Celebrating Tunisia
"What are we celebrating today?"
"We are celebrating freedom! We are celebrating Tunisia! We are celebrating democracy!"
Rachid Ghannouchi, 63, leader of Islamist Party
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| Supporters of Tunisian presidential candidate Beji Caid Essebsi shout slogans and wave flags on Bourguiba avenue in the capital, Tunis. Photo: Fadel Senna / AFP |
The Islamist party's supporters hardly needed the cheerleading of Mr. Ghannouchi, they were celebrating anyway. They were celebrating the fact that their country had just undergone a peaceful election, and they waved their little red-and-white Tunisian flags in celebration of that event. That they happened to have lost the election appeared almost incidental.
In a way it's odd that North Africa's most civil, secular-ruled and societally-secular country, the first among all its nation-cadres to explode into the protests to unseat the then-government of their dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, incited by the self-immolation of a fruit vendor who was protesting a matter of licensing and ill treatment by authorities, remains the sole Arab (Muslim) country to have found their way to the balance of political moderation and social peace.
The Islamist government that ruled was accused perpetually of surrendering its authority to the more radical Islamist parties within a society that is more Western in cultural and social practise than its other 21 Arab-member countries. But the transition through a democratic vote that removed them from power to make way for a successor has been civilized and peaceful.
Unlike Egypt's turn at their Arab Spring, vastly dissimilar to the basket case that Libya swiftly degenerated into with competing Islamist militias, armed and dangerous to the public weal, defiant of central government. And certainly bearing no resemblance whatever to the horrors that befell Syria when its majority Sunni population campaigned for equal treatment as citizens of Syria ruled by the Baathist Alawite Shiite regime of Bashar al Assad who preferred to bomb his critics rather than negotiate with them.
Not that all is sweetness and light in Tunisia. While the Islamists on the moderate scale of the ledger had surged to power (just as the Muslim Brotherhood did in Egypt with the downfall of Hosni Mubarak and then went on to demonstrate their inability to lead the country responsibly as its economy collapsed and crime skyrocketed along with unemployment) Tunisians have decided after all, that they would return to some semblance of the sectarian rule they had dismissed three years earlier.
The fly in their ointment appears to be the likely election of Beji Caid Essebsi, now 87, who had served the previous authoritarian government, pre-revolution. But it is his secular party that won the parliamentary elections. This time the secularists view Mr. Essebsi as a moderate, giving Islamists reason for alarm in a return to the 'the old regime controlling everything'.
posted by Pieface @ Saturday, November 22, 2014
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