A Terrible Time In Tunisia

Time to stick another flag on the global crisis board.

Tunisia's president -- whose country has been embattled by weeks of street protests over poor living conditions and repression of rights -- has dissolved the government and declared a state of emergency, state TV said Friday.

President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who announced concessions to meet some grievances the day before in a nationally televised TV address, made the moves in reaction to the instability in the North African country.

Officials said the reason for the emergency declaration is to protect Tunisians and their private property. People are not allowed on the street from 5 p.m. to 7 a.m.

People in gatherings of three or more will be arrested or they will be fired on if they try to run away and can't be stopped.

Ben Ali also will call for parliamentary elections within six months. The government sacking comes days after the president dumped the interior minister and fired a couple of aides.

First Ivory Coast, now Tunisia.  Things are getting ugly out there in 2011.  The global recession is far from over folks, and you will see more government fall worldwide as the problem only gets larger.  MoJo's Nick Baumann has your primer on the north Africa country:

What's happening? Violent riots and protests have spread across the country over the past four weeks. Now Ben Ali's totalitarian government seems to be collapsing. (Elliott Abrams, a former Bush administration official who unfortunately is rarely right about anything, thinks that if democracy can take hold in Tunisia, is could spread elsewhere in the Arab world, too.)

Why are Tunisians unhappy? Well, they don't have much freedom. But there also just aren't enough jobs. Official unemployment is 13 percent, but it's probably actually much higher. The combination of a repressive regime and a faltering economy is often bad news for the regime. Plus, the regime has diverted a lot of the country's wealth to Ben Ali's family and friends, so people are really upset about official corruption.

How did it all start? On December 19, authorities in the small, central city of Sidi Bouzid seized the produce cart that 26-year-old Mohamed Bouazizi was using to make a living. So Bouazizi set himself on fire. Young people in the small, central city of Sidi Bouzid rioted, and police moved to seal the city. In early January, Bouazizi died, becoming an early martyr for the cause. Brian Whitaker, the Middle East editor of the Guardian and a Tunisia expert, has a good article explaining how Bouazizi and Sidi Bouzid got the ball rolling on revolution.

The bigger picture is nearly all of North Africa is facing something of a domino effect right now, including food riots in Tunisia's neighbor Algeria, and crackdowns in Algeria's neighbor, Morocco.

There's also the possibility that WikiLeaks releasing cables showing the State Department's brutally frank assessment of the corruption of the now crumbling Ben Ali regime may have contributed to the unrest.

North Africa is in real trouble at this point, and if problems spread eastward into Libya, Egypt, and Jordan then things could get very nasty indeed.  Keep an eye on the region.