Youth Suicide Up In Tunisia

The vile and oppressive regime in Tunisia is brutally cracking down on protests, many of them led by students, against high youth unemployment in the country. Frustration and resentment against a notoriously corrupt regime has been growing in recent years. 14% of Tunisians cannot find work and unemployment amongst college graduates is double that. All the while a recent Wikileaks-released U.S. diplomatic cable from Tunis describes a Tunisian ruling elite hosting lavish parties with imported French ice cream and a pet tiger dining with three chickens a day.

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What incited the riots, finally, was a young man who attempted suicide. A hopeless college graduate who could not find work and resorted to selling fruits, only for the police force to shut him down citing absence of license. This was followed by a 24-year who killed him shouting "no for misery, no for unemployment".

Youth feel hopeless. One in three Tunisian youth now goes to college, but for what? Business investment is low in the country not due to just bureaucratic, regulatory and tax inefficiency but also to the regime's corruption. The ruling in-law Trebelsi family operates a "quasi-mafia," in the words of U.S. diplomats, which demands a take in the profits of successful firms, if not wholesale expropriation. Tunisian investors are naturally loath to invest in such a climate where property rights are not secured:

The perception of increasing corruption and the persistent rumors of shady backroom dealings has a negative impact on the economy regardless of the veracity. Contacts tell us they afraid to invest for fear that the family will suddenly want a cut. "What's the point?" Alaya Bettaieb asked, "The best case scenario is that

my investment succeeds and someone important tries to take a

cut." Persistently low domestic investment rates bear this

out.

So Tunisians suffer low investments and thus low job creation and employment prospects for the highly educated all because the ruling family, already holding a surfeit amount of money and illicit holdings, has an insatiable appetite for corruption and theft of other people's earnings. 'The Family' will destroy the entire economy and nation just to procure their own expanding empire: to mutate Tunisia from a soft dictatorship to a Banana Republic.

Tunisians put up with a lot and this may be the proverbial "straw" that will finally upend a bankrupt and insulated regime and bring about at least some measure of change:

"Sadly, the suicide rate among young people has increased as well. Some youths have even set themselves on fire in public to draw officials' attention to their depressed state. As the latest incident demonstrates, these acts are neither isolated nor exceptional. Rather, they express a deep sense of despondence among many youth that their chances for employment and a dignified life are dwindling."

This vile regime is responsible for the deaths. And the regime's goons recently killed an 18-year demonstrator. And the president recently had the nerve to visit the dead 24-year old's family and even the family of the son killed by his police force. And Ben Ali has threatened to "in all firmness" crash the protesters, blamed foreign media, especially al Jazeera, for being agitators trying to hurt the image of Tunisia; and has arrested numerous journalists and oppositions figures and his secret police has rounded up the papers of two publications who dared to report on the original protest.

The regime will likely survive this episode, but this may be the beginning of change and its inevitable demise.