The New Middle East (8 page)

Tunisia may not have had a history of revolution until this point, but it had been quietly radical. In 1860 it became the first country in the Arab world to promulgate a constitution.
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A few years earlier, though under much pressure from the European powers, it had drawn up a civil rights charter known as the Fundamental Pact, which gave Muslims, Christians and Jews equal rights under the law.
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Just under a hundred years later the region was throwing off the shackles of colonialism. After winning independence President Habib Bourguiba decided his calling was to modernise Tunisia. He used his initial popularity as ‘the Father of the Nation’ to push through a programme of social engineering that made Tunisia one of the most socially liberal and well-educated countries in the region.

Bourguiba was a masterful schemer and raised political opportunism to an art form. This played a key role in the country’s relatively peaceful transition from a French protectorate to an independent state, and would define his leadership afterwards. Tunisia was less important to France than neighbouring Algeria was, and so the French had no stomach to fight for it as they did next door. Things were settled largely through negotiation and brinkmanship, which played entirely to Bourguiba’s strengths. He also bucked the trend towards Pan-Arabism that swept the region as colonisation receded, though this was largely because he had just as big an ego as President Nasser in Cairo and he wasn’t ready to play second fiddle to anyone.
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He saw Islamic traditions as the biggest obstacle to change, and described the veil as that ‘odious rag’. ‘It is unthinkable,’ he said, ‘that half the population be cut off from life and hidden like a disgraceful thing.’
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His most fundamental reform was the Code of Personal Status introduced in 1956, which ‘attacked Tunisia’s social structure at its very roots, the family, by abolishing polygamy and making marriage a voluntary contract’.
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The following year women were given the right to vote. He overhauled and expanded the education system, stripping it of almost all religious instruction.
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‘We are obliged to throw out the worst customs,’ he said.
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He even attacked the fast during the holy month of Ramadan because he thought it wasted economic effort.
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Bourguiba was determined to drag the Tunisians with him along the road to modernisation whether they liked it or not. He was no liberal democrat. When he was asked during the early years of independence about the country’s political system, he replied: ‘The system? What system? I am the system!’
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He ran a one-party state and used patronage and the threat of its withdrawal to keep his opponents in check.

‘Habib Bourguiba was famous – or perhaps infamous – for his liberal interpretations of the Quran and other Islamic texts. In fact, Bourguiba famously drank juice in Ramadan . . . and [his] views and policies framed the social progress that defines Tunisia today.’
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That is how the American government still saw his legacy decades after his death.

Bourguiba got himself made president for life in 1974, but the job didn’t last that long. As he got older and slid into senility his cronies started thinking about their future after he was gone. The more adventurous saw his growing weakness as an opportunity. Despite his ailing health, Bourguiba lost none of his passion for scheming, but it became more and more irrational. His government first took on and broke the country’s powerful labour union. Then in the early 1980s it turned its sights onto an increasingly popular Islamist group, the Islamic Tendency Movement or MIT, led by Rashid Ghannoushi. Ghannoushi’s organisation initially trod a moderate path and was committed to non-violent democratic change. The prime minister, Mohamed Mazali, who hoped to replace Bourguiba, waxed and waned over whether it was best to woo or attack the MIT as it grew in size and influence. Despite his illness the president was still lucid enough to spot when his prime minister was running amok, so he sacked him, though the attack on the Islamists continued. That was being led by a former military policeman who had risen in 1986 to become interior minister, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.
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Ben Ali built up the internal security services and went after all comers: union leaders, journalists, human rights groups and, of course, the Islamists. The following October the now quite decrepit Bourguiba declared Ben Ali prime minister, and in November his new prime minister got seven doctors to declare Bourguiba unfit to govern. Ben Ali took his place.

When he took power the conflict with the Islamists had dragged the country to the brink of civil war. Ben Ali was smart enough to recognise just how much of a mess the country had been left in by Bourguiba’s increasingly demented machinations and so he sought to defuse the fight with the Islamists. He announced a raft of amnesties, including one for the jailed MIT leader Ghannoushi, and began to make noises about real democracy. What he was actually building though was a walled garden. It gave the illusion that liberalism was blooming, but Tunisian politics remained well sheltered from the winds of change.

For a while the MIT looked for its place in the sun within the new set-up. It changed its name to the ‘Renaissance Party’, or ‘Ennahda’, to abide by a rule that banned religious references. Despite all the obstacles placed in its path, including one that stopped its members standing for election under the party banner, Ennahda supporters did well in legislative elections in April 1989.
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A little too well for Ben Ali and his ruling RCD. Realising where this was likely to head, the Ennahda leader Rashid Ghannoushi left the country, as a campaign of intimidation grew eventually into a full-scale onslaught. He would not return for twenty-two years, until the 2011 revolution was complete. However, in exile: ‘Ghannouchi, now trying to direct the movement from abroad, felt compelled to toughen his own rhetoric in order to maintain his base inside Tunisia. By the summer of 1990 he had begun calling for veiling women, suppressing foreign tourism, applying Islamic law more strictly, and a popular uprising against the government.’
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This kind of hard-line Islamic rhetoric would come back to haunt Ghannoushi and his party. It was what provoked the suspicions of the crowd with Manal Labidi after the Constituent Assembly results. Many women feared that the religious groups would try to steal both the spoils of their revolution and what little they had gained during the bad old days. They were worried that the Islamists would try to turn back the clock on social reforms.

The secular dictatorships’ championing of women’s rights gave them a popular stick with which to beat the Islamists. The regimes presented their First Ladies as the symbol of these policies, so the Islamists after the revolutions in both Tunisia and Egypt tried to discredit feminist ideals by associating them with the hated wives of the hated dictators. Women’s rights would prove to be one of the biggest areas of dispute in the years that followed the 2011 revolutions. Conservative Islam would constantly seek to redefine the role of women in the new nations that surfaced once the smothering hand of the dictatorships had been removed.

And, for the first time, the rights of religious minorities and the balance between religious and civil law were also up for grabs. Under the old regimes the function of religion in society had been pushed out of what little debate there was. Islam was feared by all the dictatorships because they did not want the people listening to a higher authority than their own. In the urban centres Islam receded from many people’s lives and hid quietly in the mosque. When its most fervent supporters occasionally dared to use their voices, the strong arm of the state took them by the throat. In the big cities the state had encouraged material concerns to replace spiritual ones, but in the countryside the state hadn’t even tried to buy the people off with the Faustian contract of government subsidies in return for political silence. The rural poor had been given nothing by the state, and so the only thing they had of any value was their faith. The only people who had stood by them were the local imams. After years of being suppressed by the regimes, grass-roots support translated into significant political power for the Islamists after the revolts.

Ben Ali was as ruthless as Bourguiba, but he was even more careful. He did not use the army to do his dirty work, in fact he didn’t seem to want anything to do with it at all. Instead he quadrupled the size of the internal security services.
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The new president cranked up the machinery of state to lay waste to Ennahda.

Under both presidents the army was kept deliberately weak so that it would not emerge as a threat. It had only 35,000 men and had never fought a war. Tunisia spent just 1.4 per cent of its GDP on the military, less than half that of neighbouring Algeria and Libya.
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It was made up of the rural poor, largely because the middle classes could often bribe their way out of national service.
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Because the army was marginalised and unloved by the regime it remained apolitical. It didn’t have to choose a side when the revolution happened. Ben Ali had made it clear from the start that they weren’t on his team. Therefore when the time came it was an easy decision for the army to protect the people from the police and thus secure the revolution.

Over the years Ben Ali built a monster of an internal security force that was at least 150,000 strong.
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But even then he didn’t feel safe, so he built yet another force, the Presidential Guard, to protect him in case his first creation turned against him. The 5,000 members of the Guard were the best paid, the most arrogant and the least liked, even by the other security services.
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With all that in place, Ben Ali must have felt that he had the country sewn up. He never got less than 89 per cent of the vote in every ‘election’ that took place. So, having destroyed any opposition, strangled freedom of expression and scared the middle classes into becoming ‘grudgingly complicit in Ben Ali’s authoritarianism [by] skillfully exploiting their fear of the Islamists’, Ben Ali and his wife settled down to doing what they did best.
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They robbed the country blind.

Ben Ali’s was one of the most oppressive and quietly brutal dictatorships in the Middle East. The eyes and ears of the state security apparatus were everywhere. The regime used to claim it had no political prisoners, only criminals, but it defined a criminal as anyone who might present a challenge to the state over just about anything. It used a corrupt justice system to lock them up, and inflicted what Juan Méndez, the UN Special Rapporteur, called the ‘notorious and endemic practice of torture’ to deter them from doing it again. The revolution itself was broadly portrayed at the time as a relatively smooth transition. In fact the UN said the regime killed around 300 people and 700 more were injured as it fought for its survival during the month-long revolt. The protests may have begun as a small-town affair, but social media and Al Jazeera made sure the word spread quickly. It took just days for the troubles to reach the capital and not much longer before the Ben Alis were heading into exile.

After they had fled in January 2011 with as much of their ill-gotten gains as they could carry, the people they had spent a lifetime mugging started trying to refashion the kleptocracy that had been left behind. The Tunisians quickly put ‘The Family’ on trial, convicted them in absentia and sentenced them to several decades in jail for theft. A subsequent trial sentenced Ben Ali to life for the killing of protesters during the revolt. Saudi Arabia, where he had flown to exile, refused to extradite him. His countrymen eased their frustrations with a bit of retail therapy and celebrated the second anniversary of the uprising with a month-long public auction of everything the Ben Alis didn’t have the time or space to stuff into the private jet. Among the things they left behind was $42 million in cash in a variety of denominations which they had stored in a walk-in closet of their bedroom, which a Tunisian official told me he saw with his own eyes. I asked him where Mrs Ben Ali put her shoes. ‘Oh, she had a pavilion for those,’ he said with a laugh. But once the January 2013 sale was out of the way, attention shifted back to the real world.

Revolution, once its makers pluck up the courage, is the easy part. It is what follows that is so hard. Every nation that rose up has found this. There is a real ‘now what?’ moment that hits people once the dictator has gone. Suddenly right and wrong are less obvious. Overnight, people who weren’t allowed to decide anything their whole lives have to decide everything. It is not a learning curve, it is a sheer cliff.

In Tunisia the politicians continued their work on the new constitution and preparations for more elections. The young revolutionaries who swept them into power weren’t working at all. In the years that followed the revolt unemployment went up, and so did prices. Life got no better for the vast majority of Tunisians. How could it? The country had been left in a financial mess. Foreign investors were waiting to see what happened next before they spent their money.