“They say that we started a revolution, but my father asked: when was that?” Many Tunisians share these sentiments, which have been voiced by rapper Clay BBJ. They express the Tunisian people’s dissatisfaction and their feeling that their revolution has been stolen from them by sheikhs, whose numbers are growing in the world of politics. 

“They say that we started a revolution, but my father asked: when was that?” Many Tunisians share these sentiments, which have been voiced by rapper Clay BBJ. They express the Tunisian people’s dissatisfaction and their feeling that their revolution has been stolen from them by sheikhs, whose numbers are growing in the world of politics. 

Nearly three years later, there is an overall feeling that the revolution has lost its charm. It shows that the revolution has deviated from its original demands and that the new authority in the country is seeking to deep root the issue of identity and play the “Islam in danger” and the “revolution is in danger” cards after it failed in solving the vital and daily concerns of the people that were behind the revolution that was launched by Tunisia’s youth. 

We need something more lethal to confront what is coming.  We should create weapons from words and words like bullets capable of killing.  We need to revive and activate all the dictionaries of bad words in order to be equipped with enough weapons to face the coming phase. These are the sentences circulated by Tunisian youth activists on Facebook pages in Tunisia on the political scene in their country. These youth, who succeeded where other generations, raised under the “Youssifi – Bourgaibi” conflict and the years of embers,” do not know the meaning of words such as partisan commitment, and committed art.  However, they are fully and radically committed to changing life and finding a place under the sun. Their method is discontent and anger.

Part of the Tunisian youth is angrier today than at any other time. “We went out to the streets in order to have a future.  Our reward was marginalization,” said Wadia al-Jalasi, the young man who has a famous picture carrying a cage through Habib Bourguiba street in 2011, describing the gains of the youth since the eruption of the revolution”Nothing has changed and there are no guarantees whatsoever,” he says. He believes that freedom of expression is as threatened as it was before, pointing to court rulings against many young people being accused of “assaulting the police and offending public morals in the rap songs such as Clay BBJ and Weld El-15.” 

The youth have invented their own way to “offend the morals of those who are responsible for the political affairs in Tunisia, regardless of their being in the government or the opposition.” They used rap, art and jokes to express their continuous feeling of discontent. One of these jokes, as narrated by Nawal Bouzid, a human rights activist relates this well: “We elected a constituent council to rule the country and write the Constitution, but we ended up living under the rule of the Shura Council of the Ennahda Movement.  This council, which is composed of 150 members has only six young men, three of them are the sons of leading members of the movement.”    

“The ageing of the Ennahda Movement’s Shura Council is not the only an indicator of the country’s creeping towards the aging of its key institutions.  The youngest man in the list of the 10 most influential personalities in the political scene of the country, Hamma Hammami, the leader of the Popular Front, is 64 years old.

The revolution has been betrayed

“We are not dreamers. We woke up from our dream of change.  Our dreams were turned into nightmares,” said Fawzi Dessie, an independent political activist, using the words uttered by his best model “Slavoj Jajik” to express his disappointment about the post-revolutionary period. The revolution, which took on many names such as “the youth revolution,” and the change revolution,” made Fawzi dream of change in the concepts of political activism and of making it more youthful. “Those who feel the pain should put an end to it. The most painful thing for the Tunisian youth is unemployment and its rates after the revolution went up from 800 thousand to more than 1 million according to official statistics.”

Promises of changing realities and providing work opportunities are “political lies,” according to Fawzi. “When there is civil and social peace, the best that can be achieved is a five pro cent growth rate, a rate capable of employing 70,000 unemployed people as a maximum annual average in the labor market,” he said.  “This raises the question on the fate of the remaining unemployed people, especially if we add to them the 80,000 students graduating each year from the Tunisian universities and who will also be looking for job opportunities.” 

The deviation of the revolution from its track is not limited to the deviation from the reasons for its eruption as expressed in the slogan of “employment, freedom, dignity.” The revolution did not respond to these demands and it was not able to build the second republic which Nawal Bouzid was dreaming of. “I, as well as others, thought that I had elected a legitimate institution capable of building a democratic system. But we found out that there is confusion and overlapping in the work of the authority which we have elected,” said Bouzid. This 23-year-old girl had not discovered this fact but also other very important ones. She is now raising many questions such as: who is eligible to rule? Is it the sheikh who struggled in the past when he was young or the young man who is dreaming of a better future?  Before elections, Bouzid was used to think that “a history of struggle is a guarantee for a good rule.” She used to believe that those who were repressed can’t be repressive and those who were marginalized can’t marginalize others.  However, she woke up to see that she was a victim of the lies of the old generation.

We are responsible

“We are responsible. We made a mistake by trusting the sheikhs,” said Bouzid.  “These sheikhs are responsible for the conditions witnessed by the country and they made the youth reluctant to participate in the political scene because politicians were able to kill the youth spirit of enthusiasm,” she stressed. “They have used the youth in their election campaigns and then they abandoned them and their demands when they reached their high ranking positions.”

According to Fawzi Dessie, the youth is responsible for their exclusion from the decision-making process. “They were absent in the lists of the government members and in the constituent assembly’s lists.  The average age in these two is 45.  Moreover, the youth did not hold any advisory position although there are many such positions.” Fawzi stressed that the youth is responsible because they did not take stances regarding a number of essential issues such as employment, terrorism, etc.….