MAN OF THE YEAR 2011: Mohamed Bouazizi

My chosen Man of the Year for 2011 is a man who died on only the fourth day of this year. He was not a famous man. He was not a man of any great consequence, so to speak. He led an unremarkable, ordinary life in the small North African country of Tunisia.

He was a simple fruit seller.

Yet, after years of petty harassment and abuse at the hands of authorities in the small town of Sidi Bouzid, and at his wits end, he had finally had enough. So it was that on December 17th 2010, after having his plight ignored by the local governor, this man stood in the middle of traffic and set fire to himself in protest against the corruption and abuse of power he could no longer tolerate.

His words shouted out as he set fire to himself? "How do you expect me to make a living?"

This man was Mohamed Bouazizi.



He was just 26 years of age.

His act of desperate defiance became an instant cause celebre in Tunisia, and he remained in a coma for 18 days until his death on January 4th 2011.



More than 5000 people attended his funeral and many were heard shouting out that his death would be avenged and never be forgotten...

That would be putting it mildly.

Within days after his death, a welling up of public outrage and disgust against the despised regime of President Ben-Ali erupted in the streets of Tunisia, and within weeks one of the longest-running and most brutal dictatorships in the Arab world collapsed...no, to be more precise, it was toppled; topped by sheer People Power.

What happened in Tunisia in the early weeks of 2011 stunned the entire world.

And so the Arab Spring was born.

It was a veritable house of cards that fell in one of the most repressed and undemocratic regions in the world:

• Egypt - the overwhelming, joyous overthrow of the most reviled and powerful of them all, Hosni Mubarak
• Yemen - which will yet fall
• Syria - on the brink
• Libya - Qaddafi was goodriddance, even if his ouster by being murdered was barbaric and if for mostly wrong and no doubt the most cynical reasons
• Bahrain, Morocco, Algeria, Jordan, even the UAE - dictatorships all, and all very, very, very worried
• Saudi Arabia - can we hope?

And so the Arab Spring continues. It continues to galvanize not only the Arab world but similar people revolts all over the world - the Occupy Wall Street movement of New York, Portland, Oakland and numerous other US cities and cities worldwide, the sit-ins of Madrid, Barcelona, London and Rome, the rage of Athens - it goes on and on and on.

A groundswell of outrage by ordinary people all over the world, sick and tired of the lies and manipulation and outright obscene greed of the super rich and their corporate-politico puppets. A rage that marks 2011 as a watershed year for humanity, much as were 1789 or 1848 or 1968 or 1989...

And all because one man decided he could take the abuse of power no more, and whose desperate act of defiance is a mirror to all of us who have simply had enough.

For all those reasons, and many, many more, I do not hesitate in making Mohamed Bouazizi my Man of the Year for 2011.

He is a our everyman, a martyr for humanity.