Democracy still has a chance in Tunisia
If you read most of the stories on the terrible terrorist attack in Tunisia recently, you would have, at best, an incomplete picture of the reality of that lovely little state, which seemingly reaches out geographically to Italy from the northern borders of Africa.
At worst, you wouldn't have the faintest idea what was really going on.
Only The New York Times has mentioned the fact that the Bardo Museum, a historic palace that lies near the ruins of ancient Carthage, far from being only “a museum,” is the home of one of the greatest collections of Roman mosaics in the world. It was there that the handful of gunmen deliberately chose to kill 20 innocent tourists from all over the world.
I have not seen any analysis of why Tunisia, which many good journalists correctly described heretofore as the “greatest hope of the Arab Spring,” was and is so different from the rest of the Middle East. As if it were a secret!
And a disturbing number of TV and other analysts, if they mentioned him at all, unbelievably described the revolutionary founder of the state, the melodramatic but enormously successful Habib Bourguiba, as simply another Middle East “tyrant.” A brilliant, French-educated lawyer who was repeatedly imprisoned by the French colonialists, Bourguiba was Tunisia's president from 1957 to 1987.
A typical — and revealing — comment on Tunisia in these troubled days, when international analysts judge about 3,000 young Tunisians have gone to Syria to fight with ISIS, while a stunning 9,000 have been stopped at the borders, came from the respected International Crisis Group: “Tunisia is often presented as an exception in the region, a point of hope for balanced progress and democratization after its early role in the 2011 Arab Revolutions.” The group's Tunisia senior analyst, Michael Bechir Ayari, further referred to the dauntless country as “an example of successful compromise” — founder Bourguiba's idea of how moderation, or “politics by stages” or a “strategy based upon realism,” is the only realistic way a poor country can advance in today's globalized world.
But the important thing to remember is that Tunisia's “exceptionality,” which is nearly always mentioned when one speaks of the little North African wonder, did not emerge out of nowhere. It was not a miracle, like Mary's Virgin Birth or the Prophet Muhammad's voyage from Jerusalem to Heaven. It was a carefully planned economic and social program put into action by the very human Bourguiba after the French were driven out of their protectorate in 1957.
Take, first, the question of the makeup of Islam, which has become so overwhelmingly central in the new/old/forever Middle East.
Most articles give the impression that Islam came to the fore in Tunisia only AFTER Rachid Ghannouchi, the Islamist leader of the Ennahda party, returned from two decades of exile after the 2011 Arab Spring. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.
Tunisia, it turns out, was actually the FIRST country in the Middle East to have a full-blown Islamist revolt, coming to a head in the 1980s. At that time, the followers of Ghannouchi, whose inspiration then came from Albania and the anti-colonialist and pro-Marxist Third World set off four bombs in tourist areas. Then they planned to assassinate Bourguiba.
Bourguiba was so sick by this time that he could no longer rule the country. His mind now passing from his beloved moderation to extremes, he wanted to hang Ghannouchi and other Islamists.
Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, former head of intelligence, overthrew Bourguiba, took power and sent almost all of the seditionists into exile. When Ben Ali was overthrown in the initial act of the Arab Spring in 2011, it was he who was now pictured as a corrupt dictator. This is not true, either; Ben Ali's weakness was staying in power too long (1987 to 2011) and the corruption of his wife's family.
It is sad that, all over the Middle East, our military, our businessmen and too many of our political analysts do not seek out these deeper meanings of history, for without understanding the roots of human action — whether in Tunis, Baghdad or Cairo, and whether from the Turkish Ottomans or the Egyptian reformers of the 1890s or the New York Stock Exchange — we cannot understand what THEY are doing, and more important, what WE are doing.
Today, as yesterday in Tunisia, the Islamists are attacking foreign tourists. Innocents! Why? Because, as new Prime Minister Habib Essid told The New York Times, “ ... everything is there to succeed. Now the country is going to cross the last stage of the transition toward economic and social development. ... They do not want democracy to deliver.”
If we can understand how the Arab peoples themselves can cause representative government to “deliver,” instead of trying to impose our own ideas, there is every likelihood that the Tunisian “exception” could become the Arab example.
Georgie Anne Geyer can be reached at gigi_geyer@juno.com
© 2015 Universal