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“If you throw your waste in the street, be careful, Labib will come and punish you! “ Samy Haddad, 27 years old and a pharmacist in training, was rocked all his childhood by this maternal refrain. “Labib”? This mascot representing a fennec is a familiar figure for young Tunisians who, like him, grew up in the 1990s and 2000s. “Until now, when I see someone behaving badly with the environment, I remember my mother’s threats. I really liked this character when I was a kid ”, says Samy.
Erected as a statue at the time of the Ben Ali regime, the southern Tunisian fennec has been the hero of environmental awareness programs. Dressed in a blue jumpsuit, he adorned the roundabouts and bordered arteries renamed “Boulevard de l’Environnement” throughout Tunisia.
But since then, Labib has become, in spite of himself, a symbol of the dictatorship. During the 2011 revolution, some sculptures were overturned or destroyed, because they were too associated with the fallen regime. The statues that have survived have been abandoned, a bit like Tunisia’s environmental policy. They arouse mixed feelings: indifference, nostalgia but also frustration among environmentalists, who denounce the country’s lack of vision, especially in terms of pollution.
“Healthy behaviors”
Despite decrees gradually phasing out plastic bags, Tunisia thus remains one of the largest consumers of polymer in the Mediterranean. Environmental scandals are frequent there, in connection with problems of mismanagement or corruption, as revealed by the case of Italian waste, urban waste imported from Italy illegally for more than a year. And the environment ministry has not ceased to be the poor relation of the budget since the revolution. Proof, according to some activists, that the entire environmental policy initiated thirty years ago has failed to take root, both within the population and within institutions.
“Faced with the current state of the country, one wonders if the Labib was not just “Greenwashing” [marketing publicitaire qui permet à un organisme de se faire passer pour vertueux en matière écologique] “, comments Houssem Hamdi, activist in the Tunisie Recyclage and Soligreen associations for forest reforestation. Others, however, insist on its usefulness, such as Khayreddine Debaya, of the Stop Pollution collective in Gabès, in the south of Tunisia. “He marked a whole generation and he was also accompanied by projects”, he insists, recalling for example that the minister at the time had initiated a plan to dismantle the site of the chemical group of Gabès, the main polluter in the region. Today, Khayreddine and his collective are still campaigning for this liquidation, which never took place.
The former Minister of the Environment, Mohamed Mehdi Mlika, behind the launch of this mascot, was Ben Ali’s own nephew. “The Labib was available on all media, panels, television spots, stuffed animals, stamps”, he recalls today, pointing out that “Its primary vocation was to promote healthy behaviors with nature”.
“Firstfruits”
In television spots, we saw the fennec soar into the air to lecture the one who threw his butt on the ground or his garbage on the beach. For the press cartoonist Chedly Belkhamsa, creator of the final form of the Labib, the mascot should perhaps have remained this animated figure, visible on national television, and not become a statue: “On the one hand, I was happy that the Labib took the place of the statues of Bourguiba a little, because its message was positive. But it is also this statuary that created the amalgam with the regime. “
Criticizing the Labib also exposed them to pressure. Karim Bouzouita, an academic who created a Facebook group in 2007, entitled “The anti-Labib league”, had thus been listed by the police as an “opponent”. “For me, it was really an object of propaganda and this group allowed to demystify this symbol thanks to humor”, he recalls. In 2008, some Internet users already denounced in this group the degradation of beaches and plastic pollution.
In post-revolutionary Tunisia, associations have established themselves as the main actors in raising awareness among young people about the environment. “We are only at the beginnings, explains Mehdi Abdelli, president of the Tunisian Association for Environmental Law. But the idea is to establish a whole program to make environmental education a subject in the school curriculum. “
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