By Rami G. Khouri

Exactly one year ago, Mohammad Bouazizi set himself on fire in the provincial Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid to protest his mistreatment by local police and officials, setting off the past year of unprecedented historic change across the entire Arab world.

The lone, desperate and ultimately fatal protest of one 24-year-old young man initiated the greatest transnational sequence of upheavals in the modern Arab world for an important reason: the feelings of vulnerability and humiliation that Bouazizi experienced were and continue to be shared by several hundred million other Arabs in most of the region’s 22 countries. We should bear it in mind as we survey the varied scenes across the region and ask what the future will bring.

When one forlorn young man could no longer absorb the mistreatment he received at the hands of two local state officials, he reacted with a forceful yet fatal gesture of both protest and self-assertion. In setting himself on fire, I suspect that he wanted to say: “I am a citizen with rights; if my government denies me my rights and degrades my humanity, there is no reason to continue living, and I will kill myself with a single swift action instead of allowing my government to kill me slowly with a daily stream of abuse.”

His action is important to recall because it instigated the widespread revolts across much of the Arab world, but also because the two main forces at play – heavy-handed government actions and defiant citizen reactions – continue to define much of the region. Even the countries in transition from authoritarian to democratic systems, like Egypt, Yemen and Tunisia in particular, still show deep-rooted strains of the state’s abuse of its power to mistreat its citizens. For example, over 10,000 Egyptian civilians have been hauled into military courts in the past 10 months, in a massive show of disrespect for citizen rights that even tops some of the abuses of the Mubarak government.

Not surprisingly, therefore, Egyptians and other Arabs continue to take to the streets to protest and challenge the way that power is exercised in their country, while also expressing themselves through the series of elections and referenda that are part of the transition process. Abusive states and defiant citizens continue to define the political cultures of the Arab world, and the political balance they define in due course will determine how credible are the transitions to democratic rule that may or may not take root in the years ahead.

As we watch this process unfold in different ways across the Arab countries, it is important to recall exactly the nature of Mohammad Bouazizi’s discontent. Those sentiments that sparked his protest and the ensuing pan-Arab revolts remain very much alive, and they will continue to drive political events in Arab countries. Bouazizi reacted harshly to his predicament because within the span of just two hours on that mid-December day last year, he experienced the near-total lack of rights and respect that many Arab men and women feel is their condition vis-à-vis their state authorities or the ruling elites in their societies. First the police overturned his vegetable cart and confiscated his electronic scale, and then the governor’s office refused to hear his complaints about the police’s actions. The Tunisian state’s message to its citizen-son was clear and emphatic: You have no rights, especially no right to a redress of grievance.

Recalling this aspect of Bouazizi’s life and death helps us understand the events of the past year, but also clarifies why citizens continue to revolt and challenge their governments in several Arab countries. Even when they know that they are likely to die, as thousand have died and continue to die in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, Bahrain and Yemen, men and women go out into the street to march, shout defiant slogans and sing protest songs. They do this because the prospect of continuing to live as citizens without rights or respect is no longer bearable for them.

This strikes me as the single most important lesson of the past extraordinary year in Arab history: The sentiments of individual, ordinary, men and women matter; they can be translated into collective action in some circumstances; that action can lead to political change that includes new democratic governance systems.

The process is by nature messy, erratic in its advances and regressions, slow, and ideologically effervescent, with many different forces playing a role in public life, from Islamists, among them Salafists, and armed forces and liberals.

The single most important element in this epic process of building stable societies and decent nations that are well governed is, in the end, the individual citizen – the lone man or women who endures abuse for decades on end, but one day can endure no more, and stands up to put an end to the humiliation and dehumanization.

Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly by THE DAILY STAR.