With Muammar Gadafy's death in Libya this week, the Arab-world revolt claimed its third major scalp. Tomorrow the revolution enters a new phase when the first free elections take place in Tunisia, scene of the first protests last January. MARY FITZGERALDand RUADHÁN Mac CORMAICreport on what's next for the region
MUAMMAR GADAFY STOLE more than two decades of Mohammed Busidra’s life. Busidra, who studied biochemistry in Wales as a young man, was in his early 30s when he was arrested without charge and locked up in Tripoli’s notorious Abu Salim prison, where Libyan dissidents had long languished. At the time of his incarceration, he was active with Tableeghi Jamaat, an apolitical transnational movement that calls on Muslims to be more observant.
Busidra spent 21 years in Abu Salim. He admits that when he first heard the news that Gadafy had been captured and killed by revolutionary forces on Thursday, he found it hard to believe. “After all these years, after all we have suffered, he is gone,” Busidra says over a crackly phone line from his home in Benghazi, birthplace of Libya’s uprising. “As long as Gadafy was alive, we could not speak of liberation. Now we can truly say Libya is free at last. It is time to rebuild Libya and transform it into the country we deserve.” Libyans now face a new and very different struggle: to establish a cohesive and representative government in a united country after some eight months of bloodshed. It will not be easy.
The country Gadafy leaves behind is, in many respects, a broken one. Libya is devoid of anything approaching a political culture, let alone a constitutional framework. It has no civil-society infrastructure, nor has it any tradition of civil rights, free speech or free media. Its lopsided economy is almost completely dependent on oil revenue and on a dysfunctional administrative system that hinged on patronage and corruption.
It is also a nation left traumatised by the experience of war, with thousands dead and many more seriously injured. “A very high price has been paid,” says Issam ben Ali, who left his home in Dublin for the front line earlier this year. “We have lost so many people, so many good friends, for our freedom. Our society has suffered deep wounds.” To many Libyans, talk of reconciliation, particularly in relation to former regime officials in the new order, sounds premature. Others argue that in a country of just 6.5 million people there is little choice but to put the past behind them.
While the precise circumstances of Gadafy’s death remain unclear, he was captured alive and either struggled to the end, as he had always vowed he would do, or was summarily executed. Many pro-revolution Libyans were uneasy with the manner of his demise, and would have preferred to see Gadafy stand trial so the world could discover the brutal realities of his regime.
Images of Gadafy in his final moments, bloodied and staggering amid baying revolutionary fighters, are likely to fan the desire for vengeance among the remaining rump of his diehards. A week before Gadafy’s killing, there were clashes between his supporters and interim government forces in a Tripoli district long renowned for its fierce devotion to the man known as Brother Leader.
“How will Gadafy’s loyalists react? I am worried about the possibility of revenge attacks,” says one doctor in Libya’s eastern flank. “It may not be over just yet.” Reports that senior aides, possibly including two of Gadafy’s sons, were also killed on Thursday have not been confirmed. Other family members remain at large in Libya or in neighbouring countries, raising the possibility of a low-level insurgency against the interim authorities as the new state takes shape.
With the death of Gadafy, the revolutionary fervour that has swept the Middle East and north Africa this year has claimed a third scalp. What happens next in Libya will prove a litmus test for the prospect of further change throughout the region, as will the forthcoming elections in Tunisia and Egypt. As the so-called Arab Spring slips into an Arab winter of discontent, particularly in countries such as Syria and Yemen where protests continue despite regime violence, Gadafy’s bloody demise acts as a warning to other autocratic leaders still determined to remain in power at all costs.
IN TUNISIA, WHERE it all began, there is no fallen statue of the ousted tyrant Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, no flower-strewn shrine to the revolutionary dead. In fact, you won’t yet find any single symbolic site in its capital city that captures the historic moment that began here in a cold week last January, when Tunisia deposed its dictator and set off a wave that still ripples furiously through the Arab world.
The changes to ordinary life in Tunis reveal themselves subtly, in hundreds of small ways that would seem mundane were this not, until nine months ago, one of the region’s most repressive one-party police states. Overheard cafe banter between two young women arguing over how to cast their vote. A newspaper story about a sit-in by residents protesting against pollution from a local factory. Or the taxi driver who spots his passenger stretching for a glimpse of the headquarters of former president Ben Ali’s party – now an empty shell surrounded by tanks – and says quietly, as if to himself, “He’s gone, the f***er.” Once unthinkable, too, would have been the raucous meeting that took place at a conference room at the Hotel Diplomat on Tuesday night, where 30 ordinary citizens who have formed their own political group gathered for a debate on how to shape the new Tunisia – one of dozens of such gatherings held across the city this week in the build-up to the country’s first free elections tomorrow. More than 11,000 candidates representing 120 parties are contesting the election, with 217 seats up for grabs in a constituent assembly that will write a new constitution and map the country’s future.
Among the audience at the Diplomat Hotel is one woman for whom this year’s events have a special resonance. Faouzia Charfi, now aged 70, was Tunisia’s first woman physicist, but her career was stymied by her involvement in left-wing opposition groups and by her late husband’s role as president of the Tunisian Human Rights League. In 1968, after she took part in student protests at Tunis university, Charfi and some friends were jailed and interrogated for 11 days in the interior ministry. As recently as a year ago, Charfi was still under close surveillance by the security services. “Friends who came to see us were followed by police. For a long time, people didn’t dare come and see us.”
With the fall of Ben Ali in January, Charfi’s life was suddenly transformed.
She served six months in the transitional government as minister for higher education, and she began by dismantling the “campus police” and removing college presidents chosen by the old regime.
She speaks of her new-found freedom as if she still can’t believe her own words. “It’s very emotional,” she says. “To live like this for the first time, to live in a free country where you can hold rallies, express yourself and talk to your hairdresser or shopkeeper about politics. For you it’s banal, but for us it’s extraordinary. Here I am, talking to you, and I’m not thinking, There are 10 people behind us listening.”
As the first Arab state to oust an entrenched dictator, Tunisia lit a revolutionary flame that has already seen off the autocratic rulers of two more countries and continues to cause upheaval in many more. Nine months on, the cradle of the movement is now a laboratory for the next stage: the transition from single-party authoritarianism to pluralist democratic elections.
Thousands of diplomats, journalists and international election observers have descended on Tunisia, a sliver of north Africa that barely registered on the world’s geopolitical radar until last January. Now it has the world’s attention. Egypt and Libya will watch the election carefully for signs of what may lie in store for them. In Syria, Bahrain and Yemen, both sides, whether regime or protester, will seek encouragement for their own cause. Regimes in Iran and Saudi Arabia – and in the West – are eager to see whether a successful election in Tunisia could reverberate throughout the region. “The US has an enormous stake in seeing success in Tunisia,” President Obama said last week.
News of Gadafy’s death spread quickly around Tunis on Thursday. For Charfi, it was a bittersweet moment. While she would have preferred to see him put on trial, “the end of his system is a signal for all other dictatorships in the Arab world that these countries need to be rebuilt with democratic values. That’s what I hope for our Libyan brothers,” she says.
“I don’t like violence, and I would have preferred to have seen a trial with everything that would have involved; establishing the truth about all that happened over the years. There is a lot we will never now understand.”
In a country where no citizen has ever voted in an election in which the outcome wasn’t known in advance (Ben Ali’s rigged ballots regularly gave him well over 90 per cent of the vote), Tunisia’s political landscape is a blank canvas. Most of the pre-election debate centres on how strongly Islamist parties will perform, now that they have returned to public view after decades of state suppression. The leading Islamist party, Ennahda, is the best-organised political group in the country and is predicted in some polls to become the biggest after the election.
Despite its long dictatorship and chronic economic problems, Tunisia is relatively liberal and secular, an outward-looking state with a well-educated population and some of the strongest women’s rights in the Arab world. Ennahda’s rise has alarmed some liberals, who accuse its leadership of using a “double discourse” – making soothing, moderate noises nationally while taking a harder line among sympathisers. They are particularly concerned that women’s rights will be rolled back – that polygamy could be on the agenda or that the veil could be imposed, for example.
ONE OF THE striking features of Tunisia’s revolution was how comprehensively it cut across society. The protests were led by the young, but parents and grandparents lent their support. In their demonstrators’ ranks were men and women, liberals and conservatives, urbanites and farmers, all united by the common goal of toppling the dictator. But once that goal was achieved, splits appeared in the movement.
Take the young bloggers who played such a vital role in the revolt last December and January. Some are running for election or working for parties. Others have no interest. One of those with the highest profile, Lina Ben Mhenni, is even calling for a boycott of the vote. Ben Mhenni’s blog started as a cultural noticeboard in 2007, but when the first isolated anti-regime protests broke out a year later, it took on a sharper, political edge. Ben Mhenni, a 27-year-old university teacher, soon had her blog blocked by the police and describes a protracted game of cat-and-mouse as she tried to foil the state’s online surveillance. On one occasion, the police broke into her home and took her laptop and camera. (The officers dropped by after the revolution to apologise.)
Ben Mhenni now spends much of her time travelling and giving lectures about her experiences, and two weeks ago she was rumoured to have been in the running for the Nobel Peace Prize. At home, she has been heavily criticised for calling for an electoral boycott.
“To me, it’s another farce,” she says, sitting in the cafe of a Tunis hotel. “The political parties and the intellectuals didn’t try to throw out this corrupt system. They went for elections, for power.” She feels angry that the police who served the old regime remain in their jobs and have not been held to account, and that some of Ben Ali’s political loyalists are up for election tomorrow. “There’s no difference between the last elections and these ones. For me, parties that have agreed to enter into competition with corrupt people are themselves corrupt. We have to start by putting on trial people who were at the head of the system, people who killed the martyrs. A cleaning out has to happen.”
Despite feeling disillusioned, Ben Mhenni says she is proud Tunisia was the catalyst for a much wider revolt. She goes farther and draws a link between the spirit of the young people who drove the Arab Spring with the wave of anti-austerity protests on Wall Street and in many western countries. “Young people are coming out to say ‘no’ to their systems. I’m proud of that.”
The revolution obscured some natural divisions in Tunisian society, then, but its aftermath has brought other ones into sharp relief. The most glaring of all is the split between an urban, European-influenced coastal elite and those who live in the neglected, rural interior, where jobs and opportunities are scarce.
In the countryside, the uprising was led by young people who were angry about their lack of jobs or hope. Their demands were essentially economic. In cosmopolitan Tunis, where jobs are more plentiful and living conditions much better, the revolt centred on demands such as freedom of expression.
Cyril Ghislain, a prominent Tunisian commentator who worked as a management consultant overseas before moving home to Tunisia at the height of the unrest last winter, fears those original, root problems are being forgotten in the rush to put together political structures.
“The solution Tunis has chosen from the beginning has been a solution to its problems,” he says. “It’s ‘let’s sort out the politics’, ‘let’s sort out the constitution’. But none of that is sorting out the problems of the original revolutionaries.”
It’s not just a Tunisian issue; these problems are shared by young people across the region, Ghislain believes. “The biggest issue in Arab countries is that they don’t have an exciting and positive future to offer their youth, especially young men. That’s the biggest issue. If you add up the numbers, you will get just under 100 million young men, anxious, waking up in the morning not knowing where they should go. They have no ability to dream about the future.”
The 120 parties in the running tomorrow span the spectrum of ideas, from communists and secular liberals to ex-Ben Ali loyalists and Islamists. All agree on one thing: everything hinges on the integrity of the electoral process. The worst scenario would be a contested result, leading to recriminations, political stalemate and perhaps even violence. It would also embolden those, at home and abroad, who are willing the democratic experiment to fail.
There are concerns about apathy: just over half of eligible Tunisians have so far registered to vote. Faouzia Charfi is aware of these risks and uncertainties, but she says now is the time to enjoy the moment. “I have waited for this for 50 years,” she says. “I’m so proud of Tunisia, this little country that gave an example, that gave courage to others. I have rediscovered the joy of telling myself: I exist in my country.”
Tomorrow, seven million Tunisians will have the chance to say just that. The world is listening.
