Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 1997, Page 116.

Book Review

Ben Ali on the Road to Pluralism in Tunisia

By Sadok Chaabane, American Educational Trust, 1997, 141 pp. List: $14.95; AET: $11.95 for one or $14.95 for two.

Reviewed by Richard H. Curtiss

This is the story behind a success story because, as a quick glance at all of its neighbors confirms, Tunisia has been the most successful of the states of the Arab Maghreb.

Libya, blessed with abundant petroleum resources, received its independence without bloodshed, because its last colonial ruler, Italy, was on the losing side in World War II. But because of political failures, Libyans must drive to Tunisia to take an airplane to the outside world and even to buy groceries and medicines.

Algeria, blessed with petroleum and even more abundant gas deposits, lost perhaps one-tenth of its population in the cruelest of France's colonial wars, from which the country never recovered. A tiny, corrupt elite within the army has been in sole charge ever since, running what should be North Africa's richest country into the ground.

Before the outbreak of its current civil war, visitors to Algiers had to queue up in the lobbies of the city's half-dozen shabby hotels to use the telephone, private restaurants were virtually non-existent, and a whole generation of young Algerians were working at menial jobs in Europe because there were no jobs for them at home. Now there still are no jobs, and few foreign visitors to line up for the telephones.

Morocco, which obtained its independence from France with little bloodshed, has neither oil nor gas. Its natural resources instead are broad, arable coastal plains, spectacular mountains and both Atlantic and Mediterranean beaches. To date, however, it has been unable to overcome its legacy of colonialism with attending poverty and illiteracy sufficiently to organize an agriculture- and tourism-based economy strong enough to provide employment and a decent living standard for all of its people. Morocco, too, has filled Europe with "economic refugees" and it contains pockets of poverty that shock not only tourists from Europe, but also visitors from much of the rest of the Arab world.

The fourth Magrebian country, Tunisia, is by far the smallest, is blessed with neither oil nor gas, has arable land only in the northern third of the country, and its mountains and beaches are less extensive than those of its neighbors. Yet its employment, educational and health standards far exceed those of any of them.

In fact, there is very little to distinguish the Tunisians—whose ethnic origins range from Scandinavia through the eastern Mediterranean to Yemen—either in dress or physical appearance from the hundreds of thousands of European visitors who flock to its many beach resorts and their well-appointed hotels.

Tunisia received its independence from French colonial tutelage earlier and much more easily than did Algeria. Recognizing that well-developed tourism and services were necessary to supplement the country's agrarian economy, the hero of its independence struggle, Habib Bourguiba, created a climate hospitable to the foreign expertise necessary for rapid and successful modernization.

Bourguiba, whose credentials as a nationalist were well established, and whose countrymen took pride not only in their own achievement of independence but also in the important support they provided Algerian nationalists during that country's bloody struggle, had little to prove other than the ability of the Tunisians to modernize and govern themselves successfully. Although he eventually declared himself president for life, Bourguiba eschewed the excessive pan-Arabism that has been the full-time preoccupation of adjacent Libya's permanent leader Muammar Qaddafi, and the Islamism that now fuels the fires of bloody rebellion against the army-based "Power" that has governed Algeria since it obtained its independence.

Bourguiba, however, remained in power far too long for his country's good. As senility replaced what once had been sound political instincts, he became paranoid, unpredictable and irascible, shifting favor from one courtier to the next, and summarily dismissing both political leaders and bureaucrats who attempted to deal seriously with the country's multiplying problems.

The downward spiral was broken on Nov. 7, 1987 by a military officer, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Initiating what in this book is called "the Change," he submitted Bourguiba's case to a medical committee which declared him unfit to continue in office. Ben Ali then forcibly retired Bourguiba, preventing him from leaving the country but at the same time ensuring that he continued to live in comfort in a residence outside the Tunisian capital. In fact, Ben Ali has regularly visited Bourguiba, ostensibly for consultations, ever since. There was no resistance whatsoever at the time, and very little ever since in a country fed up with unpredictable autocracy, but perplexed over how to replace it.

The decade that followed is the subject of this detailed book, which political opponents will call an apologia for Ben Ali's replacement of an autocratic ruler with rule that to date has been more stable and successful, but which still is not fully free.

That is not the way the author, Ben Ali's former Minister of Justice Sadok Chaabane, sees the problem, however. As Chaabane, who now is director of the Center for Strategic Studies in Tunis, lays it out in a lengthy introduction and three sections based upon the "challenges" faced by Ben Ali, Tunisia's history for the past decade has been a steady progression toward multi-party democracy, marked by setbacks encountered in dealing with "extremism" of both the secular left and the religious right.

Chaabane maintains that both brands of extremism are funded and to some extent inspired by outside powers. He also makes it clear that, at least for the present, the tides of history are running against the leftists and the now-outlawed Tunisian Communist Workers' Party. This is not the case, however, with the religious extremism he calls "fundamentalism" and which found expression in Tunisia's Nahdha movement, led by Riad Gannouchi. Chaabane maintains that Nahdha apparently looked to Sunni Muslim sources among the Arab states of the Gulf for funding and also to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary government for inspiration.

The book deals sketchily with the accusation that Gannounchi's followers were implicated in acts of terrorism apparently aimed at Tunisia's vitally important tourism industry. Chaabane points out the irony involved in Gannouchi's finally having been granted political asylum in England, although it was British women tourists who were maimed in a bomb blast in a tourist hotel for which the Tunisian government holds Gannouchi responsible.

Chaabane is highly critical of Western human rights organizations, which he maintains have overlooked, until recently, such terrorist actions by Nahdha while vigorously criticizing Ben Ali's government for outlawing it. Chaabane expresses the government viewpoint that all parties or movements purporting to be based solely upon Islam are meaningless in a country in which virtually 100 percent of the population is Muslim.

Tunisian law also makes a clear distinction between holding beliefs, no matter how hateful, which it considers freedom of thought and no crime, and "incitement to fanaticism and advocacy of hatred," which is a crime. Tunisian law provides that "a prison term of two months to three years and a fine of one thousand to two thousand dinars is the penalty for anyone directly advocating...hatred between races, religions, or inhabitants [or] propagating ideas based on racial discrimination [or] religious extremism."

Chaabane cites two sentences imposed on persons convicted of violation of these laws. One, Ahmed Kahlaoui, wrote a leaflet entitled "Death to Murderous Zionists" in which he complained about "criminals who are welcomed on Tunisian soil as tourists, scientists, and singers, met with red-carpet treatment, made into citizens enjoying the right to nationality and to possession of land and wealth." He was sentenced on June 27, 1994, to two years and eight months imprisonment for circulating the leaflet.

The other example is that of Nejib Al Baccouchi, who was sentenced in the same year for writing and distributing a leaflet attacking an agreement with Israel and declaring that "the foul Jews have declared themselves the enemy. They bring treachery and treason...They spread AIDS, drugs, and spies...They forge currencies and pillage agriculture...So what peace, what tolerance, what understanding are they [the Ben Ali government] brokering with the Jews?"

The most horrendous incident, which after it was covered on Tunisian television turned public opinion against "fundamentalist" opponents of the Tunisian government, occurred on Feb. 18, 1991. A masked group surprised guards at a headquarters of the government party, handcuffed them, poured gasoline on them, and burned them to death. It was the most shocking of a series of widely publicized acts of violence, in some of which extremists threw acid in the faces of those who opposed them, including the imam of a mosque.

There has never been any persecution of religion, as such, under Ben Ali. In fact, as Chaabane points out, "more than a thousand small and large mosques, a quarter of the total national number, were built after the Change. Memorization and reading of the Qur'an were promoted with a law on editions of the Qur'an...a Presidential Award for Memorization and Recitation of the Qur'an instituted...and the Noble Qur'an read non-stop at the Zeitouna Mosque every single day of the year by order of Ben Ali."

At the same time President Ben Ali has strenghened the country's network of non-governental organizations, maintaining that a strong institutional base is a necessary prerequisite to the establishment of multi-party democracy after a long period of authoritarianism. As Chaabane points out, "today Tunisia boasts more than 5,200 associations, 2,500 of which are active... Boosting the number of associations created is part of the country's endeavor to establish democracy and fortify civil society." In fact, according to the author, Ben Ali's entire reign appears to be a search for means to initiate multi-party democracy without permitting it to lead to a takeover of the government by extremists of either the left or right.

In the first multi-party elections, a hitch in this program was the inability of opposition parties to make coalitions to give themselves a realistic chance of winning seats in Tunisia's parliament. Ben Ali then amended the electoral law so that 144 seats in the 169-seat parliament went to the local winners of a majority vote (as with the U.S. Congress) but an additional 19 seats in parliament were filled by names from party lists to which the nation-wide minority party totals from individual electoral districts were applied. Based on the 1994 election results, therefore, 19 members of parliament represent four of the six legally recognized opposition parties that participated. In municipal elections the laws have been changed even further to give opposition parties a better opportunity to be elected as mayors and to other municipal positions.

Westerners can point out that so long as restrictions are put on any party in Tunisia, there is not true democracy. But, since as yet no other state in the 22-member Arab League would pass that test, Ben Ali can hardly be faulted. In fact, looking at the bloody repression of Islamists in neighboring Algeria, the autocratic dissolution by Turkey's secular high command of a democratically elected Islamist government, and the barring from the electoral process of non-Islamist candidates by Iran's Islamist government, Tunisia may be one of the more hopeful spots on anyone's map of the Middle East.