1 Tunis and Sidi Bouzid:
Cigarette Smugglers and Hitchhiking Heroes
I
N THE long grey baggage hall at Tunis-Carthage International Airport, voices of passengers from our half-full flight echoed across the bare, dimly
lit space. No other travellers were about, just a handful of officials in blue uniforms who lazily eyeballed us as we shuffled by in the early-morning February chill.
There was no sign of our baggage. With time to kill I stepped into the
solitary duty-free shop, the sole customer. Followed by an assistant who
sensed a sale, I perused the shelves, considering whether to splash out. Getting a drink could be tricky in some of the places I was heading, and
everything in the shop was dirt cheap: bottles of rum for a handful of euros, fine French wines going for a song. I was about to embark on a voyage to Arabic lands where bars would be few and far between. This could be my
last-chance saloon. But then I thought ahead to my next port of call. Alcohol
was illegal in Libya during Colonel Gaddafi’s rule. Whether it was still, I had no idea. What was the point in handing over a bottle to a border official? Or perhaps even being arrested later on: ‘BOOZE TOURIST BEHIND BARS: SOLDIERS SEIZE SMIRNOFF’.
I didn’t like the idea of that. Nobody I’d talked to seemed certain what
was happening, or might happen, in Libya.
Close by, a neat row of shiny silver and green shisha pipes caught my eye. 1
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A Tourist in the Arab Spring
Beside the pipes were colourful boxes of tobacco with curious flavours: apple, strawberry, rose, mint. Sweet smells emanated from the packaging, suggestive
of another world. It was the shop’s only real indication of being somewhere foreign. I closed my eyes, drew in a breath and imagined the many souks and
cafés beyond the walls of Tunis-Carthage International Airport; the sense of
adventure, that slightly giddy feeling of launching into unfamiliar territory, beginning to set in.
But back in the baggage hall, there was discontent; still no sign of our
luggage. The inscrutable officials stared ahead blankly and indifferently. The
delay was nothing to do with them, their body language said. Revolution or
no revolution in Tunisia, we were going to have to wait. So we did. Eventually
a distant carousel creaked into action, with a board that announced ‘ParisOrly’. An enterprising passenger ambled over to investigate, even though
we’d flown from London. The bags were ours. With a growing sense of ‘noone seems to be in control here’, we made our way across.
I collected my bag, and customs officers waved me through; clearly
tourist material. Many of the returning locals, of whom the plane mainly consisted, were being taken to one side. With resigned looks, passengers
unzipped bulging suitcases. Were great hauls of smuggled goods about to be confiscated? I didn’t have time to see. A doorway led to a gloomy hall
that smelt of smoke. Within moments, men in black leather jackets and jeans appeared as if from nowhere; the feeling of ‘abroad’ coming in a great
swoop. ‘Tax-eee, tax-eee, s’il vous plaît, tax-eee, monsieur tax-eee!’ they urged, leaning close and gleaning that I was an English-speaker. The language of
the former colonialists, who left in 1956, is widely spoken alongside Arabic, but many have English, too. They switched tack: ‘You alone sir, ver-eee good
pric-eees sir, where is your hot-eel, tax-eee, you wan tax-eee?’ They hopped from foot to foot and gesticulated, all conspiratorial smiles and hurry-up-
come-with-me. For sheer shiftiness and persistence the taxi touts and guides of Tunis-Carthage International Airport must rank among the shiftiest and
most persistent of them all. They seemed desperate. They almost all smoked.
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Eyes darted up and down, assessing my value and lingering on my shoes.
Many wore trainers and appeared interested in mine. I muttered ‘non merci’ enough times for the message to sink in.
Another smoker in a black leather jacket and jeans leant against the front
of the Europcar kiosk. I had booked a car for the four-hour drive south to Sidi Bouzid, the city in which the Arab Spring of revolts had begun just over
a year previously. He turned out to run the hire car company. He ushered me into a dingy room with aquamarine walls. It was eye-stingingly smoky. A sign on a wall showed a glamorous woman on a beach and said: ‘VIVEZ CETTE SENSATION.’ We discussed the booking, and for the first time that I can
remember I was not hassled to buy extra insurance. I was even told the price was less than the amount originally quoted.
‘Vous êtes certain?’ I asked, imagining there must have been a mistake.
No rental car company, anywhere, charges less than you expect. ‘Oui, c’est moins,’ he replied matter-of-factly.
I paid and was led across a windy car park to a dented silver KIA. It,
too, reeked of cigarettes, and was almost empty of petrol. I gazed across the
car park towards a stream of traffic on a busy road. Horns blasted. Engines
roared. Vehicles swept by as though tied together by an invisible rope. How could I possibly find a gap amid all of that? It looked totally chaotic; barely controlled mayhem. What was it like in a country that had just had a revolution? Would chaos be king? I was about to find out. I slipped the car into gear and headed towards the hurly-burly.
So began my journey across the countries of North Africa’s Arab Spring
revolutions. I was beginning to wonder what I was doing as I tentatively
made my way on to the Trans-African Highway, going south on a six-lane monster full of cars honking madly, weaving and lurching. I could not speak
Arabic. Some of the places I was going were potentially dangerous. I was no
expert on North Africa, nor on the Middle East. I was not a veteran foreign
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A Tourist in the Arab Spring
reporter with gung-ho tales from the front line in Afghanistan or Sudan. I
had no experience of the sound of bullets fired in anger, and had certainly never had to dodge any or feel them whistle past.
Not that I had any intention of finding out. I was simply someone who
had watched the television news and read about the great changes that were happening, and wondered what it might be like in the new world forming
as dictators disappeared and democracy seemed, at least, to be coming in. It felt like a moment equivalent to the fall of the Berlin Wall; a time of total transformation. On 17 December 2010, the street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi had set himself on fire in a remote Tunisian town in protest about ill-treatment by corrupt officials. A year on – with despots toppled in rapid succession in Tunis, Cairo and Tripoli – what would it be like to see these countries starting anew in the wake of the old regimes?
The Times, the newspaper for which I work as a travel journalist (not
usually straying too far off the beaten tourist track), had just named Bouazizi
‘person of the year’, stating: ‘He was a simple fruit seller whose demand for justice cost him his life – but his defiance sparked a revolution that changed
the world. We salute him.’ It was an exciting time. Seeing the reports of
sweeping changes and popular revolts, I got caught up in that excitement. And on the day of Gaddafi’s death on 20 October 2011, which seemed such a
pivotal moment in what had been so quickly termed the Arab Spring, I made up my mind to go on a journey across North Africa.
I looked at the map and plotted a route. Tunisia, where it all began with
Bouazizi’s spectacular and sad act, was the sensible place to start – from a tourist’s point of view. Flights from London were cheap. So were the hotels
and car hire. Visitor numbers had plummeted because of concerns about going to a country so soon after a major upheaval, and it was a tourist’s market. It was amazing how easily I could arrange on the internet a week or so exploring the place that sparked off the Arab Spring.
Then I’d go to Libya. It appeared possible to travel by land into Gaddafi’s
former hunting ground from the southeast of Tunisia. There was a border
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crossing at a place called Ra’s Ajdir that had apparently reopened, after being closed during the revolution. I’d leave Tunisia by heading into the west of
Libya, making my way to Tripoli and then eastwards to Benghazi. This would
not be so simple. I wasn’t exactly sure how I’d get about in Libya. Even though I had a visa, I wasn’t sure whether foreigners would be allowed to cross the border at Ra’s Ajdir. Had I dreamt up a mission impossible?
Next would come Egypt – to complete the trio of revolutions in North
Africa. With Mubarak gone after the dramatic demonstrations in Cairo’s
Tahrir Square, what was it like in a country that had just had an uprising; a nation with which so many are familiar from visits to the pyramids and the
ancient temples and tombs of the Nile? I would go to Tahrir Square, stay at a hotel overlooking the epicentre of the clashes, and move on through desert across land tourists rarely visit, heading towards Suez and then down into the
Sinai Peninsula. That seemed to be the place where the east and the west of the Arab world met: where North Africa and the Middle East joined.
Would it feel as though the Arab Spring was alive and kicking? Or
would I just find a whole lot of sand, herds of camels, heat haze and scorching temperatures?
I wasn’t sure what would happen. I wasn’t sure how I’d get about. But I
wanted an adventure… I wanted to give it a try.
It was not to be a journey about politics alone, though I knew
that politics would play a big part. I was travelling as a tourist, not as a foreign correspondent with a well-thumbed contacts book and a series of
appointments. I would take the temperature of the region during a key period in its history as a casual visitor with an open mind. I would see what there was to see as a traveller with a guidebook. Yet by talking to people along the way, I’d get a sense of the bigger picture.
That was my hope, at least. Being a tourist would be my way of unlocking
the countries. I would take in the Byzantine ruins of Tunisia, the Roman remains in Libya and the treasures of the pharaohs in Egypt, plus some lovely
beaches in the Sinai Peninsula. What would I find out about the Arab Spring
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A Tourist in the Arab Spring
as I pottered among the ancient sights? What does an Arab Spring feel like?
Was this really a Berlin Wall moment? Or had so many of us, perhaps, fallen for the hype of deposed dictators and the rise of democracy?
The Trans-African Highway was the beginning – and as I followed the busy
road curving south along the misty edge of Tunis, with flint-grey sea on one
side and a muddle of skyscrapers on the other, I felt as though the whole of North Africa stretched ahead.
Evidence of the country’s recent upheaval quickly became apparent.
Soldiers in khaki uniforms with knapsacks slung over shoulders stood by
junctions thumbing lifts: revolutionaries on leave, by the looks of them. They leant against concrete walls, shivering, occasionally swigging bottles of
Coke, squinting into the glare of the traffic. Was that what they had fought
for, I wondered, to catch lifts on the edge of a big, cold, dusty road? The temperature was a few degrees above zero. There had been snow in the north of Tunisia two days earlier according to La Presse de Tunisie, the Frenchlanguage national paper I’d read on the plane.
I drove on amid the manic stream of cars, passing graffiti on an underpass:
‘MORT AU RCD: DEGAGE!’ (‘DEATH TO THE RCD: GET LOST!’)
The Constitutional Democratic Rally was the former political party headed by President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali in his single-party state. The unpopular leader had, quite unexpectedly, fled Tunisia precisely 28 days after protests against his dictatorship began. He was living in exile in Saudi Arabia at the time of my visit.
Strange images began to flicker ahead, almost as though I was driving
through a dream. More hitchhiking heroes appeared, remarkably cheerful-
looking despite the biting wind. For a moment I considered offering a lift,
but not fast enough. The Trans-African Highway was not a place to dawdle. Yellow taxis darted ever more daringly, accelerating through impossibly
tiny gaps between dented buses and pick-up trucks piled high with plastic
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containers. I kept in a steady, straight line, hoping they’d all stay out of the way. Tunis thinned into scrubland and shanty-town dwellings. The traffic
became quieter. By the side of the highway, chickens pecked amid debris. Nothing prevented them crossing the road (other than common sense). A
farmer in a caramel tunic with a pointed hood stood on a hillock, looking like a figure out of the Bible. A man pushed a bike heaped with bundles of bags
along the highway’s verge. I stopped to buy petrol from an OiLibya station, and a friendly but wordless assistant passed over my change in a handful
of coins so worn they might have been scraped from an archaeological dig. The landscape opened up, the horizon spreading ahead. Great grey clouds billowed towards the heavens, as though the end of the world was nigh. They
were streaked with an ethereal sand-coloured light, unlike any I had seen before. Then there were cacti… thousands upon thousands of cacti. Their green, spiky, humanoid shapes populated the scrubland as the highway rolled towards Hammamet, the beach resort: not a single tourist coach in sight.
After Hammamet, I took the turn for Sidi Bouzid. I knew it was the right
road as somebody had kindly spray-painted ‘190KM TO SIDI BOUZID’ on a rusty sign previously covered in Arabic scrawl. The city that ignited the Arab Spring did not get any other mention, not in English at least. Pausing
in a car park by a tollbooth, I heard a tap on the window. A figure wearing a blue hooded top peered downwards. He stood grinning, looking hopeful. He
was in his twenties and had a stubbly face, thin nose and coal-black eyes. He
clutched a white plastic bag. He did not appear to be a revolutionary soldier. I rolled down the window and he indicated in gestures that he’d like a lift. I
hesitated, thinking to myself ‘what the hell’, and as if reading my mind, he stepped around the vehicle and opened the passenger door.
This was how I met Hasen, the cigarette smuggler. As we drove along
a single-lane road through a long, symmetrical olive grove, I asked what
he did for a living. He looked at me sheepishly, keeping his hoodie up, his face poking out like a sea creature half hidden in a shell. ‘Les cigarettes,’ he
replied, pulling a packet of 200 from his white plastic bag. ‘I drive trucks.’
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A Tourist in the Arab Spring
We spoke in a mixture of French and English. He pointed at a pick-up truck
and explained that he was making his way back from Tunis after completing a run. He lived in the village of El Haouareb, about seventy kilometres north of Sidi Bouzid. He showed me the village on my map.
‘Le Marlboro, le Merit,’ Hasen said, referring to his latest delivery while
peering forwards through the gap in his hoodie. ‘Le Dunhill, le Carlton.’ He had picked up the cigarettes somewhere in the south.
Hasen made 300 dinars a month from smuggling – about £125. That was
not enough to live on properly, he said, and nothing had changed to improve his fortunes since the revolution. He glumly shrugged his shoulders as if
to indicate he was not particularly impressed by the Arab Spring – which
so many had hoped would transform the economy after the widespread corruption of the Ben Ali regime. The Tunisian National Institute of Statistics had recently reported that unemployment stood at 18.9 per cent, a slight rise
since the revolution, with the highest rate of around 30 per cent where I was going in the south.
‘Trois cents dinars,’ he repeated, holding up three fingers, sounding
particularly unimpressed by the figure. ‘Trois cents.’ He shook his head. We continued in silence through another olive grove.
Further on, we came to a series of roadside stalls consisting of neat rows
of canisters. The sun broke through and the liquid inside the canisters took on a golden glow. ‘Petrol from Libya,’ said Hasen, ‘smugglers.’ He smiled
approvingly, as though he was part of some kind of unofficial smugglers’ union. It seemed that people in these parts were doing whatever they could to get by, whoever might happen to be running the country.
Beyond the petrol stalls, the road narrowed and we came to a small
settlement consisting almost entirely of barbecue kiosks. By each business, the carcass of a sheep was hung to advertise the day’s fine dining. The effect was
ghoulish, as though we’d entered the site of some kind of terrible massacre. The smell of grilled mutton wafted across the smoky street. I pulled up by a stall with a few tables and chairs, and Hasen and I went for lunch.
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As Arabic music played and a (live) sheep tied to a post watched,
plaintively baaing as if sensing its fate, we dined on a spicy soup and chunks of bread followed by succulent chicken served with chips – Hasen insisted
on chicken, mumbling a reason that I could not make out. We discussed the Africa Cup of Nations: Tunisia was to take on Ghana in a key match in
a few days’ time. Hasen felt that Tunisia had a bonne équipe (a good team), though he did not think they would win. We drank thick, sugary coffee, and fell into silence. A man with ‘SECURITY’ written on his jumper stepped from behind a barbecue and began to skin a recently slaughtered sheep with a machete. We looked on as he carefully went about his task. After a while, a
waiter approached with our bill. It came to the equivalent of £3 for both of us. I paid. And as I did, a thought occurred to me: this would never have
happened back home. Quite apart from all the carcasses and the machetes, what struck me, simply, was how open Hasen had been. It was perfectly normal to him to meet a stranger and to pass the time of day as though with a long-lost friend. That was just the way things were, it seemed.
The chef with the machete began hacking through bone, as I mulled over
this sense of easy openness. It had a soft, almost fatalistic quality, I realised: soft, fatalistic, yet charming, too. I was in Arabic North Africa, and new rules
of behaviour applied: new to a Westerner unused to the Arabic world, that is. Life, I could already sense, moved in fits and starts: manic one moment, with the utter mayhem and crazed aggression of the Trans-African Highway, and calm and contemplative the next, quietly sipping coffees in the sunshine after
an impromptu barbecue. There were hitchhiking revolutionaries. There were sociable cigarette smugglers. You just had to go with the flow.
I dropped Hasen at El Haouareb. He set off down a dirt track, still hunched in
his hoodie, after scribbling his mobile phone number on a piece of paper and
telling me to call if I was in trouble or needed anything. It was late afternoon. The sun had turned tangerine. I drove the last few kilometres to Sidi Bouzid
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A Tourist in the Arab Spring
in a low blaze of orange light. The landscape was arid and crammed with
cacti casting eerie shadows. For long stretches, mine was the only vehicle in
sight. More makeshift petrol stalls materialised. I passed a police checkpoint. The officer looked surprised to see a white face at the wheel. He turned to watch me pass. I was hardly heading off to remote (and dangerous) bends of
the Congo River à la H M Stanley, or investigating Bedouin tribelands with no previous contact with the outside world in the manner of the great desert
explorer Wilfred Thesiger… but I could already sense I was far enough off the beaten track to stand out in these parts.
A flat-topped mountain range rose on the horizon. Shepherds in brown
tunics stood sentry-still, their eyes seeming to follow the KIA. The windswept
Tunisian steppes were not exactly a hive of activity. Around the shepherds, skinny sheep with ragged coats skipped between rocks, heads down to tufts of
rough grass. It looked a hard way to scratch an existence. Then the shepherds disappeared. And in the final run to Sidi Bouzid, I passed a fly-tip of rusty
old refrigerators and washing machines. The tip led to a filthy corridor of cacti covered in blue plastic bags. It was a total dump: as though there had
been some sort of ecological disaster. Nobody had cleared up in these parts for quite some time.
Beyond, ramshackle buildings appeared: neglected concrete blocks with
washing hanging from balconies. You immediately noticed the poverty on the
outskirts of Sidi Bouzid, where unemployment was particularly high even by Tunisian standards. I turned down a road that seemed to lead to the town centre; all the signs were in Arabic. In fading light, I followed the traffic along
a hectic street with garages surrounded by piles of enormous black tyres, an OiLibya station, tumbledown convenience stores stacked with plastic buckets
and brooms, and a square with a packed café. After the wide, arid landscape, the bustle came as a shock. I eased onwards in the traffic jam wondering how on earth I’d find my hotel. I didn’t have a satnav or a smartphone. I didn’t have a clue. I was in a strange city with no street signs I could read, and it was getting dark. I parked the KIA and considered what to do.
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Then I looked out of the side window and got a surprise. A giant picture
of Mohamed Bouazizi stared down, attached to what appeared to be, or had
once been, a post office. A half-smashed notice declared the building to be La Poste. Two men wrapped in heavy purple shawls sat on a broken bench by the entrance; the temperature had dropped even further and it was as good as freezing. They looked at me. I looked back at them. The haunting echo of a call to prayer played out across the dusty centre of Sidi Bouzid.
I had reached the start of it‌ where the Arab Spring began.
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