Islamists chant anti-French slogans at rally in Tunisia

Islamists chant anti-French slogans at rally in Tunisia

    Monday, February 11, 2013   No comments

Thousands of pro-government supporters rallied in the streets of the Tunisian capital Saturday, shouting anti-French slogans and accusing its former colonial ruler of interference, a day after the funeral of slain opposition leader Chokri Belaid.

Several thousand supporters of Tunisia’s ruling moderate Islamist party rallied in the capital in a pro-government demonstration on February 9, a day after the funeral of an assassinated opposition politician. Protesters hurled insults at France, accusing the former colonial ruler of interfering in the North African country’s politics.

The ruling Ennahda party had called for a show of support for the constitutional assembly, whose work on a new constitution suffered a severe setback after the killing of Chokri Belaid on Feb. 6 - when leftist parties withdrew their participation. It said the demonstration would also protest “French interference” after comments earlier in the week by French Interior Minister Manuel Valls, who denounced Belaid’s killing as an attack on “the values of Tunisia’s Jasmine revolution.”

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The assassination of a secular opposition leader is forcing an Islamist-led government to give ground. But how much?

The assassination of a secular opposition leader is forcing an Islamist-led government to give ground. But how much?

    Friday, February 08, 2013   No comments

THE Islamist-led government that has been running Tunisia for the past year has been badly shaken by the assassination on February 6th of a prominent secular-minded opposition leader, Chokri Belaid, who was shot dead outside his house in Tunis by assailants so far unknown. After a wave of angry protests erupted in the capital and across the country, the prime minister, Hamadi Jebali, who is also secretary-general of the Islamist Nahda party, condemned the murder as an “act of terrorism…against the whole of Tunisia” and said he would form a new government “of competent figures without party affiliations”. The event has sparked Tunisia’s worst crisis since the revolution that toppled the country’s long-serving, secular-minded dictator, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, who fled into exile in January 2011.

It was unclear if Mr Jebali’s hasty reaction meant that Nahda, which handsomely won an election to a constituent assembly in October, 2011, would actually cede power or whether there would merely be a government reshuffle; it already heads a three-party coalition that includes non-Islamists. Mr Jebali has urged the constituent assembly to hurry up and finish the writing of a new constitution so that there can be a fresh election to a proper parliament as soon as possible, perhaps by the end of June.

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Why Tunisia ignored sharia law

Why Tunisia ignored sharia law

    Monday, December 03, 2012   No comments

The Arab Spring countries of North Africa are struggling to balance their secular and Islamic roots, but the leader of Tunisia’s ruling party thinks he has the answer.

Rached Ghannouchi co-founded the Ennahda party, but only returned from 22 years in exile after Tunisia became the first country of the Arab Spring to oust its leader.

Secular Tunisians and national media have questioned how much sharia law would be enshrined in Tunisia’s new constitution, but Ghannouchi told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Wednesday that the problem has already been bypassed.

“There was some dispute about enshrining sharia,” he said, “that’s why we had to push away the controversy and we settled for what was said in the 1959 constitution about Tunisia as an Arab country.” 

While Islam has always been the main religion in Tunisia, politics have long been secular.

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Moncef Marzouki, President of Tunisia at UN GA

Moncef Marzouki, President of Tunisia at UN GA

    Saturday, September 29, 2012   No comments

MONCEF MARZOUKI, President of Tunisia, said that, through its revolution, Tunisia had entered the fraternity of free and democratic people. But, also today, the world was witnessing a great evil, which had been exacerbated by violence and extremism. “These are issues that need to be seriously addressed,” he said. Such behaviour stemmed from extremist policies and had led to human carnage.

Describing his country’s experience, he said Tunisia had worked under United Nations auspices to establish peace and avoid confrontation. But, the freedom and democracy that people now enjoyed had come at a high cost: tens of thousands of people held as political prisoners, with hundreds of people killed and injured. Tunisia continued to confront multiple economic and social problems inherited from a regime that had lasted over two decades through sheer force of repression. That paled in comparison to the price being paid by Syrians, where thousands had been killed and the infrastructure destroyed, events that would impact Syrians for decades to come.

“Dictatorship is a disease,” he said, which impacted freedom and gave rise to hatred and violence. Europe had only known stability since the fall of the Nazi and communist dictatorships. Political maturity had since been acquired. He invited the United Nations to declare dictatorship a social and political “scourge” to be eliminated by a bold programme similar to that which had eradicated polio and small pox.

In that context, he said the International Criminal Court only tackled crimes after they had been committed, and mechanisms to prevent dictatorship from taking root were needed. Indeed, dictatorships gave themselves a “false legality” by organizing fraudulent elections and using democratic principles to undermine democracy itself. Tunisia’s dictator had done just that, with plans to rewrite the Constitution ahead of 2014 elections because he knew there were no internal or international mechanisms to prevent it. There was no Tunisian court to rule on such behaviour. Thus, a preventive mechanism should be part of the United Nations.

The United Nations Charter and the many international conventions were deemed to be humanity’s guide, he said, but what was missing was an implementation mechanism. As such, he proposed the creation of an international constitutional court, similar to the International Criminal Court, to denounce certain constitutions, or illegal charters and elections. That court would consider disputes, and rule on the legality of elections that did not align with the United Nations Charter. All democratic systems would need to be recognized by that tribunal. In turn, countries could seek advice from that body. Such a court would deter tyrannical regimes and strengthen the role of civic resistance.

In that context, he urged rapid intervention to save Syrian lives, and the deployment of an Arab peace force to help create a pluralistic peace. More broadly, he supported Palestinians on their quest for peace and an independent State with Al-Quds as its capital. Denouncing Islamophobia, he urged reducing the chasm between rich and poor. He also insisted on the need to free the Middle East from nuclear weapons. In closing, he stressed that Tunisia was a country of peaceful democratic revolution. The creation of an international constitutional court should make its way onto the Assembly’s agenda’s, an idea he hoped would garner international support, as that would help succeeding generations avoid a scourge that had cost the world so dearly.

Tunisian Minister: “A Foreign country is intent on destabilizing Tunisia”

Tunisian Minister: “A Foreign country is intent on destabilizing Tunisia”

    Tuesday, February 07, 2012   No comments

Arab Spring News Digest:

On February 4, and two days after the Tunisian security forces killed two members of an armed group and arrested a third, the Education minister accused a foreign country of “pumping large sums of money to destabilize the country." Moucef  Ben Salim, minister of higher education and member of Ennahda, made his accusation in Sfax, the scene of the deadly clash that left a policeman and three soldiers wounded, one of them critically, according to the state news agency. He said the Interpol is conducting an investigation to track the source of funding for "terrorist groups."

The incident took place in the southern region of Bir Ali Ben Khalifa. Ali Laaridh, Interior Minister, described it as “serious.” The armed group, consisting of three “bearded men” opened fire with assault rifles at a checkpoint then escaped into a nearby olive forest. Police announced that they found weapons and lists of names of people from all over the country in the get way car.

The interior minister indicated that police seized more than 600 weapons in 2011, believed to be coming through Libya. Many Tunisians accuse some of the Gulf States of using Tunisia to arm radical Salafi Libyan groups that participated in the overthrow of Qaddafi. Many Tunisians protested the Qatar rulers interference in the region. Others are angry because Saudi Arabia refuses to handover the former dictator, Ben Ali. The presence of the Salafis in Tunisia, generally seen as a Saudi influenced movement, as an attempt to spread Saudi ideology in North Africa.

Why Islamists Are Better Democrats

Why Islamists Are Better Democrats

    Monday, December 12, 2011   No comments

By Bobby Ghosh

If the Arab Spring was seeded by a liberal insurrection, the Arab Fall has brought a rich harvest for Political Islam. In election after election, parties that embrace various shades of Islamist ideology have spanked liberal rivals. In Tunisia, the first country to hold elections after toppling a long-standing dictator, the Ennahda party won a plurality in the Oct. 23 vote for an assembly that will write a new constitution. A month later, the Justice and Development Party and its allies won a majority in Morocco's general elections. Now, in perhaps the most important election the Middle East has ever witnessed, Egypt's Islamist parties are poised to dominate the country's first freely elected parliament.

In the first of three rounds of voting, two Islamist groups won a clear majority between them: a coalition led by the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) got 37% of the vote, while the al-Nour Party won 24.4%. The Egyptian Block, a coalition of mostly liberal parties, was a distant third, with 13.4%. The FJP is the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, a mostly moderate Islamist group; al-Nour represents more-hard-line Salafis. With momentum on their side, the Islamists are expected to do even better in the second and third rounds, scheduled for Dec. 14 and Jan. 3. (See pictures of Egyptians flocking to the polls.)

Why have the liberals, leaders of the Arab Spring revolution, fared so poorly in elections? In Cairo, as the votes were being counted, I heard a raft of explanations from disheartened liberals. They were almost identical to the ones I'd heard the previous week, in Tunis. The litany goes like this: The liberals only had eight months to prepare for elections, whereas the Brotherhood has 80 years' experience in political organization. The Islamists, thanks to their powerful financial backing from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, outspent the liberals. The generals currently ruling Egypt, resentful of the liberals for ousting their old boss Hosni Mubarak, fixed the vote in favor of the Islamists. The Brotherhood and the Salafists used religious propaganda — Vote for us or you're a bad Muslim — to mislead a largely poor, illiterate electorate.

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Islamists, elections and the Arab spring

Islamists, elections and the Arab spring

    Sunday, December 11, 2011   No comments

IS THE Arab spring turning into bleak midwinter? Earlier this year the revolutions sweeping through the region seemed encouragingly modern and secular. Indeed, the young Facebookers and Twitterers braving the bullets in Cairo and Tunis seemed to give the lie to the dictators’ claims that the only alternative to the thuggery of a strongman was mullah-led theocracy. But look across the Arab world today and political Islam has jumped to the fore (see article).

Egypt offers the most dramatic example. The relatively mild-mannered Muslim Brotherhood, the best-organised of the Arab movements espousing an ideology that bases its message on the texts of Islam, is winning the three-stage election to Egypt’s parliament by a wider margin than pundits predicted, with 46% of the seats so far. Far more frightening is the party coming second, with 21% of the seats. The Salafists, whose name denotes a desire to emulate the “predecessors” who were early followers of the Prophet Muhammad, decry alcohol, pop music and other aspects of Western lifestyle. They want to ban interest in banks, think women should cover themselves and stay at home, would segregate the sexes in public, might turn Christians, around a tenth of Egypt’s 85m people, into second-class citizens and denigrate Jews, not to mention the people of Israel. Assuming that the two Islamist parties do no worse in the next two rounds this month and next, generally in more conservative areas, they will control a clear majority of seats; the only question is whether the Brothers will keep their promise not to team up and rule together.

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Rached Ghannouchi: the Muslim Brethren of Egypt should form a coalition government with liberals

Rached Ghannouchi: the Muslim Brethren of Egypt should form a coalition government with liberals

    Wednesday, December 07, 2011   No comments

By Marc Lynch

"I think the Muslim Brotherhood [in Egypt] should govern by coalition that includes the people from secular parties and the Copts." That was the advice which Rached Ghannouchi, President of Tunisia's el-Nahda Party, offered his Egyptian Islamist counterparts during an interview with the editors of the Middle East Channel last Thursday. He warned pointedly against repeating the mistakes of Algeria when, as he put it, "the Islamists won 80 percent of the vote but they completely ignored the influential minority of secularists, of the army, of the business community. So they did a coup d'etat against the democratic process and Algeria is still suffering from that." Avoiding a replay of that catastrophe weighs heavily on Ghannouchi and his party.

Ghannouchi was in Washington at the invitation of Foreign Policy, after being named one of its Top 100 Global Thinkers. He took full advantage of the opportunity to visit the United States for the first time in twenty years, appearing at a wide range of think tanks including the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Washington  Institute for Near East Policy and meeting with a range of U.S. government officials, journalists, and policy analysts. He had warm praise for the Obama administration as "supportive of the Arab Spring," and described the new willingness in the United States to talk about a more positive relationship between democracy and Islam, and between Americans and the Islamic world, as a very important new development. His reception in Washington is a sign of the times, as the United States struggles to adapt to the reality of Islamist electoral success and Islamist parties struggle to reassure those who fear their ascent while delivering on their own programs.

I last saw Ghannouchi in June, when I was in Tunisia researching an article about al-Nahda. I had asked Ghannouchi at that time what al-Nahda might do with an electoral victory, and he had assured me that they would seek a national unity government. It did just that. After al-Nahda scored a major victory in Tunisia's first post-Ben Ali election, it quickly formed a national unity government while ceding the post of president to the secular human rights campaigner Moncef Marzouki. Ghannouchi explained that his party "would opt for a coalition government even if al-Nahda achieves an absolute majority, because we don't want the people to perceive that they have moved from a single party dominant in the political life to another single party dominating the political life."  Such reassurances have been meant to respond to the suspicions of Islamists and the political polarization endemic to post-Ben Ali Tunisia -- and seem thus far to have succeeded. 

When I asked Ghannouchi what al-Nahda's top priority would be in government, he answered not with talk of shari'a [Islamic law] but with a "guarantee that dictatorship will not return to Tunisia." He dismissed fears that al-Nahda employed a "double discourse" (i.e. saying one thing in English and something else at home) as a relic of the Ben Ali era's propaganda. He acknowledged that al-Nahda was a large movement, with many distinct points of view, but insisted that "there are no people in al-Nahda who are takfiri [i.e. declaring opponents to be non-Muslims]; there is no one in al-Nahda that believes that violence is a means of change or to keep power; there is no one in al-Nahda that does not believe in equality between men and women; no one in al-Nahda believes that jihad is a way to impose Islam on the world."

But Ghannouchi clearly understands both the difficulty and the urgency of convincing Tunisian secularists and outside observers of those convictions.  He told me that he expected the party to be judged by its performance. He insisted that al-Nahda's commitment to democracy had been strengthened by the Ben Ali experience, when thousands of its members were imprisoned or forced into exile. "The prosecution of al-Nahda movement could have led us to violence, and this is what Ben Ali wanted. But our experience in prison has deepened our belief in freedom and democracy, and Ben Ali failed to drag us into violence. And that's why he fell."

And what of the salafis with more extreme views? Ghannouchi laughed, "if Tunis becomes Salafi country, nothing can be guaranteed." Tunisians tended toward moderation in their Islamic beliefs, he emphasized, which shaped al-Nahda's approach. Turning serious, he went on to argue that salafis grew radical under torture and repression, and argued that in a more open environment al-Nahda would help convince them to adopt more moderate understandings of Islam. When I pushed him, he said bluntly that al-Nahda would actively resist any salafi efforts to push for a more Islamic constitution.  His party will be judged by whether it lives up to such commitments. 

An edited version of the interview follows:

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Islamists and secularists in Tunisia stand-off

Islamists and secularists in Tunisia stand-off

    Sunday, December 04, 2011   No comments

By Tarek Amara

TUNIS | Sat Dec 3, 2011 8:31am EST

(Reuters) - Thousands of Tunisian Islamists and secularists staged parallel protests outside the interim parliament on Saturday in a dispute over how big a role Islam should play in society after the country's "Arab Spring" revolution.

Tensions have been running high between the two camps since the revolt in January scrapped a ban on Islamists and paved the way for a moderate Islamist party to come to power at the head of a coalition government.

The latest round of protests was sparked when a group of hardline Islamists occupied a university campus near the capital to demand segregation of sexes in class and the right for women students to wear a full-face veil.

About 3,000 Islamists gathered outside the constitutional assembly in the Bardo district of the Tunis on Saturday, separated by a police cordon from a counter-protest by about 1,000 secularists.

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