Rough justice

Decision time for Tunisia’s Truth and Dignity Commission

Growing up in the rust-red Atlas mountains of western Tunisia amid the olive farmers and sheep herders, Ghazala Mhemdi has always been familiar with her country’s deep regional inequities.

But it wasn’t until she witnessed the death of her brother, electrocuted by live wires from a mangled streetlight during a rainstorm in their village of Ouled Mohamed when she was 18 years old, that she came to see the countryside’s crumbling infrastructure as an issue of justice. The state’s negligence, she realized, was responsible for the tragedy.