This whole Tunisia thing has caught me by surprise a bit.  I’ve been to Tunisia a couple of times and never realised things were that bad.  I never really looked into it and sort of assumed that Bourguiba was the ‘baddie’ and the present government were an improvement.

I feel a bit foolish now, and wonder if I was walking around there with my eyes closed.  All I saw was a a population that was extremely patriotic, especially about their national football team, an ostensibly liberalised country, and a well-educated younger generation.  In my defence, I was only there on holiday and not as an investigative journalist.

Anyway…  I was slightly amused when I saw a banner headline on the BBC News channel on the TV screens at work today.  We get some students shouting in Parliament Square and a few windows broken and the media is full of headlines about civil war, anarchy, riots, etc.  Tunisia has a mass uprising with tanks in the streets, civilians gunned down, a president fleeing the country and clouds of smoke hanging over its capital and the BBC carries a report about the “unrest” in Tunisia.

Let’s hope it never happens here because the media have already used up all their hyperbolic descriptions on a couple of small-scale demonstrations!

Unrest is such a low-key term, but then we called a decades-long armed conflict in Northern Ireland “the troubles”.   The further away from London something is the greater the understatement.

Incidentally, while thinking about the Tunisian situation and the student demos I rememberd what our daughter said about the protests.  She had classes at the time and said she wouldn’t go anyway because “demonstrating never makes any difference”…   tell that to Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali!