Tunisia Update

France's President Nicolas Sarkozy (R) speaks with Tunisia's Prime Minister Beji Caid Essebsi (L) as he leaves the Elysee Palace in Paris May 18, 2011. Center is France's Foreign Affairs Minister Alain Juppe (Reuters Pictures via Daylife)

The Economist brings us this update on the situation in Tunisia ... but before getting to the abridged article below I just have to ask why some refuse to recognize Lebanon's Cedar Revolution as the region's first against autocratic rule and why, given two consecutively peaceful and widely legitimized parliamentary elections, Lebanon's isn't considered "a solid multiparty Arab democracy".  Maybe it has something to do with the presence of a domineering paramilitary organization that dictates the course of the country's politics ... you know, like deciding if we're going to have a war or not, or whether some general stays in his post at the airport or not, or if government agencies can enter one part of the country or another ... things like that.

When they tossed out Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali on January 14th after 23 years of his kleptocratic presidency, Tunisians launched not only their own revolution but a wave of change across the region. ...

... Though shaky, Tunisia still feels well ahead of its rival in the Arab democratisation league, Egypt. Preparations are under way for a general election, scheduled for July 24th, to choose a 260-person body to draw up a new constitution. After weeks of wrangling, the government has agreed to a proportional party-list voting system in which half the candidates must be women. It has also named a 16-member independent commission to oversee the polls. Some 10,000 senior members of the former ruling party, which dominated Tunisian politics for five decades, have been banned from running for office.

... Earlier this month, a video clip on Facebook showed Farhat Rajhi, a popular reformist who served briefly as interior minister in the early days of the caretaker government, casting grave doubts on his former colleagues’ commitment to democracy. In comments captured by a reporter’s hidden camera, he said he was sacked as interior minister because he had objected to the appointment of officials, including provincial governors, tainted by links to the old guard. Most explosively, he suggested that Tunisia’s army was prepared to intervene should the election be won by Nahda, an Islamist party that was banned under the former regime but has since bounced strongly back.

Mr Rajhi’s musings tallied with widely held suspicions that the caretaker government, headed by the 84-year-old Beji Caid Sebsi, has been dragging its feet over reforms, so prompting the angry protests. ...

Public opinion appears divided. Many voices in Tunisia’s vibrant blogosphere suggest that the unguarded comments were meant to embarrass the government and perhaps to further Mr Rajhi’s own political career. Such views also reflect growing weariness with what has been a long season of protests and strikes. A lot of Tunisians are eager to move on.

... With its tourism floundering and problems such as high youth unemployment and poverty festering, Tunisia is in a fragile state. ... But although the pace of reform may seem ponderous to the impatient young, the country is still heading steadily if bumpily in the right direction—and is on course to emerge as the first solid multiparty Arab democracy.

Timeless Longing for Dignity, Freedom and Self-Respect

 Rami G. Khoury, writing in Lebanon's Daily Star:

In the annals of modern history, a few moments stand out as pivotal to all humankind, moments when a single human being, during a fleeting moment of intense anger and humiliation, undertakes an act that manifests his or her determination to end systematic humiliation and to seek a new life of dignity and full humanity.

We can best understand the full causes and consequences of the current citizen revolts across the Arab world... by fully appreciating the incident that sparked them: the desperate act of Mohammad Bouazizi, a 24-year-old Tunisian fruit and vegetable street cart vendor who set himself on fire last December 17 to protest two consecutive and related acts that he felt accentuated his sense of abuse and humiliation by the Tunisian state authorities.

The first was when a 45-year-old female municipal police officer, Faida Hamdi, and her colleagues overturned and confiscated Bouazizi’s cart and its wares, with some reports saying she or her colleagues also slapped and spat on him. The second was when Bouazizi went to the local governor’s office in the town of Sidi Bouzid to seek redress and was refused a meeting with any official.

Publicly humiliated and defenseless in front of an uncaring structure of state authority, and prevented from earning the meager income from his street vending that he required to help feed his mother and six siblings, he ended his misery in a final act of gruesome self-immolation that was also an act of desperate self-affirmation. His personal anguish – as the ongoing Second Arab Revolt reveals – was also reflective of the pain and vulnerability of millions of other Tunisians, and several hundred million Arabs.
...
It is hard to think of a better description of the person, mindset and final desperate act of Bouazizi, whose weariness with his life-long mistreatment by the Tunisian state finally prompted him to undertake his own “individual expression of a timeless longing for dignity, freedom and self-respect.”
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