International aid has recently poured into Tunisia to confront the viral invasion of a country that has been devastated by poverty and marginalization and exacerbated by the pandemic.

International aid comes in the name of international solidarity and solidarity among peoples… But the questions that must be asked are:

Why doesTunisia need international aid?

Who has brought it to a state of need for others to exist?

Why has the condition of its survival become outside of itself and will?

Qatar has contributed with a mobile hospital and medical equipment, the Emirates with vaccination doses, Turkey also with medical and pharmaceutical materials and vaccination, and Algeria with vaccination and oxygen. In addition to the United States of America, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and others.

This aid was necessary, and the necessity stems from the assumption that the absence of aid will cause Tunisia a catastrophic epidemic situation that may lead to the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and threaten the rest with displacement and destruction…

Why could Tunisia not meet its health needs?

The shocking data has proven that in the state of “Independence”, that is, from the state of Bourguiba through Ben Ali and the state of the revolution until today, Tunisia’s hospitals collectively do not have more than a hundred recovery beds, for a population of more than 11 million people.

Nissaf Ben Alaya, a spokeswoman for the Ministry of Health and director of the National Observatory of New and Emerging Diseases, says that the health system has collapsed, and announced the end of a gain that Tunisia has always been proud of, and even if her words are inaccurate, the health system is at its worst and has become unable to keep pace with the epidemiological situation in the country. Why?

Since the nineties, the Tunisian state has chosen to abandon the role of the state and to adopt neoliberal options that subject everything to the duality of supply and demand and to abandon the role of the regulatory state (l’Etat régulateur).

The state’s economic and political choices have weakened the basic sectors in Tunisia such as education, health, transportation and scientific research, and the regime has transformed the lifestyle in Tunisia into a service model.

The Tunisian people have brought down the authoritarian political authority, considering its neglect of the political gains of the state and the people, and the starvation of the people, the hitting of public facilities and the spread of unemployment as an epidemic.

The revolution was announced on the fourteenth of January 2011, and the world waited for Tunisia to begin a new historical stage capable of changing the face of political practice not only in the region but also in the world. What happened?

It is true that the new rulers of Tunisia arrived through free elections, but we cannot consider them to have arrived within a democratic system because this same system is simply in the process of being formed.

The new rulers in Tunisia preserved the same economic frameworks and structures and the same sociological and legislative structures, and thus responded precisely to Albert Einstein’s saying “It is naive to be faced with the same conditions and the same circumstances and expect different results…”

 Indeed, the rulers of Tunisia repeated the same thing that Ben Ali did economically and developmentally, and they waited for revolutionary results!!!

It is this political and intellectual naivety that characterized the rulers of Tunisia after the revolution, so they were unable to manage everything, even the same incapacity.

They neglected the rest of the basic services in health, education and transportation.

They understood capitalism in a superficial way. They considered it selling everything to the private, and they forgot that it is an economic mode of production based on the individual, but the state has a modifying role in strategic sectors. Respected countries, no matter how poor and simple they are, do not neglect their health and education, and do not give the fate of their generations to the global financial metropolis brokers.

After the revolution, the rulers of Tunisia did not deal with the country from the point of view of history, but rather as mere officials who would pass through power and that’s it.

They were unable to manage the crisis and find accurate answers to Tunisian questions. They were unable to find a vision based on strategic plans and foresight for the future. Therefore, they neglected the health of Tunisians and were involved politically, morally and legally in the killing of thousands of Tunisian people.

It is true that international aid reflects the extent of the value of solidarity between peoples, but it should not hide the crime of neglecting life by rulers that Tunisia has known from the fifties until today.

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