Tunisia's democracy: Freedom is disappointingly messy, but there's hope

Tarek Dziri cannot forget Tunisia’s revolution for a single minute.

Mr. Dziri was 26 years old and a new father, working as a chef in the town of Al Fahs, 40 miles south of the capital, when riots broke out in central Tunisia in December 2010 against the country’s dictatorial then-president, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.

On Jan. 12, 2011, Dziri and his friends decided to join the protest movement and demonstrate in front of the Al Fahs police station to denounce the killing of innocent civilians. Police officers fired on the young men; one bullet hit Dziri’s shoulder, and a second lodged in his lung.

When police came to the local hospital that night, ostensibly to arrest him but most likely to “finish the job,” Dziri says, a quick-thinking nurse smuggled him out in an ambulance and transferred him to Ben Arous hospital near the capital, an hour’s ride away. The ordeal left him paralyzed from the waist down.

Seven years since the revolution felled Mr. Ben Ali, things have changed for both Tunisia and Dziri, not all for the good.

Now in a wheelchair, Dziri has been unable to secure work. Government funding for him to complete medical treatment in France has stopped; so, too,