Bouazizi & Havel: Despair, Humiliation and Revolution
On 17 December 2010 Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire; an act of protest that not only ignited the revolution in Tunisia but that also inspired other uprisings throughout the Middle East. Since then a lot has happened. The following reports give some idea about that and also about the major challenges that Tunisia faces in the years ahead.
Reuters
Tunisia’s Bouazizi Remembered door tvnportal
Al Jazeera
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIaXwDwp-Mo]
CBS News
The Real Mohamed Bouazizi – By Hernando de Soto | Foreign Policy
Bouazizi is, of course, not the only hero of the Arab Spring. There are thousands of them, if not millions. Neither is economics the only root of the revolution. But it is clear that the undercurrents of popular unrest — what led the economic martyrs of the revolution to such desperate acts — have yet to be resolved. Governments have been toppled, but the underlying economies still remain and are ignored at our peril.
We asked Salem, one of Bouazizi’s brothers, what his brother in heaven might have hoped his sacrifice would bring to the Arab world. Salem did not hesitate: “That the poor also have the right to buy and sell.”
One of the things I missed from many analyses is the comparison with Jan Palach and Jan Zajíc and others who died after self-immolation; I think a suitable one to make today. Both deaths make us think about freedom and the value of it not only in major public debates but the concrete meaning of value in everyday life and how a lack of freedom may result in despair, humiliation and transformation when people pay the ultimate price thereby exposing the emperor without clothes.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEKwU_B_n_M]
Several tributes have appeared on Youtube, dedicated to Mohamed Bouazizi:
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Nir6FcXDM8]
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEj68lrLeOY]
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwYGIk6I3m4]
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygKpOCtiRCw]
But maybe the best tribute today is a film directed by Vaclav Havel: ‘Leaving’ I discovered by reading an article in the Newyorker that featured a report by Stuart Kemp in the Hollywood Reporter:
The Front Row: Václav Havel, Filmmaker : The New Yorker
Originally, and actually for my entire life, I wanted to be primarily a filmmaker,” and he recently fulfilled that intention: he directed a film called “Leaving,” which Stuart Kemp, in The Hollywood Reporter, describes as
the story of a government chancellor who faces a crisis after being removed from political power. He based it on Shakespeare’s King Lear and Anton Checkhov’s [sic] The Cherry Orchard. Havel said his film version revolves around “the theme of the end. The end of man. The end of an epoch. The end of some community. The end of love.
”
According to the press-kit on the film’s website:
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGuHQViJT90]The film is not just about the leaving of one politician from his office, but more generally about the phenomenon of change itself: every second something comes and something irretrievably goes. We do not know from where everything emerges and know even less to where it disappears. This is in fact a classic theme of dramas: the end. The end of a man. The end of an era. The end of a community. The end of love.