Michael Totten, World Affairs, met with Fadia Hamdi, the government official whose altercation with Mohamed Bouazizi led to the Arab Spring. The whole interview is worth reading with new details and nuances that were missed at the time. In the interview Totten reflects on whether she was corrupt like her bosses, did she target Bouazizi for not paying her, did he squeeze her breasts, did she really slap him and did Obama share inaccurate information about her. Below I consolidated parts of her words from the excellent interview:
“First of all, I’m not a cop. I work for the municipality as a civilian. My job was to chase away illegal fruit vendors. I don’t carry a gun. I don’t have a truncheon. I don’t carry a weapon at all. I hadn’t been picking on Bouazizi, I have never even spoken to him before that day. I had been tolerating his illegal work for a long time, but that week I had an order from the ministry to confiscate any merchandise sold from any illegal vendor from that particular place. So I was doing my job. When I confronted him he said, ‘why are you targeting me? If I paid you bribes, you wouldn’t target me.’ I don’t take bribes. I confiscated the electronic scale Bouazizi used to weigh fruit, but I never slapped him. He pushed me and actually wounded me. So I screamed and called the police. They weren’t armed either when they showed up, or attack him. They just pushed him away so he couldn’t hit me. They confiscated his things and took him down to the station. In a small town like this a woman hitting a man is a headline. But the rest of the day was normal for me. I went home as if nothing had happened. Then I got a call that Bouazizi had burned himself.”
