SIDI BOUZID, Tunisia (Reuters) –They called it the “slap heard around the Arab world”. And it never happened.
Or so said yesterday the Tunisian policewoman who was accused of hitting a young man in the face four months ago, prompting him to set himself alight and triggering a chain reaction of popular anger against Arab police states that has since unseated two dictators and caused others to tremble.
“I’m innocent. I did not slap him,” Fadia Hamdi, the 36-year-old policewoman, told a court in the provincial city of Sidi Bouzid before the judge dismissed the case and freed her.
The mother of Mohamed Bouazizi, the young vegetable seller who felt so aggrieved by Hamdi’s treatment of him that he set himself on fire, forgave the policewoman in a spirit of “reconciliation” and dropped the complaint against her.
Hamdi’s lawyer said she had been made a scapegoat by deposed president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, who had her jailed as he fought to appease the protests triggered by Bouazizi’s death.
Three months after Ben Ali’s flight from Tunis, Hamdi’s acquittal provoked jubilation among her friends and Tunisia’s state news agency TAP declared the ruling a proof of judicial independence and a “break with the old regime”.
Manoubia, the mother of Bouazizi whose name has been on the lips of millions who marched to overthrow Ben Ali and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, told the court according to TAP: “I leave things in God’s hands. For me, it is enough that Mohamed’s martyrdom has resulted in freedom and the fall of tyrants.”
Since Mubarak’s deparature from Cairo in February, marking the high point of the “Arab Spring” movement in the most populous Arab state, authoritarian rulers have held their own.
