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Issandr El Amrani | Tunisia ;)
This is still my favorite pic of the Arab Spring (more pics in this post).
What I wrote a year ago: Where Tunisia is now: exhilarating limbo. And a few days later what I wrote for the Guardian on the impact of Tunisia on the region (I was guarded.)
We all owe the Tunisians such an immense debt of gratitude. And admiration. Tahia Tunes!
Amnesty International has released a new report on the state of human rights in the Middle East a year after the uprisings began. Below are a few excerpts on Egypt and Tunisia.
From an interview with Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki (how many times I will I write these words with wonder before the effect wears off?) in Mediapart:
N'oubliez pas que je suis l'élève de Mandela: j'ai rencontré le leader sud-africain dans les années 1990 à Oslo, lors d'une réunion du comité Nobel; je suis allé deux fois en Afrique du Sud dans les années 1990. L'expérience sud-africaine avec les comités de réconciliation nous servira dans la mise en place de cette justice transitionnelle. D'ailleurs nous avons organisé ici, il y a à peine un mois, une réunion sur le thème de la justice transitionnelle; aujourd'hui des associations travaillent sur cette idée, le gouvernement a sa propre mission, et on va organiser cette justice transitionnelle, ouvrir les archives, former les juges, repérer ceux qui ont été coupables de très grands crimes et qui devront passer devant les tribunaux normaux, et faire passer les autres devant des tribunaux particuliers où ils devront demander pardon, ce qui leur sera accordé. Nous ne sommes pas du tout dans l'esprit d'une justice de vengeance, parce que cette révolution a été pacifique, démocratique et elle doit avoir une justice à son image.
My quick translation:
Don't forget I'm a student of Nelson Mandela: I met the South African leader in the 1990s in Oslo, during a meeting of the Nobel Committee; and went twice to South Africa in the 1990s. The South African experience of reconciliation committees will be useful to implement transitional justice. In fact we organized, just a month ago, a meeting on the theme of transitional justice. Today associations are working on this dea, the government has its own mission, and we will organize this transitional justice, open the archives, train judges, identify those who are guilty of great crimes and who will have to appear in front of normal tribunals, a right they will have. We are not at all in the logic of revenge, because this revolution was peaceful, democratic, and it must have a similar type of justice.
Remember how, in early January, Egyptian officials and many a pundit warned that "Egypt is not Tunisia," suggesting an uprising against Mubarak was unlikely? I wrote about this in one of my first long pieces on the uprisings in the LRB, before Mubarak was toppled, and have thought about it a lot since. I take to task the centrality of the Egyptian uprising in a new piece in The National (part of a series of three looking at the Arab uprisings), and argue that Tunisia must be given its due. To me, the Tunisian revolution (because it is that, a revolution) was the most remarkable event of 2011, and I'm glad I got a chance to witness key parts of it.
It has often been written in the past year that the beating heart of the Arab uprisings is Cairo's Tahrir Square. In this view, the events that took place the month before in Tunisia were a mere precursor to the real deal - the Egyptian revolution - as if the Tunisians were simply the warm-up act for the star of the show.
The fall of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, after all, was the most unexpected and counterintuitive of events: Ben Ali's Tunisia had been a well-run, orderly little place with its share of social problems and a pervasive police state, but no real political fissure on the horizon. Hosni Mubarak's Egypt, on the other hand, was a disaster waiting to happen, in which an elderly president, his ineffectual son and a divided regime were gearing for battle as a leadership succession loomed.
In other words - from this perspective - tiny Tunisia was an uprising that could have easily ended differently if, during a few hours of panic on January 14, the president had not caved into the advice of his security chief and decided to leave the country. In expansive Egypt, long a gravity well of the Arab world, the spark of Ben Ali's downfall found ready kindle to unleash a much larger revolt that spread like wildfire.
I beg to differ with this analysis, which puts the horse before the cart. It is true that few saw the Tunisian uprising coming, despite waves of social unrest in the country's poor hinterlands in 2008 and the unceasing and dull brutality of Ben Ali's security forces. And it is true that the Tunisian revolt was less filled with tension and drama than the Egyptian one, which had the world's cameras perched above Tahrir Square and a people given to dramatic performances to enchant them. But we should not confuse the spectacular nature of the "Arab Spring", as brought to you by CNN and Al Jazeera, with its reality.
This year’s uprisings have, in several countries, defeated the domestic spying apparatus, but there is yet little idea of how not only to reform these agencies, but what to do with all the data they collected (or indeed reveal the extent of this data collection).
In Libya, the chaos and sudden fall of Tripoli allowed, temporarily, access to files that revealed not only surveillance but collaboration with Western intelligence on various issues. The state of the intelligence apparatus in unknown, but it is likely that much of it collapsed alongside the Qadhafi state.
In Egypt, the very first days of the uprisings saw security agencies move to destroy many documents and recordings (this was seen in safehouses in different parts of Cairo, as well as in the offices of State Security), some capture of documents by protestors during the (possibly manipulated) break-in into State Security HQ in Nasr City, but no fundamental reform — indeed it appears that not only State Security is still operating as National Security (and lately returning to the streets), but General Intelligence is now at the peak of its powers, even without Omar Suleiman.
In Tunisia, in-depth police reform has yet to begin but the surveillance state has been partly dismantled already. They are now beginning to deal with the many years of work full accountability will take, as this fascinating post at Unredacted on the Tunisian debate of what to do with the former regime’s secret police files shows:
Operating out of the Interior Ministry and other federal agencies, the intelligence and security forces known collectively as the secret police, or political police, excelled in spying on citizens, infiltrating civil society groups, trolling emails and social media sites for information, and harassing, intimidating and torturing suspected opponents of Ben Ali’s regime. Conference participants agreed that no space, public or private, was safe from the surveillance state. As Farah Hachad, a lawyer and president of Le Labo’, recalled at the start of the conference, “Since I was born, even conversations inside our house would be silenced because of the fear inside our hearts that we would be heard and punished.”
Presenters at the conference and audience members had their own memories of the repressive power wielded by the political police. One man recounted how an agent showed up at his door to detain him, “And when I asked, do you have an arrest warrant?, he pulled twenty blank arrest warrants from his pocket, all signed by the Interior Minister, and said, I can have as many as I want.” Taieb Baccouche, the interim Minister of Education and president of the Arab Institute of Human Rights, remembered signing his name to a petition for democracy in the late 1960s along with dozens of other activists, artists and scholars. “That was the beginning of surveillance: they controlled my phone, my mail and all my movements from then on.” Everyone agreed that the political police still existed and still posed a danger to democratic change, despite the advances of the revolution.
More than the issue of disbanding the secret police, however, the conference was focused on how to seize their archives as a way of preserving collective memory and permitting informed public debate about the repressive past. There were strong differences of opinion about how to manage the archives. Some feared the impact on people’s lives of the release of personal information, whether true or invented by the regime. Others felt that Tunisia’s democratic transition could not be complete without access to the archives. As artist and activist Zeyneb Farhat put it, “These political archives were designed to devalue and damage the credibility of activists by spreading lies about them… They have to be opened now in order to create a justice-based relationship between police and citizens and to build trust, so that people understand the police are for protecting security, not for undermining change.”
From a transcript [PDF] of WINEP's rountable with Tunisia's Rachid Ghannouchi — the commentary says much:
Q: You said that a majority of Palestinians accept the idea of a two-state solution with Israel. What about you and your party? Do you accept that concept?
A: Tunisia will never try to take the place of either of the two Palestinian organizations in deciding about these issues.
[Comment: Ghannouchi not only equates Hamas with the Palestinian Authority, but also clearly refuses to explicitly accept a two-state solution for the Arab-Israeli conflict. This is in line with his published interview in February 2011, on the occasion of his most recent visit to Qatar's pro-Hamas Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, whom he cited later in the Q&A as his superior in the International Organization of Muslim Ulama [scholars]. In that interview, Ghannouchi declares that while Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin prophesied that Israel would be eliminated by 2027, his own view is that Israel could be eliminated even before that date. See http://www.alarab.com.qa/details.php?docId=185944&issueNo=1181&secId=28 and http://www.rightsidenews.com/2011112014978/world/terrorism/tunisian-pledges-a-new-caliphate.html.]
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Q: There is a record of your referring to the Hamas government in Gaza as a model of democracy. Do you still believe that?
A: I do not remember making such comments about Hamas. But what cannot be denied is that Hamas was democratically elected, and so it is a legitimate government.
[Comment: For Ghannouchi's praise of Hamas "democracy" in Gaza, see http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/5107 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJ4_pNibf3.]
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There's more of the same in the document, notably over the question of Ghannouchi's past support for violent resistance in Israel/Palestine. WINEP doesn't like that — but I don't remember it condemning the violent treatment of Palestinians, the adoption of collective punishment war doctrines, a policy of assassinations or more generally the violence-enforced occupation.
Last month I took part in a conference entitled "The Economies of the Arab Spring" run by the Hollings Center in Istanbul. Present were a number of people from various countries, with a particular focus on Egypt, Tunisia and Syria (and for the latter on Turkey's relationshipw with Damascus. Below are links to the proceedings of the conference, in Arabic, Turkish and English:
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Issandr El Amrani | Tunisia The very final results for Tunisia's elections are in, with Ennahda losing one seat from the expected 90 and, with the overturning of the cancellation of Aridha Chaabia's seats, it is the third party. The country is merrily going about its transition, it looks like Ennahda is getting the PM's seat, CPR's Marzouki will be the speaker of parliament, and Ettakatol's Ben Jaafar could be president. Maybe. Whoever gets what seats, they're starting to look at deep reforms — over the last few days top press people held meetings with party leaders to discuss media reform, for instance — and quietly making things happen.
Sometimes I think all the money for post-uprising reforms should be put in Tunisia until Egypt gets its act together. Right now Tunisia is so promising while investing in Egypt looks like throwing good money after bad.
Issandr El Amrani | Tunisia Remember the great video I put up showing Tunisians' reactions to a giant Ben Ali poster appearing in the Tunis suburb of La Goulette? The makers of that stunt — the ad firm Ogilvy — sent me the making-of video above.
We were away in Tunisia in late October and never got a chance to do the podcast we had promised from there — we were too busy enjoying the well-organized election, promising democratic prospects and excellent fish. We catch up and talk what we saw there, why Egypt is so much worse off with its own upcoming elections, and agree that the French need to grow up about Islamism.
Issandr El Amrani | Tunisia Ursula and I have penned a long article for MERIP that looks at the Tunisia elections and breaks down their results. It's been fun to finally have an Arab election where you can put the numbers of the spreadsheet and get some meaning out of the results, since the poll was free and fair and held in a democratic environment — even if probably it is still an outlier because it was the first one to be.
Elections nerds might want to take a look at my spreadsheet of the results (inside Tunisia only, I omitted overseas voters because there were inconsistencies or errors in the results published on the ISIE website). If anyone is seriously interested, drop me a mail at issandr [AT] arabist.net.
;)
Moncef Marzouki;)
Mohamed ElBaradeiWe were in Tunisia for nearly a week and it was impossible for me not to spend a lot of my time there making comparisons with Egypt.
It would be hard to find two more different countries than small, Francophone, organized, serious Tunisia and boisterous and chaotic Egypt, a cultural and intellectual hub of Arabism with a population eight times larger.
But the comparison between the two countries in the Arab world who, through peaceful demonstrations, overthrew their dictators, in nonetheless unavoidable. And, sadly, much to Egypt’s detriment.
I am about to leave Tunisia — I'm writing this from the airport — and wanted to write a few thoughts down before I left, as I promised in my post two days ago. It's still not clear what the final results are, as the Election Commission is taking a very long time to count the votes and make sure there are no errors. I don't think any election has been as meticulously scrutinized, ever! But it's clear that Nahda has won a plurality of seats in the constituent assembly — right now they are projected as having won at least 32% of seats, far less than the 47% I was hearing on Monday. I suspect the final result will show them in the low 40s. Even at 32%, they still obtained twice the number of seats as the second party, the CPR.
Now, there are all sorts of allegations floating about. Some say Nahda supporters were told to vote CPR in part, and some hardline secularists view CPR as a Trojan horse for Nahda. This is a bit much, as CPR also benefited from a strong campaign (or so I've been told) and the personality of longtime dissident Moncef Marzouki.
I've written before about Tunisia's great get-out-the-vote initiatives. But the above video shows the best of all. What they did is restore a giant poster of Ben Ali that used to be a landmark of La Goulette, a suburb of Tunis. Passersby are astounded as they see it in the morning, and their stupefaction shifts to anger. They are being filmed by hidden cameras and don't know what's happening. Watch what they do, it's really clever.
;)
Graffiti in Ariana, a suburb of Tunis
I have a confession to make: I used to hate Tunisia. I spent some time reporting there in the last decade and had an awful experience, including a fistfight with police informants who were following me at one point. Many others have had similar experiences. But most of all I disliked Tunisia because so many Tunisians I met seemed perpetually on the verge of a nervous breakdown, which I thought was because they were partly complicit in their ordeal under Ben Ali.
Of course I met admirable Tunisians: I remember how, at a conference of human rights activists in Casablanca, a Tunisian woman broke down in tears as she told me of the daily humiliations the police subjected her to when she visited her husband in prison. But I thought far too many of her compatriots were silent, and this beautiful country seemed, compared to boisterous Egypt where I lived, dead in the soul. This was no doubt unfair — I was, in part, blaming the victims. I have never had to endure what they were subjected to.
Ursula and I arrived in Tunis today, and the city is abuzz with electoral excitement. On Sunday, Tunisian will hold the first election of the Arab Spring, to appoint a constituent assembly that should not only write the first constitution, but effectively be parliament for a year. I won't give my impressions now, except to say that after several depressing weeks in Egypt this is a breath of fresh air. It makes you wish Egypt had followed the same transition model. One thing that strikes me is that although there are plenty of malcontents — apparently especially in the inner region that started the uprising last December — in Tunis I sensed real optimism.
It's going to be a little messy, for sure. I am now watching the bizarre spectacle on state TV of candidates being given three-minute video spots to explain their platform. This means for for about five hours a day at peak evening viewing time, TV is dominated by little-known personalities from the some 60 of 110 political parties that are participating (in this country of some 10 million.)
The pictures above are from a show at an art gallery, with young artists doing their own provocative versions of get-out-the-vote posters.
Tunisia's elections for a constituent assembly will take place on 23 October, and Ursula and I are headed over to Tunis tomorrow (along with half the Cairo press corps, analysts and election monitors) for a week. The video above is a get-out-the-vote initiative by Tunisian up-and-coming artists, and to read up on the elections themselves, check out POMED's Guide to the Tunisian Elections.
The Tunisia-Libya border
Today we inaugurate a new series of dispatches from Libya by our intrepid war correspondent Abu Ray, who is headed to Tripoli where bored journalists await the final battle.
Coming into Libya again, once again I was greeted by graffiti, but this time it was "God, Gadhafi, Libya and that's it." And in fact that was pretty much it for the spray painted slogans for the whole trip from the Tunisian border to Tripoli. As the Palestinian TV producer I was traveling with pointed out, it was somewhat heartening that God at least came before Gadhafi in this instance.
It was certainly a contrast to the jubiliant, riot of "Libya is free" graffiti on the eastern side that I saw four months ago when I came to cover a nationwide rebellion that has since turned into a stalemated civil war and a cautionary tale for any would be Arab democracy activists.
A group of Egyptian NGOs, echoing calls from various political parties and youth groups, have issued a statement backing the Tunisian model of transition, namely that a new constitution should be drafted before parliamentary and presidential elections take place. This is a position that is gaining traction among a lot of people, reflecting in part a lack of trust in the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and in part the fear of Islamist-dominated parliament in the next elections.
Although it might still me a minority opinion, I think this activism on the question of when a constitution should come is gaining momentum, and the reasons provided below make a persuasive case. What remains to be argued and fleshed out is how this new constitution would be formed. By an elected or an appointed constituent assembly? By a panel of jurists and selected (presumably by the SCAF) politicians? By representatives of all political parties (legal or not?) and youth groups? These are questions that need answering.
But, just like yesterday's postponement of the elections for a constituent assembly in Tunisia from July 24 to October 23, it shows that best laid plans can change quickly if deemed necessary. As I've argued before, I don't think the issue of when to have elections is as important as how transparent they are. The Tunisians are delaying theirs to do a proper clearing of the electoral roll. The Egyptians, whether they have elections for parliament or for a constituent assembly, should do the same.
June 9, 2011
In the footsteps of the Tunisian revolution: A Constitution first
The undersigned human rights organizations call on the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) to engage constructively with demands from revolutionary forces to reconsider the agenda of the transitional phase and to give priority to the drafting of a new constitution for the country whose provisions will govern the institutions of a democratic regime. The constitution should be followed by presidential and parli
