Artocracy Project - Ordinary Tunisians in Portrait
It used to be that only one man’s face could grace any billboard in Tunisia. Former President/Dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali made sure his ageless mug was plastered everywhere, so that no one could avoid seeing his likeness every time they stepped out of the house. I can only imagine what it would have been like . . .
Take an afternoon stroll down the street, look up to admire the blue sky, and there’s Ben Ali waving to you flashing his botox smile. Pickup the kids from kindergarten, and there he is on the side of the school with his hand over his heart, showing you he cares. Pop into the fish market to pick up something for dinner, and there he is again, this time hard at work on his iMac (because of course, whenever you think fish market the next thought is dictators using Apple products).
But when Ben Ali was forced to flee the country following a revolution in January against his 23-year rule, all those posters were torn down by protestors in a sort of cathartic release. Suddenly Tunisia was awash in empty canvases, waiting to be filled by a community of artists and photographers whose creative freedom had been suppressed for most of their lives.
French street artist JR (in hat and shades) in front of portraits.
Wasting no time, businessman Slim Zeghal brought a collective of Tunisian photographers together with award-winning French street artist JR to create the Autocracy Project. They travelled across the country, photographing portraits of ordinary Tunisians representing a cross-section of society. These photos were then blown up into posters and placed on monuments, alleyways in impoverished neighbourhoods, and even cars that were burnt during the revolution.
Artocracy Project - Ordinary Tunisians in Portrait
Personally I find Artocracy to be beautiful, powerful, and humanizing – giving public space and recognition to the regular folks who suffered for far too long under a brutal regime. The world may never no their name, but in some way all of them contributed to what may become one of the most defining moments in modern history. Also, nothing neuters the imposing memory of a former police station like a few smiling faces.
Artocracy Project - Portraits on a former police station, burned during the revolution
While organizers like to view the project as a success, it hasn’t been without its problems. Initially, the posters were just thrown up without any prior notice and residents didn’t react well to this approach. Many people noted that after so many years of Ben Ali’s political slogans thrown up on billboards in their neighbourhood without their consent, they didn’t appreciate the sudden appearance of these portraits. Learning from their mistakes, photographers made an effort to explain the project to residents before the posters were put up and received a much warmer response.
Autocracy Project - Ordinary Tunisians in Portrait
Interaction with the portraits and encouraging lively debate are all part of the project, says Tunisian photographer Marco Berrebi in this interview with Al Jazeera:
“After 50 years of silence, people are willing to discuss, to talk, to challenge your ideas . . . If people want to tear them down, or write something on them, that’s part of the project, that’s okay.”
Whether or not street art takes hold in Tunisia, the organizers of Artocracy should feel a real sense of accomplishment in how quickly they managed to bring all of this together.
Artocracy Project - Ordinary Tunisians in Portrait
Opposition Rally - Baku, Azerbaijan - June 5th, 2005 (Photo by Shakh Aivazov/AP Photo)
Azerbaijan has had a history of popular protest as far back as 1918 when it declared independence from the Russian Empire. More recently in 1990 citizens rallied for independence from the USSR, Soviet troops moved into the capital Baku and opened fire on civilians in what would become known as Black January.
After independence protests against then-president Heydar Aliyev were regular but muted. Many Azerbaijanis were willing to tolerate rampant corruption because they believed that after the country had stabilized and grown economically, Aliyev would be able to bring reform. As time wore on, this belief came to be held by fewer and fewer people as Aliyev made moves to secure more wealth and power for himself and his associates.
Before his death in 2003, Aliyev set in motion a transfer of power to his son, Ilham who remains in office to this day. This culminated in the 2003 presidential elections that saw Ilham Aliyev win by a large margin. The process was widely condemned as being a fraud, with various international organizations citing examples of corruption from before campaigning had even begun, right up until the final results were announced.
This widespread fraud served as a catalyst that saw the ranks of reform-minded groups and political parties swell, their aim was democratic reform and the moment that they chose for this were the 2005 parliamentary elections.
The run-up to and aftermath of this election is detailed in the excellent BBC Documentary How to Plan a Revolution, which was broadcast on CBC several years ago.
The film follows the efforts of young activists Emin Hüseynov and Murad Gassanly as they try to organize popular support for democratic reforms. The film has an incredible amount of access to the reform movement, camera crews follow the pair at night as they spray graffiti, drop leaflets into public spaces, and organize protests – all acts which could land them treason charges and life imprisonment.
It’s also an excellent document on the various kinds of corruption an autocratic regime engages in order to suppress popular will during an election and de-rail reformists. Some methods used include using government-sponsored volunteer clubs to provoke protestors into shoving matches, thus justifying use of force by riot police, seizing ballot boxes, arresting election officials who witness fraud, and refusing to register opposition candidates without reason.
In one of the film’s most absurd moments, a bag of hand grenades and explosives is found out in the open in the building that houses the offices for various youth movements. Murat speculates that Azerbaijani security forces employed an old KGB tactic: planting weapons to try and link the movement to violence, discrediting them and giving police grounds for mass arrests. Activists immediately phone journalists to the scene and proceed to call the police to report the explosives. A few officers arrive, take a quick look at the weapons, and leave without making any statements. This prompts the group to turn in the explosives to the police themselves, accompanied by journalists.
Protestors from the "Azadliq" (Freedom) youth group, including Emin Hüseynov, during a protest against election fraud. Baku, Azerbaijan - November 10th, 2005 (photo: Joseph Sywenkyj/New York Times)
The protests against the Aliyev regime culminated with a rally following the announcement of the election results (which saw Aliyev’s NAP and his “independent candidate” supporters win a large majority), and soon after that a day of protest on November 27th. This rally was attended by a cross section of Azerbaijani society: women, men, young, old, elites, the poor and working class. It was brutally crushed by riot police who used tear gas, water canons and beat protestors indiscriminately.
It was difficult enough to watch the final minutes of the film and seeing the hopes of many Azerbaijanis dashed by brute force. What makes it worse in my opinion is that it happened within the context of a deeply hypocritical US foreign policy in the region.
When the neighbouring state of Georgia had it’s Rose Revolution in 2003, and Ukraine had it’s Orange Revolution in 2004, then US president George W. Bush not only supported the reform movement with words, but also with diplomatic initiatives, and cash for activist groups. Perhaps most importantly for the reform movement: Bush pressured both governments to allow peaceful protest and the security forces largely stood aside. This allowed protests to build quickly into a critical mass over the course of only a few days, much like what happened in Egypt during the early days of its recent revolution.
The Bush administration gave the appearance that it was supportive of democratic reform throughout the region. In May of 2005, six months before the Azerbaijani elections, Bush visited Georgia’s capital of Tblisi to give a speech. He congratulated that nation’s reformers and reaffirmed the United State’s commitment to spreading democracy, saying: “Now, across the Caucasus . . . we see the same desire for liberty burning in the hearts of young people. They are demanding their freedom – and they will have it.”
Many Azerbaijanis took this as a sign that the US, and even Bush himself, would back their efforts for democratic reform. They were to be profoundly disappointed.
A young protestor holding a poster of U.S. President George W. Bush. Baku, Azerbaijan - June 5th, 2005. (photo: Shakh Aivazov/AP Photo)
The Bush administration did not even acknowledge the reform movement’s existence, it did not comment on abuses of power by Ilham Aliyev’s regime, and it ignored a report by election observers and resolution by the European Council that condemned widespread election fraud. By turning a blind eye to the situation, the US showed that it was willing to let Aliyev crush the opposition, thus allowing him to send in the riot police during the November 27th protest of 2005.
To add insult to injury, just over a year later, Bush held talks with Ilham Aliyev at the White House. Bush looked on as Aliyev remarked at how he looks to the US as a model of a secular, democratic nation that he wished to emulate. Bush also remarked about Aliyev’s key role in energy security, which was telling.
As I pointed out in my last post, Azerbaijan is a major oil exporter. But more specifically, Aliyev was a key figure in the construction of several crucial oil pipelines that serve Western markets. It’s pretty clear to most observers that energy politics determined Bush’s foreign policy in the region, and not the spread of democratic reform, as he claimed in his Tblisi speech. He had a leader in Aliyev that was receptive to Western energy demands and an early ally in Bush’s War on Terror. Whatever leader emerged from an Azerbaijani revolution may not be as warm to the U.S. as Aliyev was. They may build the next pipeline to service southern Russia or Central Asia instead of Europe.
Much like elsewhere in the world, The U.S. was willing to overlook an autocratic leader’s corruption so long as they aligned themselves with Western interests.
After the events in Egypt of the last several weeks, most of us are familiar with the main criticisms of the former Mubarak regime: It snuffed out free speech and political representation, its interior ministry ran a police state rather than a police force, the services it provided were wretchedly ineffective and mismanaged, and Mubarak and his cronies siphoned off public money into their own pockets with impunity.
Ordinary citizens fought against this regime in a variety of ways, such as organizing protests, or exposing police corruption. They paid for these actions with jail time, torture, and in some cases, their very lives.
But you didn’t need to choose to become an activist in order to feel the weight of all that corruption bearing down on your shoulders. Mubarak’s kleptocracy ensured that ordinary Egyptians endured countless indignities that often existed out in the open, for everyone to see.
When I visited Cairo in April, 2010 it didn’t take me long to spot a blatant example of this corruption: hundreds, perhaps thousands of what appeared to be apartment buildings still under construction. Their concrete skeletons poured, walls patched up with rough brick, steel rebar jutting out of roofs and walls. Yet for all this construction, there was a mysterious absence of any construction workers, equipment, or scaffolding. In fact, many of these buildings appeared to have residents – as evidenced by laundry hanging in windows that lacked shutters.
I found out via a travel companion and several Egyptians I spoke to that these buildings are primarily a result of a loophole. So long as a building is still under construction, it’s not subjectable to property tax. And because the housing shortage in many cities like Cairo is so severe, owners have no trouble finding families willing to live in a shell of a building. For some it’s a better option than living on a roof, or in a cemetery, but that isn’t really saying much.
The photos in the gallery above were taken on an elevated highway in the western suburbs of Cairo that is one of the main routes to get from downtown to the pyramids. The fact that anyone visiting Egypt’s number one tourist attraction can see these structures says a lot about how comfortable Mubarak’s regime had become with their rampant corruption – they didn’t even attempt to hide its most visible representations. Nor did the officials responsible for the loophole make any attempt to distance themselves from the developers and landlords they were supposedly regulating.
We drove at highway speeds for over ten minutes, and the entire time almost all the buildings we could see were unfinished, they cover an enormous area, and that’s just in one suburb. In between photographs I took some video on my old Canon HV40 which you can see below. I didn’t bring my gorillapod with me on the trip (I hadn’t planned to do much filming in cars), so please excuse the handheld.
(Music: “Reach for the Door” by my friend Elevator Boy)
These construction sites don’t have electricity or water, and given their height I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to live in these structures. Residents either go to the washroom in buckets which they carry downstairs or share a communal toilet on the ground floor. When a sandstorm rolls in off the desert, their apartments and all their possessions are covered with sand due to a lack of windows or even properly sealed walls. And as with any construction site there are nails, steel, and rough concrete edges that are hazardous enough to workers, let alone the many children that live in these structures.
The indignity of life in these buildings must be bad enough, but what makes it much worse is how much money developers, landowners and government officials have been making by charging rent for buildings which cost literally nothing to operate, and almost nothing to build. Ahmed al-Maghraby, who was Mubarak’s Minister of Housing until the revolution, has a net worth estimated at $1.8 billion.
Now that Egypt’s state prosecutor is free from intimidation and threats, he’s preparing with investigations against several former ministers, including Maghraby. The cases need the approval of the military to proceed and the supreme council is reviewing the evidence. It remains to be seen if the new government can start to grapple with the indignities of the old, and provide Egyptians with a more promising future.
