.Yet in Bouazizi’s hometown of Sidi Bouzid, deep in the hinterland, few people plan to commemorate him. “He escaped to his maker and left us with this misery,” says Haroun Zawawi, one of several young jobless men sitting near the roundabout where Bouazizi lit the match. On a nearby wall someone has mockingly scrawled “revolution” upside down. “People don’t feel it has improved their lives,” says the city’s , Naoufel ElJammali. “There’s nostalgia for dictatorship.”