Tunisian spark

Published : Feb 25, 2011 00:00 IST

Protesters hold a banner which calls for the President's resignation, in Tunis on January 14. - AP

Protesters hold a banner which calls for the President's resignation, in Tunis on January 14. - AP

The Jasmine Revolution takes the authoritarian rulers in Tunisia by surprise and triggers anti-government protests across the Arab world.

THE self-immolation by Mohammad Bouazizi, an unemployed man who was harassed by the police in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid on December 17, was the spark that ignited the Arab street. It first started the Jasmine Revolution (jasmine is Tunisia's national flower). The residents of the sleepy town, who were already angry about routine police brutality and the lack of economic opportunities, took to the streets spontaneously with a rock in one hand and a cellphone in the other. Grainy images of the protests were soon telecast on Al Jazeera television and were subsequently picked up by other Arab television networks. There had been similar incidents of suicide and protests in Tunisia before, but the authorities had managed to stop the news from reaching the domestic audience. This time, however, things took a dramatic and unscripted turn, taking the authoritarian rulers in the region by surprise and triggering anti-government protests all over the Arab world.

On December 17, a close relative of Bouazizi posted a video of a peaceful protest led by the victim's mother in front of the local municipal office. The next day it was on Al Jazeera. Although the news was not reported in the Tunisian media, the country's 3.6 million Internet users, who form one-third of the population, quickly caught on to the happenings in Sidi Bouzid.

Tunisia has the highest number of Internet users in Africa in terms of percentage of population. The Tunisian authorities tried to thwart the flow of information by resorting to censorship and cutting off of power in Sidi Bouzid and neighbouring towns that had joined the protests.

It was only on December 29 that a local television channel showed footage of the protests. The government, in a desperate effort to stop the protests from spreading, even resorted to phishing operations and hijacking Facebook accounts of online protesters. The overconfident government of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, which had one of the strongest censorship laws in the Arab world, had allowed social networks such as Facebook and Twitter to remain uncensored until the events of December.

The working class played an important role in the uprising. Members of the Tunisian General Labour Union (UGTT) were involved in it from day one. The union activists in Sidi Bouzid and in the south of the country became the driving force behind the daily demonstrations, which soon spread to nearby towns. Thousands of people, many of them unemployed, joined in. The unemployment rate in Tunisia is around 30 per cent. Many university graduates are among those without work.

The unrest spread through the nation and engulfed the capital, Tunis, after the police resorted to killings in the towns of Menzel Bouziane and Regoub. Students, teachers and the unemployed spontaneously joined the struggle.

A resident of Sidi Bouzid told Al Jazeera that Ben Ali's big mistake was to order the police to use real bullets instead of rubber bullets against his people. On January 6, a successful general strike was organised to protest against the brutality of the security forces. More than a hundred people had been killed by then. The government ordered the closure of all the universities but the unrest had become unstoppable.

On January 13, Ben Ali finally went on national television and promised to initiate democratic reforms. He also said he would not seek re-election when his term would end in 2016. Ben Ali has been in power since the mid-1980s. In fact Tunisia has seen only two rulers Habib Borguiba and Ben Ali, both pro-Western and authoritarian to the core since it attained independence in 1956.

The President's appeal had no takers. The following day, the trade unions called for a general strike. The government responded by invoking a state of emergency and threatened that arms will be used if orders of the security forces are not heeded. The people defied the threats. Thousands marched to the Interior Ministry building even as a nation-wide strike was on.

The 29-day-long struggle of the Tunisian people ended Ben Ali's 23-year rule. He caught a plane in the stealth of the night on January 14 and disembarked in Saudi Arabia, the favourite resting place for dictators shorn off power. His long-time patron, France, refused him asylum at the eleventh hour.

It was the first popular revolution in the Arab world in many years. The Sudanese got rid of their dictator Jaffar Nimeiry in 1985 by taking to the streets, but their triumph was short-lived as the country experienced another military coup a few years later. Tunisia could also face a similar threat if the democratic opposition does not get its act together soon.

Ben Ali is out, but the vestiges of his rule remain. Mohamed Ghannouchi, the man who has assumed the presidency, is a close associate of Ben Ali. He has pledged to remain a caretaker President until multiparty elections are held later in the year. Popular outrage forced him to drop the holdovers from Ben Ali's Cabinet and replace them with lesser known associates of the fallen dictator. The new banners the protesters are carrying read RCD Out instead of Ben Ali Out. Ben Ali had used the Constitutional Democratic Rally (RCD) party to consolidate his rapacious rule. The opposition has demanded that Ben Ali return the $5 billion he is alleged to have embezzled during his tenure. The only way Tunisians could find jobs in the government was by becoming members of the RCD. One out of 30 Tunisian works for the country's security agencies.

Efforts are under way to form a Centre-Left democratic alternative comprising the Communist Workers' Party, the Congress Party of the Republic and the Ennahda Party. The return of Rachid Ghannouchi, the leader of the Islamist Ennahda movement, to Tunisia from his exile in France will make the political situation more interesting. Ennahda was banned in 1989 when it was the leading opposition force. A year before that, in the only comparatively free elections held during Ben Ali's rule, it had got nearly 20 per cent of the votes. The Islamists, like their counterparts in Egypt, did not play an important role in the events leading to the ouster of the dictatorship. Today, the party is split into two factions. Some of its leading members even talk of separating religion from politics. Seyyed Ferjani, a senior member of the party, has said that the Tunisian uprising belongs to the people. It is a genuine revolution and it does not belong to any party. It belongs to all, he said.

The West was supportive of Ben Ali's crackdown on the Islamists. Washington and Brussels will not be too happy at the prospect of Islamists being able to operate legally again and contest for power in Tunisia and Egypt. The United States especially has reason to be upset by the turn of events. Ben Ali was their favourite strong man in the region. He unquestioningly implemented the policies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, which led to the impoverishment of his people and encouraged crony capitalism.

The diplomatic cables exposed by WikiLeaks show that the U.S. was aware of the rampant corruption the President's close associates were indulging in. But the U.S. was willing to gloss over everything because Tunisia was one of its strongest allies in the war on terror.

Tunisia was also the headquarters of the U.S. administration's Middle East Partnership Initiative, ostensibly meant to spread democracy in the region. The Bush administration had taken upon itself the task of spreading its version of democracy after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The success of Hamas in Palestine in the 2006 election and the good show by the Muslim Brothers in the seats they were allowed to contest in Egypt in the 2005 election convinced Washington that democracy was not all that good for its strategic interests in the region.

The Ben Ali government, like many other governments in the region, had lent a helping hand to the Bush administration's extraordinary rendition programme. Terror suspects from other countries were handed over to Tunisian security services to extract information through torture. The Tunisian government was one of the few supporters of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), which aims to set up military bases on the continent. When the popular uprising commenced, the U.S. announced $12 million in security assistance to the Tunisian government. The other beneficiaries of the Obama administration's security assistance are its close allies, Israel, Egypt, Jordan and Colombia.

There was not a word of condemnation from the U.S. when the police opened fire on demonstrators. Washington's reaction came only after it became clear in the second week of January that Ben Ali's days at the helm of affairs were numbered. France had also viewed Ben Ali as their man in the region. French Foreign Minister Michele Alliot-Marie said in Parliament in December, when the protests were raging, that France was willing to share the know-how of its security forces to help control this kind of a situation. President Nicolas Sarkozy, during a 2008 visit to Tunisia, hailed Ben Ali as a great democrat, saying that the space for freedom was getting wider. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the IMF chief and a man widely tipped to challenge Sarkozy in the next presidential election, once hailed Tunisia as a model for many developing countries.

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