Opinion From fighting over fruit to revolution

Soon after Bouazizi set himself on fire in front of the modest governor’s building where protesters now gather around portraits of the martyr. Bouazizi would live another 18 days. By then,an Arab dictatorship with a 53-year pedigree was shuddering. Within another 10 days,it had fallen in perhaps the world’s first revolution without a leader.

Or rather,its leader was far away: Mark Zuckerberg,the founder of Facebook. Its vehicle was the youth of Tunisia,able to use Facebook for instant communication and cyber-inspire their parents. Castro spent years preparing revolution in the Cuban interior,the Sierra Maestra; Facebook propelled insurrection from the interior to the Tunisian capital in 28 days.

How could a spat over pears in Nowhereville turn into a national uprising? No Tunisian newspaper or TV network covered it. The West was busy with Christmas. Tunisia was the Arab world’s Luxembourg: Nothing ever happened. Some poor kid’s self-immolation could never break a wall of silence. Or so it seemed.

That day,December 17,a dozen members of Bouazizi’s enraged family gathered outside the governor’s building. They shook the gates and demanded that the governor see them. “Our family can accept anything but not humiliation,” Samia Bouazizi,the dead man’s sister,told me,sitting under a bare light bulb in a small house near a trough where sheep were feeding.

Humiliation is an important word in this story. It was the “hogra,” or contempt,of the dictator’s kleptocracy that would cyber-galvanise an Arab people. The protests soon swelled. Participants uploaded cellphone images onto Facebook pages. “My daughter,Ons,who’s 16,started showing me what was going on,” said Hichem Saad,a Tunis-based entrepreneur. Al-Jazeera was alerted through Facebook.

When Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali,the now ousted dictator,addressed the nation,as he would three times,Facebook-ferried fury was the response. Ben Ali might have 1.5 million members in his puppet party; he soon faced two million Facebook users. By now Faida Hamdy,the policewoman,had slapped Bouazizi across the face. Perhaps she did. Her cousin told me he slapped her: hurtling facts are too good to check.

Hisham Ben Khamsa,who organises an American movie festival in Tunis,watched with his kids as Ben Ali made his last speech on January 13. Now,the strongman’s confrontational fury had gone. Like the shah of Iran in 1978 — too late — he had “understood.” He felt the people’s pain. Bread prices would come down.

“He hadn’t understood a thing,” Ben Khamsa told me. “This was about dignity,not bread. His political autism was terminal. Everyone was live-commenting the speech on Facebook.” The next night,Ben Ali fled after 23 years in power,short of his predecessor’s 30 years. It’s said the average age of a Tunisian is one dictator and a half. That nightmare is over.

Now the new youth minister,a 33-year-old former dissident blogger,tweets from cabinet meetings. Everyone is talking where everyone was silent. “Every Arab nation is waiting for its Bouazizi,” his sister told me.

Some observations: First,the old nostrum goes that it’s either dictators or Islamic fundamentalists in the Arab world because they’re the only organised forces. No,online communities can organise and bite. Second,those communities have no formal ideology but their struggle is to transform humiliation into self-esteem.

Third,cyber-uprisings can go either way: Iran hovered on a razor’s edge in 2009,Tunisia’s regime fell in 2011. In both societies the gulf between the authorities and young wired societies was huge. The difference is probably the degree of sustained brutality a dictatorship can muster.

Fourth,Internet freedom is no panacea. Authoritarian regimes can use it to identify dissidents; they can try to suppress Facebook. But it’s empowering to the repressed,humiliated and distant — and so a threat to the decayed Arab status quo.

Tunisia was a Facebook revolution. But I prefer a phrase I heard in Tunis: “The Dignity Revolution.”