Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, the autocratic ruler of Tunisia whose 23-year rule was ended by the popular protests that triggered the 2011 Arab spring, has died in exile in Saudi Arabia.

The 83-year-old had been seriously ill since being admitted to hospital last week, after years of treatment for prostate cancer. His body is to be transferred to Mecca, awaiting the family’s decision on burial arrangements, according to his lawyer, Mounir Ben Salha.

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A Tunisian court sentenced Ben Ali in absentia in 2011 to fines and time in prison on charges including misappropriating public funds and ordering the torture of army officers accused of launching a coup attempt against him.

The following year, he was sentenced in absentia to life in jail for his role in the deaths of protesters during the Jasmine revolution that ousted him. The uprising inspired what became known as the Arab spring, a movement that swept many autocratic leaders from power.

Amid the upheaval of snap presidential elections, which took place at the weekend, some Tunisians have expressed a nostalgia for the Ben Ali era – if not for the man himself, whose death was announced on the website of Tunisia’s La Presse with the simple headline: “Ben Ali is dead.”

Appointed prime minister in October 1987, Ben Ali assumed the presidency later that year in a bloodless coup against Habib Bourguiba, the ageing founding father of Tunisian independence from French colonial rule.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The former Tunisian president Habib Bourguiba, right, greets Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, left, in January 1986. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Ben Ali’s rule was marked by familiar themes, including widespread corruption as well as widespread and sometimes deadly political repression. As president, his image was plastered for decades on billboards and buildings across the country, his face remaining strangely ageless despite the passage of time, his hair still jet-black. It seemed that only death would end his grip on power.

But as revolt swept the country in late 2010 and early 2011, fuelled by anger over corruption, repression and unemployment, demonstrators set fire to his photo – once an unthinkable act. After he was ousted from power on 14 January 2011 his picture was peeled off buildings and billboards nationwide.

Ben Ali was born in the coastal town of Hammam-Sousse in 1936, eventually becoming Bourguiba’s chief of military security and a close aide.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Protesters demonstrate against Ben Ali in Tunis on 14 January 2011. Photograph: Zohra Bensemra/Reuters

After a three-year stint as ambassador to Poland, he was called back to his old security job in 1984 to quell riots over bread prices. Now a general, he was made interior minister in 1986, charged with countering the perceived threat from the country’s Islamist movement, and then prime minister in 1987.

After that it took him less than three weeks to arrange a promotion to the top job, bringing in a team of doctors to declare Bourguiba senile, meaning he would automatically take over as head of state. “I needed to re-establish the rule of law,” Ben Ali told a French television channel in 1988. “The president was ill and his inner circle was harmful.”

His first decade as president involved a big economic restructuring – backed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank – and an annual growth rate slightly over 4% a year.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ben Ali and his wife, Leila Trabelsi, voting in Tunis in October 2004. Photograph: Reuters

Before his coup against Bourguiba, he promised to move Tunisia towards democracy, but instead fixed elections that he won by majorities exceeding 90%, earning the nickname “Mr 99%”.

Ben Ali offered a Tunisian variation of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s “democracy of bread” – the promise of stability and better living standards at the cost of political rights. What that meant, in effect, was harsh restrictions on dissent and freedom of expression, a state-dominated media and violent suppression of the country’s Islamist movements.

But in the midst of widespread rural and urban poverty, a stagnating economy and the realisation that Ben Ali and his second wife, Leila Trabelsi, had vastly enriched themselves and their cronies at the expense of the country, Tunisians finally turned against him.

The moment in December 2010 when the desperate vegetable seller Mohammed Bouazizi set himself alight in the impoverished town of Sidi Bouzid after police confiscated his barrow became the trigger for revolution.

Bouazizi’s funeral was attended by tens of thousands of people, prompting weeks of protests in which scores of people were killed.



