Tunisia: Man sets himself on fire on Habib Bourguiba Avenue

A man in Tunisia set himself on fire on Saturday for unknown reasons and is now being treated in hospital with second degree burns, reports the New Arab.

Watan News reported that the 35-year-old man poured a flammable substance over himself and set himself on fire on Habib Bourguiba Avenue in Tunis, a road in the capital Tunis which became symbolic after protesters gathered there during the revolution.

This latest self-immolation comes just three months after a Tunisian professional footballer Nizar Issaoui, 35, set himself alight in protest against what he said was the police state ruling the country.

Issaoui was accused of terror charges after he was unable to buy bananas for less than ten dinars a kilogram, roughly $3.

After Issaoui died from third degree burns, demonstrators took to the streets in the village of Haffouz, where he grew up, and threw stones at the police.

“I have no more energy,” Issaoui wrote in a Facebook post shortly before his death. “Let the police state know that the sentence [death by fire] will be executed today.”

READ: Tunisia: Kais Saied’s power grab has ‘dramatically undermined’ human rights, says Amnesty 

In 2021, a Tunisian man died in hospital after burning himself alive, also on Habib Bourguiba Avenue.

A week prior to that 26-year-old Neji Hefiane set himself on fire in front of his family after the government failed to give him compensation despite suffering gunshot wounds to the head during the Arab Spring protests when he was just 16.

Neji lived in the working-class Tunis district of Intilaka where the 2010 protests broke out and according to his family, was entitled to a guaranteed job and free healthcare.

In 2010 Tunisian vegetable vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, self-immolated in what became a famous protest which led to a revolution which toppled dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

After Ben Ali fell, protests spread across the region, leading to the downfall of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi and Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen.

Tunisia is suffering from an economic crisis with inflation and a global rise in food prices weighing heavily on the country.

On top of this, Tunisians are grappling with an increasingly authoritarian government, which is arrested critics and opponents, has fired dozens of judges, and made racist speeches leading to the targeting of black Africans in the country.