Tunisia, the northernmost country in Africa, is where the so-called Arab Spring started. On December 17, 2010, a street peddler named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself ablaze about 170 miles south of Tunis, the capital of Tunisia, protesting how a corrupt police officer confiscated his fruit and vegetables.

Bouazizi didn’t survive his protest and self-immolation, but his death ignited something bigger. Widespread uprisings about his treatment erupted across Tunisia and numerous other countries, creating the Arab Spring, a revolution that unleashed wild optimism that advocates of democracy could topple despots by coordinating their protests with cell phones and social media.

The upheavals almost worked. Bouazizi’s death led Tunisian dictator, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, to flee to Saudi Arabia, and protesters fiooded Cairo’s Tahir Square to force Egypt’s long-time dictator Hosni Mubarak from office.

But the current situation in this country of twelve million nestled along the shores of the Mediterranean shows that the revolution powered by cell phone and internet technology ended with an old-fashioned busy signal.

“People here now seem to care less about everything,” Med Zeid Brahim, managing director of Media.com told me on my visit here. Brahim has his finger on the pulse of Tunisian media, helping clients place advertising in broadcast, newspaper, and digital news outlets. “I think everyone’s lost faith in government and democracy,” he said. “All I care about is where I can get my kid into the best school.”

If anything symbolizes the lack of support for the democratic way cherished by Americans, it’s the trash. Threadbare tires, empty frozen waffle boxes, stained egg cartons, crushed Styrofoam containers and discarded rags litter streets and roads nearly everywhere here. Empty plastic bags whip in the branches of tree as if they were colorful plastic flags heralding the opening of a new subdivision in America.

Regular readers of this blog might reasonably wonder why I’m writing about trash in Tunisia. I usually focus my attention on subjects closer to my home in North Carolina or the condo I recently bought in Chicago.

I also often write about the press, though, and I’m now on a tour of the offices and news bureaus of the Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN), an Arabic language non-profit media organization that serves an audience of nearly twenty-eight million people in the Middle East and North Africa. I’m chairman of the board of the MBN, which is financed by a grant from an arm of the U.S. State Department. Tunisia is the first stop on my journey.

A beautiful country with white stucco homes gleaming in the sun and doorframes lined with colorful mosaics, Tunisia has a rich and storied history dating to indigenous Berber tribes. Just a short ride from Tunis are ruins from ancient Carthage, an important Mediterranean trading hub that dates to the ninth century. Carthage now is a suburb of Tunis, the eleventh largest city in the Arab world with a population of nearly three million. Since Ben Ali’s fall from power, though, Tunisia has become a contemporary symbol of how democracy American-style is not always a one-fit-for-all solution to a nation’s problems.

*photo of trash along the shores of the inland nature preserve near Sousse by James O’Shea*

In a sense, the ubiquitous trash says it all. After Tunisians deposed Ben Ali, they cycled though leadership changes, ranging from Islamists who wanted to reclaim power in the nation to Beji Caid Essebsi, Tunisia’s first freely elected president who died at ninety-two while in office.

In October 2019, Tunisians elected their current president, Kais Saied, a retired law professor turned politician, largely based on hopes that he could fix an increasingly dysfunctional political system. He didn’t. A paltry eleven percent turnout in a subsequent parliamentary election reflected Tunisian discontent with their government. Soon thereafter, Saied disbanded the Tunisian parliament and created “super presidential” constitution that dashed many hopes vested in the Arab Spring.

“Even when the Islamists were in power,” one Tunisian told me, “people swept up their neighborhoods and picked up the trash. But now they don’t care, or they don’t have anywhere to go with it. That’s why you see so much of it. It’s depressing.”

Of course, all cities have trash problems, some worse than Tunis. But Saide’s government compounds the problems with polices that are designed to make Tunisia Europe’s trash bin, according to investigations by Alhurra, an MBN broadcast outlet, and others.

“This is where they brought it,” says Asma Sahboun, a Tunisian journalist who worked on an MBN investigative report about the nation’s trash problem. She is standing in a large burned-out warehouse where seventy containers of trash had been shipped from Italian hospitals overwhelmed by the Covid pandemic. “They put the containers in here,” Sahboun said, “and then the burned the entire warehouse.”

The situation could have been worse were in not for the investigation by several journalists, including the Alhurra team. “There were 280 containers full of hospital trash from Italy,” she said. Private contractors operating the ships said the contents of the containers were to go to a recycling plant, but a suspicious customs inspector held them up. Soon journalists in Tunisia picked up on the story and discovered that the containers were full of hospital refuse.

“Trash,” Elrazzaz said, “is becoming as big a business as human trafficking.”

By the time the Alhurra team arrived on the scene, the police were frustrating any attempts to film the ships, delaying permission to start shooting and erecting bureaucratic roadblocks to routine journalistic inquiries. She said the Alhurra team finally found a spot where they could start filming with their cameras and start reporting but the interviews the team requested from the companies and the government were denied.

Under pressure by attention from the media, ships loaded with 210 containers of trash left. “I guess they took them back to Italy,” she said. But the team learned seventy containers had been taken to a warehouse a short drive from the port of Sousse, where the container ships had been moored. By the time the reporters had arrived, the warehouse housing the containers had been burned.

Standing near piles of ash, Sahboun pointed to the charred remains of hospital masks, gowns and medical gear used to treat patients in Italian hospitals that had been overwhelmed by the Covid pandemic. Lax security allowed us to wander freely through the remains of the warehouse. Ashes from the burned debris and equipment were so high that I sunk to my knees when a stepped on a pile.

Nearby, a mechanical crane worked the top of a mountain of buried trash as Eurasian spoonbills picked through the waters of a nature preserve littered with used truck and car tires, trash bags, and various items of debris.

Hussein Elrazzaz, the chief of MBN’s investigative unit, said the Alhurra investigation shows how disposing of European trash has become big business for cash strapped nations such as Tunisia. At times, he said, the debris ends up being dumped into the Mediterranean Sea. “Trash,” Elrazzaz said, “is becoming as big a business as human trafficking.”

—James O’Shea

James O’Shea is a longtime Chicago author and journalist who now lives in North Carolina. He is the author of several books and is the former editor of the Los Angeles Times and managing editor of the Chicago Tribune. Follow Jim’s Five W’s Substack here.

Trash Tarnishes Tunisia

“Trash,” Elrazzaz said, “is becoming as big a business as human trafficking.”