The Battle for the Arab Spring

by Lin Noueihed

  Ghannouchi left Tunisia in the 1960s to complete his studies in Egypt and Syria, finding then losing hope in Arab nationalism, recovering his waning faith and taking a growing interest in political Islam, which he pursued while undertaking postgraduate studies in Paris in 1968.56 Back in Tunisia in 1970, Ghannouchi became the head of a secret organization named al-Jamaa al-Islamiyah, or Islamic Group.57 In a classic case of divide and rule, he and his friends played into the hands of Bourguiba, who turned a blind eye while the group attacked his communist enemies rather than the state itself.58 Due to their extensive contacts with the liberal democratic and leftist opposition, however, Ghannouchi and his group slowly moved away from their uncompromising Salafist approach and turned to the reformist school of Islam that in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century had sought to reconcile Western democratic principles with the Islamic concept of shura, or consultation, and ijmaa, or consensus, through which the early Islamic community had been ruled.

  The first incarnation of Ennahda, co-founded in 1979 by Ghannouchi, was far more austere and radical than the party of 2011. Busy attacking Bourguiba's ban on polygamy, the party initially saw no role for women in politics. It was not necessary, they reasoned, to educate women, and it was best to marry girls off young before they could get into any trouble. By his own admission, Ghannouchi's ideas were turned on their head during a visit he paid to Sudan in 1979 to find out about the Sudanese Islamic Movement led by Hassan Turabi, where he saw how women were fully included in political life. On his return in 1980, Ghannouchi criticized his earlier position, called for equality between the sexes, and argued that innocent mixing of men and women was not banned.59

  By the time the group went public in 1981, announcing the formation of what was originally called the Islamic Tendency Movement (MTI), its democratic credentials had already been established through internal elections for the president, the executive committee and the shura council.60 Its founding manifesto expressed its commitment to democracy, making it the first Islamist movement to do so, and was criticized by other Islamists, and by some in Iran.61

  But Bourguiba was not especially interested in democracy. In the same year it was created, MTI's leaders and 500 of its members were arrested. Ghannouchi spent the years 1981 to 1984 in jail.62 He was rearrested within two years of his release, along with eighty-nine other leading MTI members, and released after Ben Ali's coup. As a prelude to applying for a licence, which demanded that no party be based on religion, MTI changed its name to the appropriately vague Ennahda.

  Its members were allowed to run as independents in the ill-fated April 1989 elections, which along with events in Algeria had convinced Ben Ali that the Islamists were a serious threat. Sensing an impending crackdown, Ghannouchi went into exile in September of that year.63 Being marooned in London, where he was able to observe the workings of an old democracy at close quarters, also convinced Ghannouchi of the important role of civil society. Contrary to what his critics suggest, his espousal of democracy is more than lip service. Ghannouchi is more than just an Islamist political leader: he is a theoretician who has formulated in Arabic an influential defence of the compatibility of Islam and democracy, and Islam and freedom. Indeed, Ennahda under Ghannouchi is so liberal that more conservative Islamists denounce its members as not being Islamists at all.

  But while Ghannouchi himself may be an Islamic democrat, he is not Ennahda. As in any party, the movement includes more progressive and more conservative wings jostling for influence. Its leader is now in his seventies, and bursting to the surface is a new generation of activists who are not all as mellow or compromising. There are differences among those who lived harassed, underground or jailed in Tunisia and those, like Ghannouchi, who spent more than two decades abroad. Some secularists fear that the new generation may take the group down a more hard-line road, influenced by the spread of more conservative Salafist Islam in North Africa. As one Western diplomat said, ‘They are putting an emphasis on moderation. They are constantly drawing comparisons with the Turkish system. We are not aware of any Ennahda members doing dangerous or inflammatory things, but we don't have a track record to judge them against.‘64 The coming years will reveal whether Ennahda is the moderate and progressive force it claims to be, or one that works through the constituent assembly and through charities to Islamize Tunisian society.

  More importantly, Ennahda is not the only player on the Islamist block. Since the revolution, more fundamentalist groups have come out of the woodwork. Among them are the Salafists, a term that spans a spectrum of views but which generally refers to those who believe Muslims went awry when they stopped following the examples set by the Prophet Mohamed and his Companions in the earliest Islamic community. They tend to call for Islamic rule, though they differ on whether this should be achieved peacefully or by violent means.

  Whereas under Ben Ali and Bourguiba it was unheard of to see a woman in a niqab, or full-face veil, or a man in a long beard and short jalabiya robe, they now walk past occasionally in the street. Believed to be insignificant in number, the Salafists have nevertheless asserted themselves through attention-grabbing and sometimes violent antics. They were accused in July 2011 of attacking a cinema showing the film Ni Dieu, Ni Maitre or No God, No Master, by director Nadia El-Fani, an atheist and outspoken critic of political Islam. In October, a gang of Salafists tried to attack the offices of a television station that had aired Persepolis, an animated film made from a moving graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi that follows the experience of a young woman in Iran's Islamic Revolution. In it, the protagonist loses her faith and finds it again, and the film includes a graphic depiction of God that has enraged Islamists who believe such images to be sacrilegious.

  The main hard-line Islamist group to emerge in Tunisia has been Hizb al-Tahrir, or Party of Liberation, which has branches from Central Asia to North Africa and calls for the revival of the Islamic caliphate. Since it does not subscribe to democratic principles, Hizb al-Tahrir was denied a party licence and banned from running in the October 2011 elections. The movement remains small and relatively weak, but there is ample gossip about the Salafists’ latest efforts to disperse beach-goers and beer-drinkers, and even to attack prostitutes in the country's red light districts. Groups of Salafists have tried to segregate pedestrians in the street and force men and women to walk on different sides of the pavement. Their actions have alarmed secular Tunisians, particularly given the more lax policing since Ben Ali's departure, and left many yearning for the security – if not the repression – they felt under the ancien régime. They have also placed Ennahda in a difficult position: the group has distanced itself from violent attacks but has proven reluctant in government to suppress fellow Islamists as it was once itself suppressed.

  Some also worry that Al-Qaeda, whose North African franchise is active in Algeria, might take advantage of the erosion of Tunisia's police state and the power void in Libya to recruit and to mount attacks. Indeed, Ben Ali had cracked down hard on suspected terrorists or militant Islamists in the last five years of his presidency, with at least 1,500 political prisoners languishing in jail when he fled, according to human rights activists. There is some basis for concern. In 2002, Islamic extremists bombed a synagogue on the island of Djerba killing twenty-one people, including fourteen German tourists. In December 2006 and January 2007 a group calling itself Soldiers of Ibn Furat, after a ninth-century Tunisian jurist, clashed with security forces in an area called Suleiman. The government said the fighters were killed but security forces later rounded up about thirty men it accused of having links to the group in Sidi Bouzid, where the 2011 uprising began.

  In the murky world of post-revolutionary politics it is difficult to predict how much appeal extremist elements have in Tunisia. Salaheddine al-Jourchi, an expert in Tunisia's Islamist movements, has said he expects their voice to be drowned out in the clamour for free expression and jobs that has swept the country since the uprising. Jourchi is himself part of the ‘progressive
Islamist’ movement that takes a softer line than even Ennahda and is better established in Tunisia than elsewhere. Throughout 2011 calls for moderation have abounded on all sides and it is only extremists, of both Islamic and secular varieties, that have threatened to derail Tunisia's transition.

  ‘The danger for us is the hard-line extremist Muslims who do not believe in democracy and believe in violence,’ Moncef Marzouki, a veteran dissident who would later become Tunisia's new president, said two months before the elections. ‘But when you look at the spectrum, you will find that the extremist secularists are as dangerous as the extremist Islamists and the only solution is for the moderate secularists and the moderate Islamists to build a consensual democracy that excludes no one and guarantees the rights of the majority of people.‘65

  Yet in the grimy streets of rundown towns in the centre of Tunisia, democracy has yet to bring what the disenfranchised youths want the most – jobs.

  The Other Tunisia

  Blue ropes were left hanging from makeshift gallows outside the education board in the central town of Kasserine, where five unemployed graduates had tried to commit mass suicide eight months after the departure of Ben Ali.66 Through much of 2011, riots, sit-ins and hunger strikes had become a feature of life in these central Tunisian provinces, where cactus lines the shabby roads and almost half the inhabitants are jobless. There was no emergency law in Tunisia before the uprising began, but swathes of the interior were intermittently cast under military rule in 2011 as the young and the desperate demanded their spoils from the revolution they had ignited.

  This dusty hinterland, a world away from the well-heeled seaside towns in the north and east, was where it all began. It is also where Tunisia's most serious challenges lie in wait. Whoever wins the battle over the role of religion in the new Tunisia will face huge expectations to remedy income and regional inequalities that have only worsened since the revolt. Unlike the tussle over the role of Islam in politics, demands for jobs, equality and dignity cannot be satisfied by politicians negotiating in smoky rooms. They could take years, if not decades, to meet.

  As elsewhere in the Arab region, Tunisia's regional imbalances are significant. For decades, both government investment and foreign investors had been focused on the coast, which is greener, better connected by road and rail, and from where Bourguiba and Ben Ali both hailed. A few numbers tell the story. About 973 foreign firms employed nearly 94,000 people in the eastern coastal provinces of Monastir, Sfax, Mahdia and Ben Ali's home town of Sousse in December 2010. Greater Tunis boasted 990 foreign firms employing 91,489 people. That compared with just 59 foreign firms employing 7,720 people in the interior provinces of Sidi Bouzid, Kairouan and Kasserine. The south-west provinces of Gafsa, Kebili and Tozeur fare worse, with 32 foreign employers providing 3,500 jobs.67

  Realizing the dangers, both the government and political parties have been at pains to show their commitment to redressing the imbalances. In April 2011, the interim minister for regional development, Abdel Razzaq Zouari, revealed that the 2011 budget proposed by Ben Ali had allocated 82 per cent of regional development projects to the coastal regions against 18 per cent to the interior. Zouari acknowledged that some imbalance in spending was justified, given that more people live on the coast, but announced an additional investment programme of $177 million, of which 80 per cent would go to the central provinces and 20 per cent to the coast.

  Yet new funds and promises were not enough. The people of Kasserine, who suffered some of the highest casualties during the revolt, wanted tangible results fast. Even after new jobs were made available, riots and protests continued. With discontent simmering, Zouari announced in September a new five-year regional development plan aimed at reducing regional inequalities and combating poverty. Yet even this could not but draw attention to the scale of the challenge. Poverty levels ranged from 0.5 per cent in Monastir, home town of Bourguiba, to 15.1 per cent in the central shrine town of Kairouan. Unemployment among graduates was 47.3 per cent in the central mining region of Gafsa compared to 10.9 per cent in coastal Ariana.68

  In many ways, Tunisia's economy had already come a long way. Despite stark regional divisions, rural poverty pales in comparison to that found in Egypt, where millions live on less than $2 a day. Though it lacks the colossal hydrocarbon wealth of neighbouring Libya or Algeria, Tunisia has long been better developed, and its economy more diversified. Any Libyan with cash to spare would travel to Tunisia for healthcare, for instance, and many Tunisian clinics made the bulk of their money from medical tourism. While many Libyans struggle to speak any language other than Arabic and have suffered from a notoriously outdated and inadequate education system, many Tunisians speak Arabic and French, with English gaining traction.

  To some extent, Tunisia is a victim of its own success. Its large middle class aspires to the higher incomes and benefits of Europeans just across the Mediterranean, rather than comparing themselves to fellow North Africans. Unfortunately for many who want to taste the fruit of their revolution now, the challenges their economy faces are to a large extent structural and will take years to unscramble. Not least among those issues is unemployment. Tunisian economist Murad Ben Turkiye said Tunisia's GDP must expand by about 7 per cent a year to create enough jobs to satisfy the 60,000 educated young people entering the job market each year. The economy had been growing at about 5 per cent a year before the revolution, enough to create at least 25,000 to 30,000 jobs, but the uprising initially hit the economy hard and it was set to show no growth at all for 2011. Even if growth recovered to above the pre-uprising levels, there would be no guarantee that it would create the right kinds of jobs.

  About a third of Tunisians enter tertiary education compared to less than 13 per cent of people in Morocco which, like Egypt, still suffers from widespread illiteracy. Yet Tunisia's economic policies have tended to create low-wage jobs in tourism, industry and the public sector. To eliminate the mismatch, Tunisia must implement wide-ranging reforms in education to develop the sort of vocational skills that employers require, while rethinking the incentives structure to attract foreign and private investments that will create high-value rather than just factory jobs. These are long-term policies that will take years to bear fruit, as will efforts to root out corruption that require a deep and painful overhaul of the civil service to bring in higher state salaries and discourage bribe-taking. A culture of accountability and transparency in government and the wider public sector will not appear overnight and may only take root under sustained public pressure.

  In the months following the uprising, illegal buildings sprouted up around the country as police, no longer receiving their kickbacks, have mellowed. The tendency has been to drop some of the rules and relax the bureaucracy. The challenge for Tunisia is to reform the sprawling public sector so that the rules do apply, but apply equally to all.

  Sitting in his office in a dilapidated French-era building off Bourguiba Avenue in August 2011, Abdel Jelil Bedoui, an economist and long-time UGTT official, who was briefly a minister in the first interim government after Ben Ali's departure, was realistic about what could be achieved.

  ‘No government has a magic wand. There are no magic wands when it comes to the economy,’ said Bedoui, who was getting ready to vacate the UGTT office, piled with studies he had overseen over the years, to devote himself to the new Tunisian Labour Party he had set up. ‘It takes time to solve problems, particularly problems that have been building over many years.‘69

  Yet dissatisfaction with the pace of economic progress could spark new protests and plunge Tunisia into a cycle of government resignations. Shortly after being sworn in as president, Marzouki implored the protesters to give the government a six-month respite to try and improve the economy, promising to resign if it failed.70 From teachers to airport workers to police, state employees had been striking to demand better pay and conditions, which they see as the rightful rewards of the revolution. Sustained labour upheaval could frighten off the foreign investors Tun
isia needs so much to retain and attract. In the weeks after Ben Ali's departure, workers at a major hotel went on a brief strike aimed at removing their apparently unpopular manager. Even at banks and big businesses, employees complain that senior managers have remained in place, though they worked closely with the former regime. If we do not secure deeper changes in the midst of revolution, Tunisians ask, when will we secure them? Many saw this period of upheaval as a once-in-a-lifetime window to push through the gains they would have little hope of securing once the dust had settled.

  ‘It is as if a big cake has come along and everyone wants to try their luck with the cake, because if he does not get a slice now, tomorrow it may not be there,’ Bedoui said. ‘There are a lot of movements, social and protest movements, and these do not always represent legitimate demands. Some of these movements have been provoked and are being pushed by people who want to abort the revolution.‘71

  And whereas the Tunisian economy needs to boost incentives for private-sector investment to create jobs, the revolution may actually usher in an era of increased protectionism. While Ennahda has emphasized that its policies will be pro-business, there is immense public pressure for social justice after the predatory economic approach of Ben Ali and his wife. Tunisia's experience under ‘The Family’ has given privatization a particularly bad name.

  At the same time the European Union, Tunisia's biggest trading partner, is mired in high unemployment, low growth and sovereign debt. Developed countries can ill afford to spend the money required to support Tunisia's transition or give it the full technical and political support it needs to democratize and liberalize the economy. By September 2011 the EU had promised financial support to Tunisia of around #4 billion over 2011–2013, part of which was intended to support a new five-year plan for economic and social development.72 Like the US, the EU has promised to return the illicitly acquired assets of the previous regime. It sent a team of observers to monitor the elections on 23 October 2011, who pronounced them to be free and fair.