Boussoffara believes that part of the aftermath of the 2010/2011 uprising was the search for true and false martyrs of the Jasmine Revolution. By Anand Holla
For Tunisian photographer Amine Boussoffara, photography is a sensitivity that enables him to see beautiful things from a distance, and to allow others to benefit from this.
However, reality isn’t always a spectacle of joy and Boussoffara is as clued in to translating beauty in his field of view as he is to conveying vagaries of reality.
The 41-year-old self-taught independent visual artist’s poignant photo series titled Ghosts of the Revolution — on the police officers who died during the Jasmine Revolution, their families’ wait for justice, and the mystery around their deaths — was part of the travelling exhibition Stories of Change: Beyond the Arab Spring, which was recently held at Katara to much acclaim.
By celebrating authenticity in visual storytelling, Stories of Change offers us an intimate perspective on everyday life in five North African countries — Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia — through the eyes of a group of photographers and videographers from the region, all alumni of the Reporting Change training programme run by World Press Photo Academy through 2012 and 2014.
Boussoffara’s photo story is packed with striking visuals that compel one to think and question. A framed photo of Abbas Boughanmi (22), his uniform and belt lay on a bed, while his official cap and an open page from a holy verse are seen in the foreground. Policeman Boughanmi was killed together with his lieutenant in a squad car at Soukra on January 16, 2011. The incident was put down to a military error, but the families want the soldiers who killed them to face justice. In another picture, his mother is seen looking out of the window of their home — she says she is still awaiting justice for her son’s death.
Photographs of deceased policemen are seen stuck on the walls of the rooms in the offices of the Syndicat National des Forces de Sécurité Intérieure (SFSI), which is the police union founded to investigate the cases of security officers killed in unclear circumstances in January 2011. In these offices, colleagues and relatives of the departed appear anxious; a female cop is seen giving a defiant interview for a national TV channel.
Boussoffara pulls in scenes from a ceremony held in tribute to the deceased officers, a celebration marking two years of the revolution attended by a family of a deceased policeman, and even from the stairwell of a building to show how families of the fallen police officers periodically hold symbolic funerals, as a tribute and form of protest, and in order to continue calling attention to the investigation.
The Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia — the uprising sparked by the self-immolation of the 26-year-old market trader Mohamed Bouazizi in December 2010 — protested against corruption, poverty, and political repression. The success of this uprising ignited a wave of similar protests throughout the Middle East and North Africa, but it left more than 300 people dead.
“Most of those killed during the December-January street clashes, which led ultimately to the ousting of President Zine Ben Ali, were protesters, but among the dead were a number of security officers, including seven police officers and three national guardsmen, who were reviled by protesters as agents of the regime,” says a note on Boussoffara’s photo series.
The new government’s official investigation into the Jasmine Revolution deaths took more than a year, and it laid the blame largely on the former president, who gave orders to crush the insurgency with violence, before himself fleeing the country. “Accusations were made that snipers continued to spread terror after Ben Ali’s flight,” the note points out.
However, obscurity, speculation, and propaganda — from all sides — surrounds many reports. “A lack of protection for witnesses was blamed for the slowness in conducting the official investigation, and in the case of the dead security officers, three years on, no clear verdicts had been reached,” the note further adds.
Boussoffara believes that part of the aftermath of the 2010/2011 uprising in Tunisia was the search for true and false martyrs of the revolution. “Attributing the status of martyr to those killed is a controversial one, as in addition to the religious implications, it involves compensation for surviving families,” he explains, “My motive in choosing to focus on the police officers killed in January 2011 was in no way to determine who is and who is not a martyr, but to question the process of recognition itself, which is handled by the SFSI, the ‘Union of Security Forces’, established in March 2011.”
Through his pictures, Boussoffara wishes to highlight “a matter partly forgotten in this debate, a neglected story.” He says, “In doing this, I would like to encourage a kind of update of the Tunisian collective memory, a re-reading of all history, past or recent.”
Such purity of purpose is understandable. Ever since he joined a photo club as a teenager, Boussoffara has had a passion for photography. During the 1990s, he went in search of the history, customs, and architecture of various regions in Tunisia, while continuing to harbour a nostalgic attachment to Mahdia, where he was born. Having mastered digital technology, he worked in the IT sector until 2007, when he resigned from his job to pursue a career as a photographer.
In his first solo exhibition, in Mahdia in 2009, Boussoffara explored the graphic, aesthetic, and architectural dimensions of photography. After a further solo exhibition in Tunis, he focused on the political changes of the Arab Spring. As a member of the photographers collective Dégage, he presented his work in an exhibition, and in a book bearing witness to an important moment in the history of his country.
Boussoffara says, “I aim, also, to bring into closer focus two protagonists in this story — the families of the fallen officers, and the SFSI, which acts to shed light on the officers’ deaths and to aid the families in their appeal for recognition, support and justice.”