GAFSA, Tunisia — Tunisians often say the first uprising of the Arab Spring began not in 2010 after the self-immolation of a fruit vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, but in 2008, when protests over corrupt hiring practices at the mines of Gafsa ran on for six months. It is a measure of the lingering challenges of Tunisia’s revolution that people here are still in revolt.
In the towns of Moulares and Redeyef, protests have idled the phosphate mines — a cornerstone of the economy — for much of the last three years. Citizens regularly block roads and burn tires. Police and government officials are barely tolerated.
“We will never stop this strike until we get a job,” said Bashir Mabrouki, 28, in a group of young people who huddled around a brazier while guarding a barricade of rocks and scrap metal that blocked shipments last month. “We are being played by the government and their fake promises.”
The complaints are an enduring refrain even since the overthrow of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in January 2011. They point to what many here see as the unfinished business of their revolution, and a problem endemic across North Africa: the failure to meet the aspirations of a youthful population.
The joblessness and aimlessness of young people remain a deep well of volatility, whether or not countries took part in the Arab Spring. Youth unemployment in neighboring Algeria is at 21 percent, according to World Bank data. In Egypt it is 25 percent, and in Morocco, 18 percent.
Here in Tunisia, where more than 30 percent of young people cannot find work, the Gafsa mines are in many ways emblematic of the challenges that governments face.
Jobs here have been declining since a shift to open-pit mining in the 1970s. Wary of unrest, successive governments have put the state’s shoulder behind creating 15,000 jobs in the phosphate mines and attached environment, forestry and transport enterprises.
While International Monetary Fund economists criticized the efforts for expanding the public sector, the state is still failing to create nearly enough opportunities for the unemployed. Some 30,000 people applied in the last round of job openings at Gafsa for just 2,700 jobs, said Kamel Ben Naceur, minister of industry, energy and mines.
Each round of hiring incites a bout of new unrest from those not selected. “This is a conservative society, and youngsters do not listen to their elders anymore, and they react because they have reached complete despair,” said Najib Mabrouki, 51, a representative of the local labor union.
The same complaints that compelled the revolt against the dictatorship — of poverty and pollution, a lack of basic services like electricity and clean water, and corruption in parceling out coveted jobs — continue to animate the protests against Tunisia’s new technocratic government, which took over in January.
In Moulares, wagons filled with mounds of gray silt stand abandoned amid weeds on train tracks, and the factory siren blares over an empty washing plant. Workers and their families have forsaken their bonuses to join the protests of the unemployed.
“There is no social justice,” said Mohammad Nasir Saidi, who lives near the blockaded train tracks. He lost his job when the foreign mining company he worked for closed because of the unrest, yet he directs his anger at the government. “They are stealing our natural resources, and they are not helping us. They do not care about the people.”
A small crowd of men in their 20s and 30s gathered around him. All said they were jobless.
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