How a desperate baker ended the reign of Tunisia's thieving despot

The toppling of the Tunisian despot by a popular revolt, largely from the middle classes, is a heady development in the authoritarian Arab world. And it started with one man's desperate protest:

It all began with the despair of one man, a young graduate unable to get a job, like so many others in his country.


Mohammed Bouazizi turned to selling fruit and veg illegally to earn some money for his family, but when the police confiscated his produce last month because he had no permit, it was all too much. He poured petrol on himself and set it alight in an unusually public protest.

The 26-year-old died earlier this month, but today he is a hero. Not just to his nation, but across the 'gendarmerie' states of north Africa.

For that agonising act of self-immolation sparked something remarkable: a wave of protests that, for the first time in recent memory, felled a leader in the Arab world.

Let the other Arab despots tremble:

Now, reports are coming in from other countries in the region—including Algeria and Mauritania—that other people are turning to self-immolation, even though it is too soon to know how many of the incidents were sparked by political and social grievances.

The writer of the piece I've linked to has the standard contempt for the liberation of Iraq, but I wonder whether the replacement of a tyrant there by an elected government has helped to put democracy on the agenda throughout the Arab Middle East.

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