The Battle for Tunisia

Only days prior to the 23 October elections for a national constituent assembly, Tunisia continues to be an embattled and profoundly polarized terrain. Since the ouster of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in January, peaceful and less than peaceful demonstrations and sit-ins have routinely taken place throughout the country, particularly in the capital, Tunis. The most memorable of these remains the second sit-in protest in the Qasbah Government Square (Feb. 20th to March 3rd), which led to the resignation of Prime Minister Mohamed Ghannouchi and his replacement by appointment of Béji Caïd Essebsi on 27 February 2011.

It may go down as one of the bitter ironies of Tunisian history that a revolutionary uprising accomplished primarily by youth resulted in an interim government headed by an 85-year-old veteran who served in various posts under both Habib Bourguiba and Ben Ali. Indeed, in an interview on the eve of his recent visit to Washington, D.C., Essebsi alluded that he might still be in function after the much anticipated elections this coming Sunday. Not unlike Bourguiba, his idol and former president whom in 1974 proclaimed himself president for life, Essebsi appears to be entertaining ambitions of eternal premiership.    

Ever since Essebsi came to power, there has not been any successful demonstrations or sit-ins, despite many attempts made to organize a third sit-in in the Qasbah Government Square. With Ben Ali protégé Habib Sid as his interior minister, Essebsi has been able to preempt or repress any form of protest against his government, which has been consistently accused of complicity with the remnants of the ancien régime and the dissolved ruling party, the Constitutional Democratic Rally (RCD).

Essebsi has also been accused of drowning the country further in debt and failing to secure the return of funds looted by Ben Ali and his cronies. The trials of Ben Ali, his wife, Leila Trabelsi, and their families have been regularly perceived by most Tunisians as nothing more than cheap reality shows. Essebsi’s interim government has been quite reluctant to address and redress the grievances of the families of martyrs, and has routinely denied the existence of snipers that are believed to have killed more than 300 Tunisians during and after the Tunisian revolution.

With election day around the corner, many segments of Tunisian society have little faith that the interim government will conduct democratic elections. Essebsi has, after all, admitted on Al-Jazeera to having rigged elections under Bourguiba. Moreover, Tunisian media has lately been acting very irresponsibly, and – reportedly at the direct instigation of French ambassador Boris Boillon – has on various occasions attempted to tilt the playing field in favor of certain parties with francophone agendas.

The battle for the future of post-revolutionary Tunisia has been and continues to be played out in the realm of culture. A number of leading public figures, party leaders and intellectuals have cautioned against the impertinence of debates around Tunisian identity at this particular historical juncture. Yet others, mostly francophone elites, media and financial gurus, fearing the resurgence of Islamism after decades of repression, have insisted that Tunisia’s future hinges on the continuation of the secularist project initiated by Bourguiba and exhausted by Ben Ali.       

The latest round in this battle occurred several weeks ago when Nessma TV, a self-proclaimed independent television station, infamous among Tunisians for its extremely secularist and francophone agendas, dubbed into Tunisian dialect, adapted and aired Marjane Satrapi’s animated film, Persepolis. Like the Danish cartoons which were deemed sacrilegious for representing (and lampooning) the figure of the Prophet Muhammad, the film also represented what Muslim tradition deems beyond representation, in this case the figure of God. Tunisians who remember the days of Ben Ali when a walk to the mosque might get them imprisoned, have grown impatient with incessant and virulent attacks on Islam, masquerading as attacks on salafism or, more regularly, the Islamist Ennahda (Renaissance) party. Those who under Ben Ali were comfortable calling for the reduction of the volume of the call to prayer, have however been experiencing nothing short of panic at what they perceive as an overnight return to Islam. All the more so given the repeal of the ban on the hijab has led to its revival and spread.

Some have dubbed the return to Islam as the return of the repressed. It would be more accurate to term it the redressing of the unaddressed. Secularist (actually pseudo-secularist) media icons, intellectuals, critics, and academics have for decades remained silent on the prohibition of hijab, and the profiling of Islamists and mosque-goers under Bourguiba and Ben Ali. They did so in the name of women’s rights, secularism and modernity, which in actuality masked, condoned and licensed the brutal hold of Bourguiba and Ben Ali’s regimes on Islamists and everyday Muslims. With the ouster of Ben Ali, the crimes of their so-called secularist creed have been exposed; rather than seizing the moment to elaborate a critique of Bourguiba’s and Ben Ali’s brands of laïcité and distance themselves from their vicissitudes, they hastened to perpetuate their profoundly flawed projects. No wonder, then, that most pseudo-secularists are currently members of the parties that have come into existence after the dissolution of Ben Ali’s party, RCD (Constitutional Democratic Rally). Their inaugural gesture is reactionary and their search for credibility has consistently translated into an all-out campaign against the parties that have historical and oppositional credibility to both Bourguiba and Ben Ali, and which include particularly the Renaissance Party (Ennahda), the Tunisian Workers’ Communist Party (PCOT) and the Congress for the Republic (CPR).

CPR and PCOT can be expected to do very well in these upcoming elections on account of the indisputable activist dissidence of Moncef Marzouki and Hamma Hammami, respectively. Yet there is no gainsaying the fact that Ennahda is a major player in the current political scene in Tunisia, and is expected to carry a good number of the 217 seats that will form the national constituent assembly whose task is, among others, to write a new constitution for the country and oversee the transition toward democracy. The Democratic Modernist Pole (El-Qutb), along with the Democratic Forum for Labour and Liberties (El-Takattul) as well as the Progressive Democratic Party (PDP), the Homeland Party (El-Watan), and variations on them, have more or less found in their outright opposition to Ennahda their very raison d’être. Few people know what the economic plans of these parties might be, but most Tunisians know that their claim to fame is their unbending opposition to Ennahda, an opposition that has regularly been voiced under the banner of laïcité (whose main pillar is the separation between religion and politics).               

Clearly, though, if Ennahda were not a political party, it would not have been given a license by the Ministry of the Interior. This has been the case, for instance, with the salafist party, Hizb Ettahrir (Liberation Party), whose application for a license was turned down. The insistence of pseudo-secularists that Ennahda is a purely religious party that will end up instituting sharia law in Tunisia is nothing but a red-herring, part and parcel of the fear-mongering campaign against a formidable opponent whose history of struggle against dictatorship speaks for itself. One might wonder whether the venomous attacks on Ennahda (and at times on CPR whose leader, Moncef Marzouki, rightly pointed out that his party does not suffer from an “Ennahda complex”) do not stem from a fear that Islam and democracy are coextensive. Undoubtedly, the compatibility of Islam and democracy threatens to undo the authority of laïcité, not to mention the entire tradition of secularist-authoritarian thought in Tunisia.

Perhaps the trouble with the electoral campaign in the end is that it has allowed questions of cultural identity, religion and laïcité to override other important and thorny issues that have to do with the economy, unemployment, justice and political reconciliation, etc. On the one hand, Islamists have focused very much on their past histories of struggle and have insisted on their progressive civic agenda as well as on their preference for parliamentary democracy. On the other, pseudo-secularists have been fixated on the critique of Ennahda, all the while remaining reticent about or oblivious to the ideological underpinning of laïcité. By presenting their ideology as a form of critique, Tunisian pseudo-secularists have steadily, even dogmatically, constructed themselves beyond critique. A critique of Tunisian laïcité, however, is never more to be desired than at a time when its complicity with the old regime of Ben Ali and French cultural imperialism has become an everyday Tunisian reality. Tunisians who will go to the polls this Sunday cannot be expected to deliver such a critique—they will deliver their long overdue judgment.