The Woman Who Blew Up the Arab World
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“Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?”
- Mathematician and chaos theorist Edward Lorenz
On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip shot and killed Austria’s Archduke Ferdinand in the streets of Sarajevo—a fateful act that triggered a series of events culminating in the First World War.
Ninety-six years later, on December 17, 2010, an impoverished Tunisian fruit vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in front of city hall in the small town of Sidi Bouzid—another fateful act that changed the history of an entire region forever.
Protests supporting Bouazizi first turned to riots and then revolution. The crooked authoritarian ruler Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was overthrown in Tunis less than a month later. A copy-cat uprising in Egypt led to a bloodless military coup against strongman Hosni Mubarak. Libya’s Moammar Qaddafi was next on the list, though this time it took civil war and aerial bombardment from NATO to be rid of him. Syria’s Bashar al-Assad may follow them sooner or later, but the war to oust him has already killed more than 10,000 people and is beginning to spread into Lebanon.
Princip died in prison four years after killing Austria’s archduke. He knew what his actions unleashed on the world. He couldn’t participate any further than he already had, but he knew.
Bouazizi only survived his self-immolation by a couple of weeks. He languished, comatose, in a hospital in Sfax the entire time. He had no idea he inspired even a protest, let alone a revolution, a coup, and a number of wars.
He killed himself because he could not make a living. And he did it before city hall because he blamed the government.