Tunisia: "66 dead are too high a cost just for YouTube"

I take this sentence from the analysis on the Tunisian Intifafa by Alma Allende at La Haine. The phrase, issued by some unnamed Tunisian friend of hers, made just hours before Ben Ali had to flee the country, reflects that the battle against dictatorship still ongoing in the country of Hannibal.

The figure by now is more than a hundred killed, mostly brave citizens defending the country against the tyrants. And ceretainly some makeup concessions like access to YouTube is not worth it, a substantial regime change must happen: too much blood has been spilled, too much energy is still piling up.

We have made it shatter but not yet fall, was another of his comments. Yet they made him fall just hours later, when as Allende puts it, the people suddenly discovered that tens of thousands of unarmed civilians are still perfectly able to overcome a bunch of armed policemen. At a cost but sometimes cost does not matter anymore because there's no dignified option left.

January 14th is already remembered as the day that the Tunisian People demonstrated their democratic and revolutionary might. January 14th is our July 14th (takeover of the Bastille, some 220 years ago, national holiday in France).

However the struggle obviously continues, with the heirs of Ben Ali killing each other in the streets of Carthage, (today just a suburb of modern Tunis, where the Presidential Palace is located) and the people still in force out there in the streets, creating civil committees by neighborhoods in order to keep order and prevent looting and provocations by police  forces, loyal to the shattered regime.

While the interim president and the PM, the same one as before, have announced a concentration government, it would seem that only the Liberal parties will be in it, with no mention of the Communists, who may still be mostly in prison (I have not read any news about their release) and explicit protest of being ignored by the Islamists.

It seems to me that a second phase to this unfinished revolution is still awaiting.


Update: more references on Tunisia by Tunisians at Nawaat de Tunisie (French and Arabic mostly). 

Also IDOM has some coverage, often warning against the playing by NATO of the Islamo-Fascist card in order to thwart this revolution. Islamism has been played against Socialism and Communism in all the so-called Middle East, from Morocco to Afghanistan and it has been played by the puppeteers of Washington and Tel Aviv: the Saudis specially.

From the streets of Tunis they got this sentence:

Have you seen men with long beards at the our demonstrations in Tunisia? No! Because we do not need those people to liberate ourselves.