by Lin Noueihed
At 6.40 pm, Al-Jazeera and other television stations began to report that Ben Ali had left the country. At 6.44 pm, Prime Minister Mohammed Ghannouchi appeared on television to tell Tunisians that the president was temporarily incapacitated and that he would take over in the interim. Conflicting news began to emerge. Ben Ali was heading to Malta. No, it was Paris. Almost four hours after Ghannouchi had made his staggering announcement, new rumours broke out. Ben Ali was going to Qatar. No, it was Paris after all. Then, realizing the tide of history had turned, a French official said Ben Ali would not be welcome on French soil.3
It had taken some time for France, the former colonial power, to abandon its long-standing ally. Soon after the vegetable seller Mohammed Bouazizi set himself alight in the central town of Sidi Bouzid on 17 December 2010, the new French foreign minister, Michèle Alliote-Marie, her partner, also a minister, and her elderly parents had arrived to spend their Christmas break in Tunisia, a favoured winter destination. As protests spread from town to town, Alliote-Marie took complimentary flights on the private jet of businessman Aziz Mled, an associate of Ben Ali's family.4 On the same trip, her parents signed a property deal with Mled. Then, days before the president's departure on 14 January and with dozens dead in the Tunisian riots, Alliote-Marie appeared to suggest that Paris could offer Tunis its crowd-control know-how.5 Shipments of tear gas and anti-riot gear to Tunisia had been approved during the uprising, though they were never sent.6 In the early hours of Saturday morning and with virtually nowhere else to turn, Ben Ali and his family touched down in Jeddah, a port city of Saudi Arabia, where his family would embark on a religious pilgrimage, or ‘umra, until the situation in Tunisia had calmed down.7
The mechanics of Ben Ali's departure had caused uproar, not because he was gone but because the door was left open for his return. Legal and constitutional experts filled the airwaves to argue that, contrary to Ghannouchi's announcement, Ben Ali was not temporarily but rather permanently incapacitated, meaning that power should pass to the speaker of the parliament, in this case Fouad Mobazza’, pending new elections. With thousands on the street, Ghannouchi and other officials perhaps saw their opportunity to rid the country of what had come to be known as ‘The Family’, and transfer power with the minimum possible disruption to the system or threat to their own positions.
Tales of the corruption that had tainted Ben Ali's rule had become the stuff of lore. His second wife, a social-climbing former hairdresser, was a figure of hate. Since marrying the president in 1992, Tunisians say Leila Trabelsi had cultivated a penchant for seizing successful private businesses or attractive properties at will. Rumours abounded of the regime's excesses, some confirmed in US diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks, which described a pet tiger, Pasha, that was kept by Ben Ali's daughter Nisrene and her husband Sakher al-Materi, and consumed four chickens a day. Invited to dinner at their house, the US ambassador Robert Godec wrote in 2009 of the frozen yoghurt he had been served for dessert, flown in from St Tropez on a private jet.
With disgust at his family's greed and decadence reaching the top circles of government, Tunisia's highest court declared that Mobazza’ was indeed president. Ben Ali was gone for good and the Arab world would never be quite the same again. What had begun as localized protests in a struggling town had ended as the Jasmine Revolution, named in the Western press after the fragrant national flower that is hawked on the country's sandy beaches and in its street-side cafés.
From Riyadh to Tripoli, authoritarian rulers watched events unfold with growing unease. Tunisia had demonstrated how brittle these Arab dictatorships were, how easily and how quickly they could be swept away. By overcoming the barrier of fear, Tunisians had shown that peaceful protest could succeed, and at a heady pace. They had removed their ruler in less than a month of popular action in an unarmed uprising. They were as shocked by their own success as the world was. And success sells.
Overnight, the United States, France and Britain found that their long-standing foreign policies required a hasty rewrite. They appeared to dither and agonize, seemingly caught between their populist instinct to support protesters and their interests in propping up the dictators on whom their foreign policies had for so long relied. With little oil and less clout, this North African country of 10 million had been all but ignored by journalists busy prophesying what might become of the regional colossus, Egypt, as Hosni Mubarak sank deeper into his dotage. In Saudi Arabia, diplomats tracked the fluctuating fortunes of the myriad geriatric pretenders to the throne. Rulers in Syria, Yemen, even Bahrain, had occasionally found themselves blinking in the unforgiving glare of international attention while Tunisia's uprising brewed quietly, almost unnoticed.
Yet of all the countries that saw mass uprisings in 2011, Tunisia possessed more of the ingredients for a home-grown, successful revolution than any other. Its long history of political activism, which Ben Ali and his predecessor curbed but did not kill, its resilient civil society, its educated and unarmed people, its neutral army, its relative religious homogeneity and its engaged and pragmatic Islamist movement, also meant it had more of the ingredients necessary for success.
Tunisia faces a historic opportunity in the wake of a revolution that threatened the old political order from Cairo to Damascus to Manama. It also faces significant challenges. This was not an Islamic uprising, but it unleashed a battle over the role of religion in a state and society with perhaps the strongest secular legacy in the region. It would dramatically revive a long-banned political party and bring back its long-exiled leader, would see hardline Islamists attack television stations that aired films they considered blasphemous, and would stoke a fiery debate over the nature of the country's new constitution. Yet whatever role Islam plays in the new Tunisia, it cannot offer a solution to the economic malaise that lay at the heart of its remarkable uprising and which, one year on, had only worsened.
The Kings of Carthage
In September 2010, less than three months before Bouazizi's fateful suicide, the IMF issued a glowing report on Tunisia. The government had weathered the global financial crisis well. Growth had reached 4.5 per cent in the first quarter, a notable achievement in the midst of a crisis that had hit demand in the country's biggest export market and mired its European trading partners in debt. At 43 per cent, Tunisia's debt-to-GDP ratio was almost half that of France. Tunisia would need more dynamic sources of growth to ease joblessness, the report said, but the official unemployment rate of 13.3 per cent was not incomparable to that of southern Europe.8 In a region beset by poverty and instability, Tunisia was seen as an economic success story. Its workforce was educated. It attracted foreign investment, mainly from Europe. The World Economic Forum judged it the 32nd most competitive country in the world in its 2010–11 Global Competitiveness Report, above Italy and Spain, and international organizations never tired of praising its ‘economic miracle’.9
Yet it did not feel like a miracle to many Tunisians. While per capita GDP was growing, only 14 per cent of Tunisians classified themselves as ‘thriving’ in 2010, down from 24 per cent just two years earlier. Tunisians were increasingly unhappy with the state of housing, healthcare and roads, and they complained about bureaucracy.10 A newborn's birth certificate might be endlessly delayed if the tip was found ungenerous, while a trail of backhanders accompanied any official document requiring the stamps and signatures of underpaid civil servants and go-betweens.11
Dig deeper beneath the headline economic indicators, or drive an hour outside of the capital, and you would find another Tunisia, one where young people with university degrees and no jobs loitered in internet cafés and on street corners with nothing to do. Tunisia's economy had grown by an average of 5 per cent each year over the previous two decades, according to the IMF. By the World Bank's definition, just 7 per cent of Tunisians lived in poverty on the eve of the uprising, one of the lowest rates in the region. And yet the number of unemployed graduates had doubled over the past decade. Astonishingly, perhaps, the better
educated the individual, the more likely he or she was to be jobless. Half of graduates with a masters degree were unemployed in 2010.
Unemployment was also far higher among younger people than it was on average, and much worse in the interior and southern regions, where the uprising began, than it was on the coast. By the accounts of Tunisians themselves, perceptions of corruption, inequalities and a lack of opportunity had dramatically worsened in the last two or three years before the uprising.
Yet economic malaise does not a revolution make, at least not on its own. Economic frustration was compounded by political repression. Those considered the biggest threat, and who suffered the severest crackdowns, were the Islamists. Hundreds of them, mostly members of the group now called Ennahda, or Renaissance, were thrown in jail by Habib Bourguiba, who had led Tunisia from independence in 1956, his New Destour Party consistently dominating politics through sham elections. Ben Ali's so-called ‘medical coup’ in 1987 initially came as a relief for Tunisians. Ben Ali freed political prisoners and promised free and fair parliamentary elections two years later. Despite complaints of irregularities, the Islamists officially won 17 per cent of the national vote and some 30 per cent in some areas.12 Though the electoral system was organized in a way that meant that parliament was dominated by the ruling party, with the new and less catchy name of Rassemblement Constitutionnel Démocratique (RCD), Ben Ali was alarmed.13
By 1992 some 8,000 suspected Ennahda supporters had been arrested, 279 of whom were charged with plotting to assassinate the president and take over the state.14 So severe was the crackdown on Islamists that Tunisian men were rounded up for growing beards or attending dawn prayers, while mosques were closely watched by secret police. Ennahda members arrested in this early crackdown had mostly been released by the end of the 1990s, but they did not go back to lead normal lives. They were watched and harassed, could not get the security clearance needed for formal jobs, and were sometimes banned from travelling abroad or required to check in at the local police station every month, every week or, in some cases, several times a day.15
‘In Tunisia, if you wanted to get a permanent job, you had to go through a security check on your political views, whether you are leftist, Islamist, nationalist,’ Rida Harrathi, a self-proclaimed Islamist, said as he prepared to enter a Tunis mosque for the first Friday prayers after Ben Ali's departure. ‘I was expelled from work and when I asked why, they said, “Your problem is with the interior ministry” … If you are honest about yourself, and especially if you are an Islamist, you would lose your job or you would not be confirmed in it.‘16
By the time the revolution began, the Islamists were unable to meet or organize, but they were present in other civil society organizations like the unions, professional syndicates and human rights and advocacy groups, which managed to survive if not to flourish. Islamists were not just Islamists, after all. They were also doctors, teachers, journalists or lawyers. They worked alongside the nationalist and the secular, the apolitical and the socialist in every walk of life. Despite the best efforts of Ben Ali and his predecessor, Tunisia had a long history of political and civil activism. Working around police and legal restrictions in the years before the uprising, human rights and union activists had built cross-regional and cross-class networks. Set up in the 1970s, the Tunisian League for Human Rights (LTDH) is one of the oldest such groups in the Arabic-speaking world.
Ben Ali was wary of civil society groups but, loath to attract the kind of international criticism invited by an outright ban, he sought to undermine them in more subtle ways. In 1992, Tunisia passed an associations law that forced all non-governmental organizations to admit anyone who wanted to join, allowing the regime to stuff the ranks of NGOs and undermine their activities.17 The law also required all NGOs to obtain approval from the interior ministry, which could deny or permanently delay their licence, leaving the groups to act in a legal grey area.18 External funding for NGOs had to pass through the state, where it would often be deliberately held up by paperwork. Ben Ali's government had refused to licence new human rights groups for the last decade of his rule and activists were sometimes intimidated, dismissed from work, monitored or arbitrarily prevented from travelling.19 But while hampered at every turn, civil society survived, establishing the precious bedrock for the growth of participatory politics.
Activists could also draw on the long heritage of Tunisia's union movement, which traces its origins back to the colonial era of the 1920s, played a key role in the fight for independence alongside Bourguiba, and later fought against the government to remain autonomous.20 While the RCD claimed to have two million members, a fifth of the whole population and a figure widely disputed by opposition activists, the Tunisian General Union of Labour (UGTT) claimed to represent almost 500,000 workers in various sectors across the country, making it Tunisia's second-largest organization and a force to be reckoned with.21
In the fifteen years before the 2011 uprising, Ben Ali had succeeded in co-opting the UGTT to the extent that it was often dismissed as little more than a semi-independent contractor for the state, sapping the power of the unions as a potential counterweight to the ruling RCD.22 By the time Bouazizi set himself alight, the UGTT leadership's reluctance to stand up to the state had already undermined its authority with the rank and file, and disputes between the leaders in Tunis and the regional and local representatives were reaching crisis point.23
The Arab Spring had a dry run in the first half of 2008, when Tunisia's mining basin of Gafsa was paralysed by a series of strikes and demonstrations. They had begun in the town of Redeyef, where locals complained that recruitment for the Gafsa Phosphates Company, the biggest employer in the area, was rigged against them. Amid rising food inflation, the unrest spread through the south-west, escalating into riots and prompting a violent police crackdown. The protest was led by local unionists and activists from a handful of opposition parties. Journalists were banned from reporting on the demonstrations, preventing the miners from garnering sympathy and support in other parts of the country. The UGTT leadership, moreover, was widely seen to have abandoned the miners and colluded to isolate them, damaging its credibility in the eyes of its members. Two years later, in July and August of 2010, riots broke out in the southern province of Ben Guerdane. Grievances were again socio-economic and, again, dithering by the UGTT and its efforts to mediate in the crisis rather than lead the workers damaged its standing.
Similar tensions were developing inside some of the legal political parties. Tunisia's bicameral parliament held elections every five years for the Chamber of Deputies in which a handful of licenced political parties competed. Most outspoken among them were Nejib Chebbi's Progressive Democratic Party (PDP) and Mustafa Ben Jaafar's Democratic Forum for Freedom and Labour (FTDL), or Ettakatol, which was born out of a conference of democratic activists in 1993. Also licenced was Ahmed Ibrahim's secular left Ettajdid, or Renewal, and the Social Democratic Movement, established in the 1980s by Bourguiba ally-turned-opponent Ahmed Mestiri. The Arab nationalist Party of Popular Unity (PUP), the Social Liberal Party and the Unionist Democratic Union (UDU), which was linked to the UGTT, completed the list of officially sanctioned groups.
Some 20 per cent of the 241 seats in parliament were reserved for this legal ‘opposition’, keeping up the facade of pluralism over a system that ensured the house was overwhelmingly dominated by the RCD. Even if they did win seats, the smaller parties could not seriously propose or block legislation and some offered no real opposition at all, serving only to maintain the pretence of democracy that Ben Ali wanted to project to his Western allies.
Presidential elections had been held every five years, but Ben Ali did not allow rival candidates until 1999 – when official figures show he won 99 per cent of the vote. The legal opposition parties found that their presidential candidates might be disqualified because they did not have enough seats in parliament or, in the case of Chebbi, because he was no longer the head of a party. Ahmed Ibrahim was the o
nly serious rival for the presidency in the 2009 election, though he acknowledged that he was not allowed to mount an effective campaign. Ben Ali romped home again with over 89 per cent of the vote. Official turnout would regularly be reported at over 80 or 90 per cent, though it was not hard to find Tunisians on the street who had never voted.
The system created a dilemma for parties that had often fought for years to obtain a licence. Keen to protect the gains they had already made, and reluctant to be pushed back underground, even the more outspoken leaders were often unwilling to confront Ben Ali head-on. In many cases they opted for accommodation, a situation that suited the Tunisian government well but did not always please the party rank and file.24
Not only were Ben Ali's efforts to crush, co-opt or undermine potential challengers beginning to crack, but the septuagenarian leader appeared increasingly disconnected from his youthful population. Communication was breaking down with the urban, educated and broad middle classes that had been the engine of Tunisia's economic growth and the gatekeepers of its stability since independence. Connected to the world, a new generation of multilingual Tunisians was increasingly frustrated with the lack of free speech. Tunisian newspapers were so repressed as to be utterly unreadable. When an unfavourable book about Leila Trabelsi was released by a French publisher in 2009, the authorities not only outlawed it in Tunisia but also tried – and eventually failed – to ban it in France. The restrictions seemed increasingly anachronistic in the world of 24-hour satellite news channels and fast internet, and Ben Ali's government was among the most draconian in the Arabic-speaking world when it came to online censorship.
