Ali Griri in his office in Kasserine. (Eileen Byrne)[/caption]
From his comfortable new office, with its black leather upholstered furniture and wide-screen TV, Ali Griri has a sweeping view across the town of Kasserine to the Semmama and Chaambi mountains. Beyond lies the border with Algeria, where Griri once made his money. Through informal trading and distribution networks, he brought in appliances from Algeria—Korean-made washing-machines, televisions, fridges and air-conditioning units—to sell to Tunisian consumers at attractive prices. As his business expanded through the latter years of the rule of Tunisian President Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, he became a well-known local figure.
Griri built a five-story hostel for female college students coming from the villages of the Kasserine governorate to study in the regional capital. On the ground floor of the building, an electrical goods shop sits next door to a stylish cafe that is rather popular these days. But despite his slick surroundings, the forty-year-old father of four knows the privations of the rural hinterland of Kasserine well, as he explained to The Majalla in a recent interview.
He grew up in the small village of Bir Bou Haya, a little over 6 miles (10 kilometers) from the border with Algeria. Kasserine exemplifies all the problems of Tunisia's inland areas, which have lagged behind the coastal cities in infrastructure, industrial development and living standards. It is perhaps hardly surprising that young men in the towns of Kasserine and Thala, further to the north, were at the forefront of the nationwide rebellion that overthrew Ben Ali in January 2011. Twenty-six young men died in clashes with the police.
However, since the revolution, unemployment has remained chronically high. Investors held back from Kasserine as the town continued to see sporadic outbursts of unrest, and the central government scrambled to find an answer to the clamor for jobs. In the elections of October 2011, almost 30 percent of those who voted across the Kasserine region voted for the Islamist party Ennahda. Its religious vocabulary and track record of opposition to authoritarian rule may have seemed to offer an alternative to the topsy-turvy world of corruption and intimidation that Ben Ali's in-laws, the Trabelsis, had helped to create.
But if transparent governance and equitable development is an aspiration of many local people, local realities continue to be a bit more colorful in the short term. In the absence of new jobs, smuggling continues to be a mainstay of local economies along Tunisia's borders, as a report last year by the International Crisis Group noted. As new operators smuggling more dangerous merchandise, such as arms looted from Gaddafi's arsenals in neighboring Libya, moved in, Tunisia's National Guard and customs authority gave priority to tackling that kind of activity.
As before the revolution, tolerated smugglers would report to the security services any strangers moving along the well-worn cross-border routes. Kasserine is suffering the overspill from wider regional instability. Just when the town seemed to have found a certain calm, it emerged that an armed Islamist group, apparently including Algerians as well as Tunisians, was hiding out in the Chaambi mountains. By the end of last year, 14 Tunisian soldiers had been killed, and slopes of the Chaambi were being sporadically bombarded by the military in an attempt to flush out the militants.
This is as unwelcome to Griri as to any other local economic operator. Adapting to changing times, he is re-positioning himself as a job-generating investor in the formal economy. From his office on the top floor of a second student hostel that he built, he explains how he will shortly have in operation an assembly plant on the outskirts of Kasserine, producing the same washing machines he used to import from Algeria. His Algerian business partner and a Libyan businessman are co-investors.
He says the plant will employ 200 people—120 with electrical engineering or other qualifications, and eighty lesser-skilled workers. Last year, it secured the green light from Kasserine's industrial development authority, although Griri says he opted not to apply for any of the state financial aid available. (Created following the revolution, since May 2012 the region's development agency has been controversially headed by a former senior local official of the Ennahda party.) Griri and his Algerian associate have also bought a hotel that looks directly out onto Mount Chaambi. He hopes that, once refurbished, the hotel will attract French and other European sportsmen to hunt the wild boars that roam the mountain.
Kasserine has long had an army base on the edge of town, but Griri regards the increased army presence that resulted from the clashes on the mountain as bad for business. "Look at that," he says, as an army ambulance swings round the curve in the road outside the hotel. "This kind of thing is making people here nervous. We Tunisians are a peace-loving people." The boar-hunting French tourists will have to remain, for now, a medium-term project.
