Tunisia: Trying to Build a Government From Scratch

posted on: Feb 21, 2011

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Fed up and humiliated, Mohamed Bouazizi left his fruit stand, which a municipal bylaw official had deemed illegal, and walked to a hardware store where he purchased paint solvent.

The 26-year-old then walked a short distance to the municipal building in his hometown of Sidi Bouzid, a depressed farming town four hours south of Tunis, the capital, and lit himself on fire.

His self-immolation on Dec. 17 ignited a revolution — accelerated by the power of YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.

Today, just more than a month since former president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled on a jet to Saudi Arabia, the “people’s revolution” that ended 23 years of autocratic rule and has inspired and shaken the Arab world is feeling its way toward an uncertain future.

Facebook may have helped bring down a government but it does not excel at creating one.

A democracy must be constructed here from nothing. Tourism is in limbo, the economy shaken. Boatloads of Tunisians — some poor and some aligned with the former regime — have made their way illegally to Europe as would-be refugees.

After so many years of heavy-handed rule, a muzzled press, well-documented abuses of political prisoners, growing numbers of activists and bloggers, and high unemployment, frustrated youth and a literate, educated people, the revolution still seems to have surprised Ben Ali, his regime and his much-despised family.

It may have felt as though it came without warning, yet the conditions, as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said, were there for a perfect storm — and had been developing for some time.

How did the “people’s revolution” happen? And, what now?

The Star went looking for answers in this North African country of 10.6 million, blessed by the beauty of the Mediterranean Sea to the north and Sahara Desert to the south.

The prisoners

Near the gates of Tunis’s cacophonic Medina suuq (market) and up a short, jolting lift in an elevator slightly larger than a telephone booth, are the modest law offices of Samir Ben Amor. A small man with permanent dark semicircles beneath his eyes, Ben Amor has represented hundreds of Islamic prisoners in cases that could not be won under Ben Ali.

As a result of that work, he has also represented bloggers who were scooped up for writing things the Ben Ali government deemed threatening.

The revolution, says Ben Amor, came as no surprise to him. Most telling was what he saw at soccer matches in the past couple of years. Club supporters kept getting into bloody clashes. Not with rivals —with police. The officers were the face of the widely detested and feared Ministry of the Interior, which carried out a litany of abuses well-documented by human rights groups.

The authorities reacted by clamping down on clubs’ pre-match pep sessions and by holding matches with no fans in the stands.

“It was funny for me to watch TV every Sunday, because all of the commentators were trying to find an explanation,” says Ben Amor. “No one thought it was for a political reason.”

The discontent, says Ben Amor, had been building for decades.

Since Ben Ali took charge in a bloodless coup in 1987, there has been only one terrorist attack on Tunisian soil — a truck bomb killed 11 tourists in 2002 — yet the government detained tens of thousands of political prisoners. In his drive to maintain Tunisia’s secular society (and to show Western allies he was maintaining a secular state), Islamists were a popular target.

Following 9/11, Tunisia cracked down even harder. Men in beards were harassed by police and told to shave. Women wearing hijabs were targets. There were efforts to close a mosque. The prisons filled with political prisoners.

Jalel Ben Nedjma, 47, was released from prison in 2003 but still keeps his prison papers with him. The carpenter spent 11 years in jail on charges he was a bomb maker, allegations he says were bogus.

He was arrested after returning from a visit to Libya. He had a suitcase full of gifts for family — a tape recorder, shampoos and shower gels — but nothing that could be turned into a bomb, he says.

Ben Nedjma belongs to Ennahdha, an Islamist party outlawed by Ben Ali. He waited more than three years for a trial, which lasted a day and included 26 other accused, and was allowed one to two minutes to defend himself.

“It was a kind of comedy because every person was arrested for producing a bomb and we all had the same sentence.”

Before he was sentenced, Ben Nedjma was held in the 9th of April Prison, a Tunis jail infamous for torture and abuse of political prisoners. Inmates were crowded into cells and had access to a shower once every two weeks. The showers lasted two minutes.

He spent time in three different prisons, all of them far from his mother, two brothers and two sisters. “They did this to give your family a hard time to visit. It’s what we call the family’s torture. It’s a part of the sentence. They make them feel guilty, and they suffer.”

Over the years, the number of those disenchanted with Ben Ali grew. Bouazizi wasn’t the first suicide committed out of frustration.

Political prisoners went on hunger strikes, dying without public attention. Ennahdha member Abdelwahab Boussaa, for example, died in 2002 in a jail called Bourj er-Roumi following a four-month hunger strike.

“Bouazizi was lucky,” says Ben Nedjma. “He had Facebook, and young Tunisians were interested in his case. Before in Tunisia, things happened but no one heard about it.”

As the Facebook-fuelled protests grew and Ben Ali made a final plea to the people on Jan. 13, Ben Nedjma wondered whether Tunisians would acquiesce.

The rest, of course, is now history.

Ben Nedjma marvelled at the sight of the people rising up in Tunis on Jan. 14, the day Ben Ali fled. “My party took part in this revolution, with our wives, our children, our young people. Everybody was there. All the Tunisians were out. I felt proud.”

Where once he was filled with fear of the government, he went home the night of the 14th thinking, “I’m afraid I might die of happiness.”

He gave his mother a hug and for the first time since his arrest, he cried.

The bloggers

A white steel wall around a construction pit in downtown Tunis proves an irresistible tableau for spray-painted words from a revolution. Among them: “Thank you Facebook.”

With a pierced left eyebrow and stud in her nose, tiny frame and jet black hair, Lina Ben Mhenni looks the part of Lisbeth Salander in Stieg Larsson’s thriller trilogy about a young, computer-savvy woman who hasn’t met an authority figure she didn’t completely mistrust.

Which is fitting, since Ben Mhenni, 27, is a Tunisian blogger who — along with other bloggers — helped bring down the Ben Ali government.

Ben Mhenni, a teacher in the faculty of human and social science at the University of Tunis, began blogging about culture and small social problems in 2007. During a 2008 visit to the U.S. to teach Arabic, she discovered her Facebook page and blog were being censored in Tunisia. She also learned that student union activists were being kicked out of universities.

It was a turning point. She started writing about censorship and serious human rights issues in Tunisia.

“Repression and oppression are everywhere, as well as social problems and economic problems, poverty, unemployment,” says Ben Mhenni, set up in front of her MacBook Pro in a smoky Tunis café popular with bloggers.

“I started writing about all this and together — bloggers, cyber-activists — we were launching campaigns to talk about these problems.”

Ben Mhenni’s writing caught the attention of police, she says. Her parents’ home was broken into and her laptop and cameras stolen.

Ben Mhenni and Slim Amamou, a fellow Tunisian blogger who was arrested in the final days of Ben Ali’s reign and who is now a minister in the caretaker government, both were contributors to Global Voices, an online blogging community that shares and translates posts from around the world.

The cyber audience started to grow but it would take the ancient technology of fire — and one man’s act — for it to expand exponentially.

Following Bouazizi’s self-immolation and ensuing demonstrations in Sidi Bouzid, his home town, Facebook group pages were created, including one called “Mr. President, Tunisians Are Setting Themselves on Fire.” In its first 24 hours, it attracted 2,500 fans, and was eventually shut down. Ben Mhenni attracted 2,000 Twitter followers and had two Facebook profiles that had 4,900 and 5,000 friends respectively. A Facebook page where she posts her blog entries now has more than 13,000 fans.

YouTube videos of early protests emboldened others to follow suit. On Jan. 3, a number of government websites were hacked. Bouazizi, who had burns to 90 per cent of his body, died the next day in hospital. Police, meanwhile, were rounding up bloggers, many whom also saw their Twitter and Facebook profiles hacked.

While momentum was building within the country, the uprising had yet to attract the attention of the Western media.

That changed in no small way because of Ben Mhenni. She did what local journalists were not doing. When word spread of police firing on protesters in areas south of Tunis, she headed out to see for herself.

Facebook friends alerted her to shootings in the town of Regueb, about four hours from the capital and near Sidi Bouzid. She went to the local hospital but found the injured had been moved to a larger facility. A doctor, however, gave her a list of the dead. A group of young people offered to help her find the victims’ families.

At some of the homes lay the bodies. They’d been shot.

“I was hesitating to take the pictures of the corpses,” says Ben Mhenni, “but the families asked me to take the pictures and show this to the whole world.”

She posted the pictures to her blog on Jan. 10.

“When I published these photos, many reporters from TV channels and newspapers from around the world contacted me. They started to take interest in what was going on.”

Four days later, amid huge protests, Ben Ali fled the country.

Ben Mhenni continues to travel and report from areas where there were killings. When it is pointed out that she is doing journalism, she agrees and says the local media can’t be trusted.

“I’ve been following the newspapers. They are not improving. The same journalists who were praising Ben Ali and insulting the dissidents are now insulting Ben Ali and praising the dissidents, talking about their fight and everything.

“But they are not writing analysis of what is going on. So, they are working in the old manner and they are not trying to improve themselves.”

Excesses of a regime

There is a proverb here, the lesson of which is that one must take care to avoid disrupting one’s roots because without them you will have nothing. Ousted dictator Ben Ali, his family and members of his regime may be learning this the hard way.

Although many fled left with riches, the Tunisian cabinet is taking steps to recover “property robbed and transferred illegally abroad by members of the former regime,” reports TAP, the state news agency.

Ben Ali could lose more than his wealth: he was reported to have suffered a stroke Thursday and is in hospital in Saudi Arabia.

Particularly infamous among the members of the regime who have escaped Tunisia is Ben Ali’s brother-in-law, Belhassen Trabelsi, who flew to Montreal aboard a private jet with his wife, four children and a governess.

Tunisia has asked Canada to have him returned to face justice. Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon told reporters the government would comply: “We do not want a criminal like him in Canada.”

Just how Canada intends to remove Trabelsi is unclear; depending on his status, it could take years.

It took only days for the people to reclaim the homes here belonging to Ben Ali relatives. They have been ransacked and torched.

One villa overlooking the Mediterranean, which belonged to a nephew of Ben Ali, was nothing spectacular for the neighbourhood. But it is now a spectacle.

The villa, which boasted a home theatre and swimming pool, has been stripped of everything — including wiring — and has become an unofficial “museum” of the revolution. Tunisians come to see where their money went.

Graffiti on the wall outside reads: “Goodbye sadness, hello happiness,” and, “You tried to get more than you should, you left everything and now you have nothing.”

The well-connected lived large in a land where annual GDP per person is less than $10,000 (Canada’s GDP per person is $39,600).

In a diplomatic cable recently released through WikiLeaks — one that likely added fuel to the revolt — it was revealed that Ben Ali’s son-in-law flew in ice cream for a dinner with a U.S. diplomat and kept a pet tiger, which consumed four chickens a day.

There were luxury automobiles for the Ben Ali clan and giant portraits of the man draped from most government buildings.

The portraits are now gone and only traces remain of purple paint, Ben Ali’s favourite colour. Radio hosts lampoon the former ruler and, in another first, a street artist displays satirical drawings of Ben Ali and his family.

“Now that the family is gone, we feel free,” says Ridha Youni, 57, whose family runs a perfume business in Tunis’s Medina suuq. “We hope that this will be a lucky year for Tunisia and bring us all that we are expecting.”

The martyr

At a humble home, tucked in a quiet neighbourhood a short walk from the main street of Sidi Bouzid, Mohamed Bouazizi’s brother greets a visiting reporter at the front gate.

“It’s a special day today,” he says.

It is the 40th day since his brother died, and the family, as is the Muslim custom, is marking the end of a mourning period. There will be no interviews or photos on this day, he apologizes.

Still, there is an invitation to come in for tea and fruit. Pet canaries, housed in cages hung from the ceiling, chirp and sing. The family has been preparing couscous for the many expected guests.

Bouazizi is a national hero.

His image adorns posters and has become as iconic as Che Guevara in his beret. In the most popular image, one of the few that exist of Bouazizi, he is happy. It was taken on the day of a friend’s wedding last year.

Mannoubia Bouazizi pulls up a chair and begins to speak of her son. He was pleasant. A good son. His father died when he was young.

“He’d never been anywhere for travelling or for summer camp, or swimming. He never had a holiday,” his mother says. “He was a very respected person. He never left his mother alone. And now he is gone.”

He is missed and tears still fall but he died for his dignity, she says.

“May his death serve our country and Egypt, and all our countries.”

The future

Just what the next months will bring is uncertain.

There are no well-organized opposition parties in Tunisia and remnants of the Constitutional Democratic Rally (RCD), the former ruling party, are everywhere. The closest group to being organized is the Islamist party Ennahdha, led by Rachid Ghannouchi, who recently returned to Tunisia after living in exile. In secular Tunisia, their support base is small.

“It takes more than simple opposition to a particular regime to create the basis for a stable democracy,” says Louis Delvoie, a senior fellow at Queen’s University Centre for International Relations.

He served as Canadian ambassador to Pakistan in the ’90s and in Algeria in the ’80s. He was also posted to the Canadian Embassy in Egypt in the ’60s.

“I think that one of the key things (in Tunisia), as is the case in Egypt, is whether there will be an ability of some of these opponents of the old regime to come together and form one or two or three, more-or-less coherent, parties to contest the election.”

That hasn’t happened yet.

“It’s difficult to see — to use that French term, la relève — what follows on from this,” says Delvoie. “I was asked what I thought the situation would be in Egypt six months or a year from now, and my answer to that was anybody who ventures to tell you what is to be is simply slightly demented.

“It’s all open and all up for grabs.”

Last Monday marked the one-month anniversary of the revolution and the interim president Fouad Mebazza and placeholder government lurch toward an election, possibly within five months. Fittingly, perhaps, they are organizing in a way best facilitated by Facebook and other social media Web 2.0 applications.

Quickly, and on the fly.

“Ministerial council in 30 minutes,” began a recent tweet by blogger Slim Amamou, now secretary of state for youth and sport in the caretaker government. “It’s how the gov. 2.0 is organizing . . . just like a flashmob.”

An army colonel, who would not give his name, described this as a period of necessary “creative anarchy,” which he is confident will eventually give way to new governance.

In Tunis, the sidewalks are full. On the Avenue Habib Bourguiba, a wide boulevard with manicured trees and reminiscent of the Champs Elysees in Paris, people dressed in fashionable coats and scarves — it is cool here in February — stroll and mingle.

Still high, from new-found freedoms.

Jim Rankin
Toronto Star