A Product of Tunisia’s 1960s Resistance Continues to Protest
TUNIS — WhenFathi Ben Haj Yahia seeks to explain Tunisia’s troubled transition since its revolution overthrew nearly 60 years of dictatorship four years ago, he offers a parable.
“If Marx and Freud landed today in Tunisia, they would rewrite all their theories,” he said, letting out a belly laugh at the thought. “The situation here is so Kafkaesque.”
School director, former political prisoner, Marxist pamphleteer, writer and thinker, Mr. Yahia said Tunisia would confound the great philosophers, but he nevertheless lamented that Tunisia’s political theorists had failed to forge something new out of the popular uprising of 2011 that led the Arab Spring.
“We did not know how to begin; we had no Che Guevara or Khomeini,” he said ruefully. Instead, he said, Tunisians pulled a leader, President Beji Caid Essebsi, 88, from the “drawers of history.”
Source: www.nytimes.com