"Your time's up," alerts 25-year-old Ayman, competing for one of four computers in a dimly lit internet cafe in Regueb, a town in Tunisia's poor Sidi Bouzid governorate. He slaps Firaz, 18, and manages to draw him away from a football chatroom. "He spends too much time on there."
Ayman and Firaz deem themselves the "original" youth of a revolution that brought down Tunisia's President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and sparked uprisings throughout the region, but not before rolling their eyes and listlessly smirking. Their daily stroll to a local café mirrors as a tour through one of Tunisia's most restive revolutionary hubs, not far from the town of Sidi Bouzid where 26-year-old fruit vendor Mohammed Bouazzi set himself on fire in protest.
Since the heady moments in January when they used the internet cafe as an information command center, dispatching updates on Facebook about police brutality and deaths, they've been idling their days away on the backstreets of a ghost town. "There's one word to describe life then and now: nothing," says Ayman, lighting his fourth cigarette of the hour. "Nothing to invest. No businesses. No land. Nothing." His words make up the refrain to Tunisia's desperately undeveloped and long-neglected interior region, the birthplace of the Arab spring. What have the revolutionaries gotten out of their revolution?
Sidi Bouzid and the other cities of the south have not seen much from their role in the revolution. The neglect of the hinterlands is nothing new, of course. During Ben Ali's 23-year rule, Tunisia focused 90 percent of its investment projects on the coastal regions, leaving the interior disproportionately underdeveloped. Unemployment in the region has increased to 18 percent, twice the rate on the coast, and while Tunisia's average national poverty rate is 18 percent, it ranges from 6 percent in Tunis to more than 30 percent in the center-west governorates.
The southern cities have long been the epicenter of violent protest against the regime. Bread riots in December 1983 in the same cities launched the most serious challenge to the Tunisian regime. If things don't improve, as seems grimly likely, rebellion may return. "Trust me, we will repeat the revolution here as soon as we can," Firaz declares, signing a petition to a Tunisian company to hire more youth from the town. "There's no dignity. We are dead."
"Are we even a part of Tunisia?" asks farmer Mohammed Hidi Bin Saleh, pointing to the only road that leads in and out of a village in the poor governorate of Kasserine. When it rains, the road's un-navigable and the children can't get to school. "We don't have faith in politics. Not before, not now. Just show us projects and development, no fancy ideas," he demands. "We'll vote for the party of bread."
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