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Belarus, Tunisia

Literature and Peace prizes both send potent political messages

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Svetlana Alexievich, a Belorussian and nonfiction writer, won the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday.
Svetlana Alexievich, a Belorussian and nonfiction writer, won the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday.

Everyone expects the Nobel Peace Prize to have a political meaning.tunisia flagbelarus flagnobel-peace-prize

By the very nature of the prize, it’s not surprising when the Oslo-based awarding committee makes a decision that is affected by — or that subsequently affects — international politics. That follows almost directly from the very words that Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel used to describe the prize’s qualifications:

The most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.

That was true earlier this morning, when Tunisia’s National Dialogue Quartet received the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize. The decision highlights Tunisia’s peaceful transition to democracy and the crucial role that the quarter played in late 2013 to salvage Tunisia’s fragile transition. With an economy that’s still struggling, Tunisia nevertheless remains the only Arab Spring country to depose its leader that is also still working to enshrine a democratic system of government. Libya, Syria and Yemen are locked in anarchy or civil war, and Egypt’s democratically elected president, Islamist Mohammed Morsi, was deposed in a 2013 coup by the Egyptian military. The award is a reminder that the Arab Spring really did bring forth some good in one of the most difficult regions of the world. As the awarding committee itself noted, the prize is essentially a nod to the Tunisian people themselves:

More than anything, the prize is intended as an encouragement to the Tunisian people, who despite major challenges have laid the groundwork for a national fraternity which the Committee hopes will serve as an example to be followed by other countries.

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RELATED: How Tunisia became the success story of the Arab Spring

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But it was arguably Thursday’s prize to Svetlana Alexievich for literature that makes the bolder and more timely political statement, even though it was awarded by the Swedish Academy (and not by the Norwegian Peace Prize selection committee).

The award would have been edgy enough solely because the Swedish Academy awarded the prize to a nonfiction writer and a journalist. As Philip Gourevitch wrote in The New Yorker in October 2014, the Prize has historically favored fiction over nonfiction, and most especially over contemporary journalism.

Literature prize a shot against Lukashenko — and Putin

But Alexievich’s award — for ‘her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time’ — came just three days before a sham election in Belarus.

Continue reading Literature and Peace prizes both send potent political messages →

Tunisia

Essebsi must now deliver on Tunisia’s economy

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essebsi

Longtime secular political figure Beji Caid Essebsi won Tunisia’s presidency in Sunday’s landmark elections, representing in many ways the culmination of the country’s progress from the Arab Spring protests that ended with the ouster of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in January 2011.tunisia flag

Despite the optimism that marked Ben Ali’s fall and the promulgation of a new constitution in January 2014, Essebsi (pictured above), a figure with ties to the old Ben Ali regime —  will face the same fundamental problem that both Ben Ali and the interim governments of the past four years faced in bringing about greater economic growth and creating new jobs for an underemployed youth population.

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RELATED: Tunisian election results: the (secular) empire strikes back

RELATED: How Tunisia became the success story of the Arab Spring

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By any stretch, Tunisia is clearly the success story of the Arab Spring  — though it faces its own set of struggles in the years ahead, it hasn’t fallen into Libya’s chaos, reverted to Egypt’s military-backed authoritarian rule or fallen into a Syria-style civil war. When Tunisia held its first parliamentary elections under its new constitution in October, and when the Essebsi’s secular Nidaa Tounes (حركة نداء تونس‎, Call of Tunisia) narrowly defeated Tunisia’s Islamist party Ennahda (حركة النهضة‎), Tunisia’s Islamists gracefully conceded. Unlike in Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood broke its pledge not to run a presidential candidate in the 2012 election, Ennadha wisely chose not to contest the presidential fight, which culminated in a runoff between Essebsi and Moncef Marzouki, a human rights activist and secular liberal who has served as Tunisia’s interim president since 2011.

Marzouki

Marzouki (pictured above), who lost by a double-digit margin  of 55.68% to 44.32%, according to official results released Monday, congratulated Essebsi earlier Tuesday, clearing the way for a peaceful transfer of power. Though Marzouki still commands significant respect within the country, he has struggled to tamp down increasing disenchantment with the economy and sporadic episodes of violence. Though not an Islamist himself, Marzouki won the presidency through Ennahda‘s support, and many of its voters preferred Marzouki over Essebsi, given the latter’s ties to prior regimes that often repressed religious expression.

While Tunisia can take some pride in the strides that it has made, the best way for its political elite to secure the political gains of the past four years is to boost economic growth and pull Tunisia firmly into the class of rising middle-income countries through economic reform, public sector modernization and closer ties with the European Union. In that regard, Essebsi’s task is not incredibly different than any number of new leaders in post-revolutionary countries on the European periphery, from the democratic (Ukraine’s Petro Poroshenko) to the autocratic (Egypt’s Abdel Fattah El-Sisi). But with GDP growth of barely 3% last year, a 15% unemployment rate and a jobless rate of around 30% for young Tunisians, the relative success or failure of the Essebsi administration will lie in its ability to foster growth, and that was always going to be true of the next  government — liberal, Islamist or otherwise.

The lack of economic opportunity has already caused at least 3,000 young Tunisians to join the jihadist Islamic State group (الدولة الإسلامية‎)  in Syria and Iraq, allegedly a larger foreign contingent of fighters than from any other country. The continued failure of Tunisia’s post-revolution government to address its lackluster economy could similarly cause many of the country’s youth to turn away from democratic politics and toward more radical solutions at home — a huge problem for a country whose median age is 29.7 years old. The inflection point for Tunisia’s protests in December 2010 came with Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation, itself as much a statement against a lack of economic opportunities as against the Ben Ali’s autocratic regime.

Marzouki lost Sunday’s election in large part due to his inability to effect that kind of economic turnaround. There’s some doubt that Essebsi, at age 88, and with links to the elite that ran the country for decades even before Ben Ali, is the man for the job. Essebsi once served as an adviser to Habib Bourguiba, Tunisia’s president for 30 years after independence and Ben Ali’s mentor until Ben Ali ousted him in the 1987 coup.  Continue reading Essebsi must now deliver on Tunisia’s economy →

Tunisia

Tunisian election results: the (secular) empire strikes back

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nidaa

Behind all the happy headlines ushering in the ‘secular victory’ in Tunisia’s Sunday parliamentary elections, there’s a darker possibility lurking.tunisia flag

Tunisia’s newly constituted secular party, Nidaa Tounes (حركة نداء تونس‎, Call of Tunisia),  narrowly defeated Tunisia’s Islamist party Ennahda (حركة النهضة‎) in the first regular parliamentary elections since the Arab Spring revolution that ousted former president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Official results announced hours ago confirmed the victory, which gives Nidaa Tounes a plurality, but  not an outright majority, in Tunisia’s 217-member, unicameral parliament.

Under the new election law, 199 members of the assembly are elected across 33 single-member and multi-member constituencies, with 18 representatives elected from six overseas constituencies.

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The risks of Ennahda are well-known to US and European policymakers, who have long doubted that Islamist movements can also be inclusive and democratic. Though Tunisia’s Islam is mild by the standards of the Arabian peninsula, the Levant and even neighboring Libya, secular Tunisians feared that Ennahda would overreach in the same way as the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi in his one year as Egypt’s president, endangering the relatively liberal social climate that Tunisians enjoyed, even under the Ben Ali regime.

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RELATED: How Tunisia became the success story of the Arab Spring

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Those fears, despite a rise in violence from fundamentalist Islamists earlier this summer, were always overwrought. Ennahda, which won the first parliamentary elections to Tunisia’s post-Ben Ali constituent assembly in October 2011, has a much more mixed record in government. Tunisians are still unsatisfied about the state of the economy and, especially, unemployment three years after economic factors played a huge role in the protests that led to Ben Ali’s overthrow and kicked off the ‘Arab spring’ revolutions across the Muslim world.

But Ennahda, despite a political crisis that forced its government to resign in January 2014, nevertheless bridged Tunisia from the authoritarian Ben Ali era to the promulgation of a new constitution. In respect of Tunisia’s new democratic system, Ennahda leadership conceded victory, based on preliminary results released Monday.

Rachid al-Ghannouchi, who founded Ennahda in 1981, was a longtime champion of greater democracy in Tunisia, and he has always been painfully mindful of the political divisions that plunged neighboring Algeria into a civil war in the 1990s and the miscalculations of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the increasingly chaotic anarchy in neighboring Libya.

But in Nidaa Tounes, Tunisians have elected into government a patchwork alliance of liberals, labor unions and technocrats and officials with experience that goes back not just to the Ben Ali era, but to Tunisia’s first post-independence president, the long-serving Habib Bourguiba.

That brings another risk — that the rem ants of the Ben Ali and Bourguiba regimes could develop such a stranglehold on Tunisia’s governmental institutions that the country returns to the kind of de facto soft-authoritarian, if secular, state that preceded the spectacular January 2011 revolution that resulted in Ben Ali’s forced resignation.

Tunisian affairs tend toward moderation, among both the Islamist and secular camps. Even during the Bourguiba regime, Tunisia pushed forward with some of the most progressive rights within North Africa and the Middle East, especially as regards women’s rights. So while the prevailing sentiment after Tunisia’s elections should be relief that the vote took place with virtually no disruption, and that Ennahda quickly admitted defeat and indicated its intent to hand over power to Nidaa Tounes, there’s room for concern about the fragility of Tunisia’s nascent democracy.

essebsi

No one personifies the ties to the old regime more than Beji Caid Essebsi, the Nidaa Tounes leader, who is also the frontrunner in the Tunisian presidential election set for November 23. Essebsi (pictured above), now age 87, was an advisor to Bourguiba from the first moments of Tunisia’s independence, and he served as the head of Bourguiba’s national police, interior minister and foreign minister, and he served in Tunisia’s parliament during the Ben Ali era. Continue reading Tunisian election results: the (secular) empire strikes back →

Egypt, Tunisia

How Tunisia became the ‘success story’ of the Arab Spring

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jomaa

In the two countries where the Arab Spring ‘revolutions’ of early 2011 quickly toppled long-standing dictators, Tunisia has become the ‘success story’ and Egypt its ‘failure.’  Whereas Egypt is grinding through what’s now three years of fits and starts in its political development, Tunisia today seems like it’s on a stronger and more productive path to economic stability and political harmony.egypt_flag_newtunisia flag

First off, it’s hard to know exactly what anyone means by ‘success’ with respect to Islamic democracy, especially in the context of North African history, which has little history of democratic institutions.  By the way, is the Lebanese political system a ‘success’? Is Indonesia’s? Turkey’s? Iran’s? Pakistan’s?

Moreover, the truth isn’t so easily distilled down to the mantra of ‘Tunisia good, Egypt bad,’ and it wasn’t always so clear that Tunisia would succeed where Egypt today seems to have failed.  Experiments in political change in both countries continue to develop, and there’s still time for Egypt to ‘succeed’ — and for Tunisia to ‘fail.’

Tunisia, this week, marked the third anniversary since the fall of its former president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

Egypt and Tunisia both enacted new constitutions in January, inviting a comparison between the two approaches to post-revolutionary politics.

In Egypt, the military-led government pushed through a more secular version of last year’s constitution with stronger protections for human rights, though it did so by controlling the Egyptian media, deploying violence to silence its critics and excluding the Muslim Brotherhood (جماعة الاخوان المسلمين‎) from joining the political debate.  Not surprisingly, the Brotherhood boycotted the constitutional referendum, and the new constitution passed with over 98% of the vote.  Last month’s vote was the third constitutional referendum in Egypt since Hosni Mubarak’s fall from office in February 2011.  Egyptians also overwhelmingly endorsed constitutional reforms in March 2011 and in December 2012, the latter a hasty effort by former president Mohammed Morsi that hijacked the process from Egypt’s preexisting constituent assembly to enshrine the Brotherhood’s vision for Egypt into a new constitution.

Tunisia took a different path to constitutional reform, playing the tortoise to Egypt’s hare.  It didn’t jump to an immediate referendum — and it won’t hold a popular referendum on Tunisia’s new constitution.  Instead, its interim government conduction an election in October 2011 to choose a 217-member constituent assembly that late last month promulgated a constitution that’s even more progressive than Egypt’s, in line with the historically secular tradition of Tunisian governance and the moderate nature of Tunisian Islam — it protects freedom of expression and religion and provides for some of the strongest women’s rights in the Arab world.

Mehdi Jomaa (pictured above), an independent who most recently served as minister of industry, took office on January 29 to lead a caretaker, technocratic government designed to keep Tunisia on track through the planned elections later this year.

The charter won the support of secular members of the constituent assembly, but also the support of the assembly’s largest bloc, the Islamic democratic Ennahda Movement (حركة النهضة, Arabic for ‘Renaissance’‎).  While the constitution doesn’t enshrine sharia law or even proclaim Tunisia to be an ‘Islamic state,’ it incorporates Islam as Tunisia’s state religion and states in its preamble the ‘attachment of our people to the teachings of Islam.’  That has left the constitution open to charges that it’s vague and inconsistent, especially Article 6, which attempts to provide for freedom of religion and protect against ‘offenses to the sacred’: 

The State is the guardian of religion. It guarantees liberty of conscience and of belief, the free exercise of religious worship and the neutrality of the mosques and of the places of worship from all partisan instrumentalization.

The State commits itself to the dissemination of the values of moderation and tolerance and to the protection of the sacred and the prohibition of any offense thereto. It commits itself, equally, to the prohibition of, and the fight against, appeals to Takfir [charges of apostasy] and incitement to violence and hatred.

Despite the shortcomings of Tunisia’s constitution, it wasn’t always a foregone conclusion that the Ennahda Movement and Tunisian secularists would reach a compromise — Ennahda always had enough strength to kill the constitutional process if it truly wanted.  By 2013, rising political violence from within the Salafist, conservative ranks of Tunisian Islamists threatened the entire venture, notably the assassinations by radical Islamists of Chokri Belaïd, the leader of the leftist, secular Democratic Patriots’ Movement, in February 2013, and of Mohamed Brahmi, the founder and leader of the socialist/Arab nationalist People’s Movement, in July 2013.

Egypt, in contrast, has now held three constitutional referenda, November 2011/January 2012 parliamentary elections that were annulled by Egypt’s top court and a May/June 2012 presidential vote that ended in Morsi’s election, his ultimate overthrow by the Egyptian army in July 2013, and a brutal crackdown against Morsi’s supporters.  Egypt is expected to hold a presidential election this spring, with another parliamentary election to follow, and army chief and defense minister Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi is almost certain to run and likely to win, representing, in essence, the re-Mubarakization of Egypt.

Whereas Egypt’s 2014 elections will be its third restart at attempted representative government since Mubarak’s fall, Tunisia’s unscheduled 2014 elections follow three years of careful, if difficult, work by the constituent assembly and Tunisia’s interim government.

So what marks the key differences that explain why Tunisia and Egypt are so far apart today?  Continue reading How Tunisia became the ‘success story’ of the Arab Spring →