Mohamed Bouazizi

Tarek El-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi (طارق الطيب محمد البوعزيزي; 29 March 1984 – 4 January 2011) was a Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire on 17 December 2010 in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, an act which became a catalyst for the Tunisian Revolution and the wider Arab Spring against autocratic regimes.

His self-immolation was in response to the confiscation of his wares and the harassment and humiliation inflicted on him by a municipal official and her aides.

Mohamed Bouazizi, who was known locally as "Babousa", was born in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, on 29 March 1984.

His father, a construction worker in Libya, died of a heart attack when Bouazizi was three, and his mother married Bouazizi's uncle some time later.

Along with his six siblings, Bouazizi was educated in a one-room country school in Sidi Salah, a small village 19 km from Sidi Bouzid.

Although several media outlets reported that Bouazizi had a university degree, his sister, Samia Bouazizi, stated that he had never graduated from high school, but that it was something he had wanted for both himself and his sisters.

With his uncle in poor health and unable to work regularly, Bouazizi had worked various jobs since he was ten, and in his late teens he quit school in order to work full-time.

His father left a three-hectare plot of land whose produce hardly provided for the family.

His uncle tried to build a farm that uses irrigation water by taking a loan from a bank to finance the project.

With Mohamed working on the farm, the uncle fell in debt, and subsequently, the bank took hold of the land.

It was during that time that the young man became a street vendor.

Bouazizi lived in a modest stucco home, a 20-minute walk from the centre of Sidi Bouzid, a rural town in Tunisia burdened by corruption and suffering an unemployment rate estimated at 30%.

According to his mother, he applied to join the army, but was refused, and several subsequent job applications also resulted in rejection.

He supported his mother, uncle, and younger siblings, including paying for one of his sisters to attend university, by earning approximately US$140 per month selling produce on the street in Sidi Bouzid.

He was also working toward the goal of buying or renting a pickup truck for his work.

A close friend of Bouazizi said he "was a very well-known and popular man who would give free fruit and vegetables to very poor families".

According to friends and family, local police officers has been targeting and mistreating Bouazizi since his childhood, regularly confiscating his produce cart; Bouazizi, having no other way to make a living, continued working as a street vendor.

Ostensibly, he was targeted because he lacked a vendor's permit, but whether he even required one was initially unclear: Rania Abouzeid of Time Magazine claimed that street vending was outright illegal in Tunisia, while Guardian reporter Peter Beaumont claimed that Bouazizi had attempted to secure a permit but was refused.

Following his death, it was confirmed by then-head of the Sidi Bouzid State Office for Employment and Independent Work Hamdi Lazhar that no permit is required to sell from a cart.

Thusly, police were accused by two of Bouazizi's sisters of attempting to extort him, leaving him ultimately unable to pay the bribes necessary to allow his street vending to continue.

In an interview with Reuters, one of the sisters stated: "What kind of repression do you imagine it takes for a young man to do this? A man who has to feed his family by buying goods on credit when they fine him ... and take his goods. In Sidi Bouzid, those with no connections and no money for bribes are humiliated and insulted and not allowed to live."

On the evening of 16 December 2010, he took on approximately US$200 in debt in order to acquire the produce he was to sell the following day.

The following morning on 17 December, he started his workday at 8 a.m. Just after 10:30 a.m., the police began to harass him.

The details of the events were disputed: Bouazizi's family alleged that he was publicly humiliated and slapped in the face by female police officer Faida Hamdi, who allegedly spat at him before toppling his cart and confiscating his electronic scales.

It was also claimed that she made a slur against his deceased father; her gender, according to his family, made his humiliation worse.

Hamdi and her brother disputed this, maintaining that she did not slap Bouazizi or otherwise mistreat him, and an unnamed eyewitness likewise said to Asharq Al-Awsat that they did not see her slap Bouazizi.

Hamdi did admit, however, that her colleagues may have kicked and beaten him after confiscating his fruit cart.

Angered by the confrontation, Bouazizi went to the governor's office to complain and demand the return of his scales.

The governor refused to see or listen to him, even after Bouazizi was quoted as saying, "If you don't see me, I'll burn myself."

Bouazizi then acquired a can of gasoline from a nearby gas station and returned to the governor's office.

At 11:30 a.m., less than an hour after the altercation, Bouazizi stood outside the office in the middle of traffic and shouted, "How do you expect me to make a living?"

before dousing himself and igniting himself with a match.

According to Bouazizi's sister and uncle, people immediately panicked when he caught fire, and one of them tried to douse him with water.

Simmering public anger and sporadic violence intensified following Bouazizi's death, leading the then-president of Tunisia, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to step down on 14 January 2011, after 23 years in power.

The success of the Tunisian protests inspired protests in several other Arab countries, plus several non-Arab countries.

The protests included several men who emulated Bouazizi's act of self-immolation, in an attempt to bring an end to their own autocratic governments.

Those men and Bouazizi were hailed by New York Times commentators as "heroic martyrs of a new North African and Middle Eastern revolution".

In 2011, Bouazizi was posthumously awarded the Sakharov Prize jointly along with four others for his and their contributions to "historic changes in the Arab world".

The Tunisian government honored him with a postage stamp.

The Times of the United Kingdom named Bouazizi as "Person of 2011", The Jerusalem Post's Amotz Asa-El named him "Person of the Jewish Year 5771" and "The Protester" was named Time 2011 Person of the Year.