Timeless Longing for Dignity, Freedom and Self-Respect

 Rami G. Khoury, writing in Lebanon's Daily Star:

In the annals of modern history, a few moments stand out as pivotal to all humankind, moments when a single human being, during a fleeting moment of intense anger and humiliation, undertakes an act that manifests his or her determination to end systematic humiliation and to seek a new life of dignity and full humanity.

We can best understand the full causes and consequences of the current citizen revolts across the Arab world... by fully appreciating the incident that sparked them: the desperate act of Mohammad Bouazizi, a 24-year-old Tunisian fruit and vegetable street cart vendor who set himself on fire last December 17 to protest two consecutive and related acts that he felt accentuated his sense of abuse and humiliation by the Tunisian state authorities.

The first was when a 45-year-old female municipal police officer, Faida Hamdi, and her colleagues overturned and confiscated Bouazizi’s cart and its wares, with some reports saying she or her colleagues also slapped and spat on him. The second was when Bouazizi went to the local governor’s office in the town of Sidi Bouzid to seek redress and was refused a meeting with any official.

Publicly humiliated and defenseless in front of an uncaring structure of state authority, and prevented from earning the meager income from his street vending that he required to help feed his mother and six siblings, he ended his misery in a final act of gruesome self-immolation that was also an act of desperate self-affirmation. His personal anguish – as the ongoing Second Arab Revolt reveals – was also reflective of the pain and vulnerability of millions of other Tunisians, and several hundred million Arabs.
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It is hard to think of a better description of the person, mindset and final desperate act of Bouazizi, whose weariness with his life-long mistreatment by the Tunisian state finally prompted him to undertake his own “individual expression of a timeless longing for dignity, freedom and self-respect.”
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