Tunisia police fire tear gas to disperse rally
TUNIS — Police fired tear gas on Monday to disperse a rally on a central Tunis avenue where demonstrations are banned.
Hundreds of demonstrators, marking Martyrs’ Day and protesting against the ban imposed on March 28, sought shelter in neighbouring streets and shops.
Wrapped in Tunisian flags and shouting “We’re not afraid, the people are here”, the demonstrators had begun running up Habib Bourguiba Avenue around 10:00 am (0800 GMT), defying police stationed along the main thoroughfare with helmets and batons.
“I’m here to honour our martyrs, and to protest against the ban on demonstrating here. We’re the ones who freed Tunisia, they don’t have the right to ban our peaceful marches,” septuagenarian protester Mohsen Ben Henda told AFP.
Tunisia: “Persepolis” Trial a Setback for Free Expression
The trial of a television director on morality charges for airing a controversial animated film is a disturbing turn for the nascent Tunisian democracy, Human Rights Watch said today. On January 23, 2012, a Tunis court announced that Nabil Karoui, director of Nessma TV, will go on trial on April 19 for airing the French animated movie “Persepolis.”
On October 7, 2011, the privately owned Nessma television station broadcast “Persepolis,” an animated feature film about a girl’s childhood in Iran. The broadcast led to protests in Tunis because it contained a scene depicting God, which some consider to be forbidden by Islam. On October 14, a crowd damaged Karoui’s home in Tunis with Molotov cocktails.
“Trying someone for speech offenses is a relic of the despotism Tunisians protested against,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “Tunisian authorities should immediately drop the prosecution of Karoui.”
Ousted Ben Ali slams Tunisian trial as 'masquerade'
Deposed and exiled Tunisian autocrat Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali broke his silence on Monday to denounce his imminent trial on corruption charges as a “masquerade”, according to his French lawyer.
“Tired of being made a sacrificial lamb by lies and injustice, President Ben Ali has exceptionally dropped his discretion,” said Jean-Yves Le Borgne, who represents the former leader in France.
Ben Ali fled Tunisia in January after a revolt against his 23-year rule and is thought to be in Saudi Arabia. Family members say he suffered a stroke in February.
Tunisia’s new authorities are preparing to try him and his wife Leila Trabelsi on drugs, guns and graft charges in absentia.
Purging the Bad Guys: A How-To Guide
…Amid the new drama that unfolds every day in Egypt and Tunisia, these swipes at the regime’s tormentors stand out as an early test of how truly committed reformists are to their own calls for democracy and human rights. Vigilante justice is one thing. Transitional justice is another: Not only a break with the past, but the creation of a new political culture based on civic freedoms and rule of law.
To see this kind of transition firsthand, North Africans need only peer across the Mediterranean and study what post-authoritarian Eastern Europe has undergone during the past two decades. Nudged forward by a desire to join the European Union, new elites tackled the question of what to do with the key perpetrators of the ancien régime — plus all the loyal foot soldiers who propped it up. The key question: Beyond the secret police, how deeply to cut into the old elites, public administration, bureaucracy, courts, economy, army and regular police, even in the media and universities?
In each country, it began with lustration: a legalized “controlled purge” of collaborators. These lustration laws — the name derived from lustrum, the purification rituals of ancient Greece and Rome — were forged in the newly democratic parliaments of Eastern Europe. Crucially, though, they were hammered out by all factions — even the vanquished communists, by then reconstituted as socialists.
“This is not revenge, where you purge because you’re in the position to,” says political scientist Lavinia Stan, co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Transitional Justice and a Romanian who was raised under the repressive rule of Nicolae Ceausescu. “You want to send a message: This is a new regime, and we’re so committed to democracy that we give [former loyalists] a stake in the new system. Otherwise, you’ll have insurgency.”
Urge New Tunisia Government to Respect Human Rights
A caretaker government in Tunisia now has the opportunity to break with the legacy of 23 years of human rights abuses. Bold and far-reaching changes to overhaul the institutions that have failed the Tunisian people are imperative. The security apparatus and the justice system, the main tools used by the authorities to crush dissent and silence critics, must be reformed immediately.
The authorities must acknowledge the true scale and severity of past human rights violations. They now have a historic opportunity to break with this infamous legacy and to carry out a human rights agenda for change.
Women's Rights a Strong Point in Tunisia
Tunisian women were among the first in the Arab world to obtain the right to vote, shortly after independence in 1956. They secured abortion rights the same year U.S. women did and have a greater share of seats in Tunisia’s Parliament than women have in the French Parliament. Polygamy is banned, marriage conditional on female consent and miniskirts as common a sight as the Muslim head scarf in Tunis’s cityscape.
Perhaps most importantly, Tunisian women are well-educated: Their literacy rate, at 71 percent according to Unesco, is higher than that of women in any other North African country. They outnumber men among university graduates and are catching up among judges and medical doctors.
Mr. Ben Ali loved to cite these statistics. For three decades, women’s rights were his bulwark against Islamists at home and his alibi with Western governments inquiring about human rights abuses. (An alibi they were all too happy to accept.)
But it appears that this strategy came back to haunt him.
“The men and women marching for democracy last month were all the children and grandchildren of women who had grown up with an education and a sense of their rights,” said Fatma Bouvet de la Maisonneuve, a Tunisian psychiatrist who lives in Paris and has been supporting the uprising in her home country with Facebook postings and articles in the French news media.
“It’s no coincidence that the revolution first started in Tunisia, where we have a high level of education, a sizeable middle class and a greater degree of gender equality,” she said. “We had all the ingredients of democracy but not democracy itself. That just couldn’t last.”
Egypt: Secretary of State Clinton warns of 'perfect storm'
Speaking from a security conference in Munich, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned of a “perfect storm of powerful trends” across the region, including a young population, political repression, economic disparity, and dwindling supplies of oil and water.
“This is what has driven demonstrators into the streets of Tunis, Cairo, and cities throughout the region,” Clinton said in her speech Saturday.
“Some leaders may believe that their country is an exception – that their people will not demand greater political or economic opportunities, or that they can be placated with half-measures,” she said. “In the short term, that may be true; but in the long term that is untenable.”
Hold the Applause
Given the high degree of euphoria and romanticism in the coverage by both Western and Arab media of recent popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, it would be useful for everyone to take a few deep breaths and remind ourselves that revolutions often look very attractive in the beginning. Then they usually go through some really bad periods; the French reign of terror and the decade of political turmoil that followed, the crushing oppression of Soviet communism in Russia, and the unfinished misery of Iranians.
I would like to be optimistic, and there are some positive signs in Tunisia and Egypt. Both countries have strong traditions of national pride, histories of constitutionalism, cultural riches, and a middle class of educated men and women. So far, the armed forces in both countries have shown a degree of professionalism and discipline that have earned the respect of both popular forces and key civilian government institutions. Both have had respectable economic growth rates at a time of global economic distress. Regrettably, however, there are also major factors working against a happy outcome in the next several years.
Removing an unpopular dictator, however entrenched, is far easier than putting a stable political structure in place afterward. The success of this second step stands between passionate embrace of popular overthrow of an authoritarian ruler and prolonged chaos followed by embrace of a new tyranny or anarchy.
“This government is an insult to the revolution,” thunders a senior civil servant at the Central Bank of Tunisia. “It is as if we didn’t rebel. They are taking advantage of a political vacuum to consolidate their position and seize power.” A widely held view is that Mr Ghannouchi and other RCD ministers must at least have winked at the corruption surrounding Mr Ben Ali.” Tunisia’s Upheaval: No one is really in charge
Now two years on the job market with no job, Dhouibi — polite, earnest, thoughtful, and fluent in three languages — spends his morning with other unemployed high school and college graduates at the stand-up tables in Sidi Bouzid’s Café Charlotte. He nurses a coffee, thanks to the change his mother gives him from her olive sales. He goes home for lunch, visits an Internet cafe in the afternoon, returns home for dinner, sleeps in a room with his brother, and wakes, hopeless, in the morning to do it all again.
“Imagine your life going on like this,” he said at the Café Charlotte, standing over the coffee that was the treat of his day. “Every day the same.” The Arab World’s Youth Army
The Trouble with Dictators
Dictators do not usually die in bed. Successful retirement is always a problem for them, and not all solve it. It is a problem for everybody else when they leave. What’s to be done afterwards? The popular uprising that overturned the dictatorial Zein el-Abedine Ben Ali regime in Tunisia last week sent a thrill of hope through Arab populations, or at least to Arab democrats.
But aside from the exceptional and complex case of Lebanon, Arab nations have since the demise of the Ottoman Empire mostly suffered from European quasi-empire, exploitative military and party dictatorships, and recently, hereditary family dictatorships, a reversion to absolute monarchy in secular guise. The dream of a united independent Arab nation to replace the Ottomans was destroyed by World War I peace settlements, which left the major Arab peoples in European mandates under the League of Nations.
Indeed, this week would be an opportune moment for key men in the security forces of the Arab autocracies to seek a pay raise. The key ingredient of last week’s turnabout in Tunisia was the security forces, or a significant part of them, who refused to fire on their fellow citizens to protect the ruling family. Authoritarian regimes are innately vulnerable once economic despair strips citizens of their fear of challenging those in power. When soldiers are sent onto the streets to fire on people they recognize as their neighbors, their loyalty is far from certain. And it was clear that in Tunisia, the officer class was ready to seek a new governing arrangement once the cronyism of the rulers had ignited a popular revolt. That scenario ought to give Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak pause if, as is widely assumed, the 82-year-old autocrat plans to install his son, Gamal, as his successor — a move that would break the authoritarian regime’s tradition of picking its leaders from within the senior ranks of the military.” Tunisia: No Domino Effect, but A U.S. Dilemma Over Arab Democracy
Ministers quit new Tunisian govt
Tunisia’s junior minister for transportation has said that he and two other ministers with ties to a top labour union have resigned from the newly formed government.
Anouar Ben Gueddour said on Tuesday that he has resigned along with Houssine Dimassi, the labour minister, and Abdeljelil Bedoui, a minister without portfolio. They are all members of a general national labour union.
Their walkout comes a day after Mohamed Ghannouchi, the Tunisian prime minister, announced a new ‘unity government’.
The announcement was met with anger by some Tunisians, who said too many members of ousted president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s party remain in power.
Ghannouchi was one of eight ministers staying on from the previous government of Ben Ali, who resigned and fled on Friday in the Arab world’s first such popular revolt.
Ghannouchi said that the ministers remaining, including the defence and interior ministers, had acted “to preserve the national interest.”
“They kept their posts because we need them at this time,” Ghannouchi said on French radio. “All of them have clean hands.”
Revised death toll
According to Ahmed Friaa, Tunisia’s interior minister, 78 people have been killed in the country during the recent turmoil, almost quadrupling the official death toll.
