Tunisia and tyranny: just part of life?

The Guardian reported today that the electoral commission in Tunisia, controlled by the president who staged a coup against his own government and the country’s elected parliament last year, has reported that more than 90% of the people who voted supported his new constitution which allows him to appoint the head of the army, to appoint government ministers without need for parliamentary approval and allows him to force parliament to give his proposed laws priority. The president, Kais Saied, addressed crowds of his supporters who proclaimed that they would “sacrifice [their] souls and blood” for him, telling them that there had been “large crowds” at polling stations which would have been larger if it had been held over two days (so why wasn’t it, then?) and that “all those who have committed crimes against the country will be held accountable for their actions”. The opposition boycotted the referendum and said that turnout figures had been exaggerated (the commission itself said that there had only been a turnout of about a third). The article notes that Tunisia’s democracy had been the last of the countries which had seen some change from the Arab Spring to revert back to tyranny, and named Saudi Arabia and the UAE among Saied’s supporters.

What stuck out about this article was the final paragraph:

“Of course, today’s referendum in Tunisia is a setback for the rooting of a democratic culture in Tunisia,” said HA Hellyer, a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “But the history of revolutionary change across the world is like that: a step forward, a step back, and so on. Tunisia, and frankly the Arab world, is no different.

But no, it’s not. Many countries have been taken over by dictatorships and seen those dictatorships fall. In Africa, many of the newly independent former colonies were taken over by their ‘liberators’ as dictators: Kenneth Kaunda in Zambia, Hastings K Banda in Malawi, Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, Jomo Kenyatta and then Daniel Arap Moi in Kenya. Most of those fell in the 1990s or 2000s and those countries are democracies today, albeit sometimes imperfect ones. Likewise in South America, military regimes came and went and democracies of one sort or another have taken their place. Eastern Europe fell under communist rule for years during the post-war Soviet occupation; none of those regimes remain. All democracies. North Africa is a part of the world that is a neighbour to western Europe. It is not the back of beyond. It is fairly technologically advanced, especially in the cities. Literacy is high.

I discussed some of the reasons why democracies have failed in the Middle East in a previous entry a couple of weeks ago. There is a lack of patience with new political systems and a poor understanding of what they can deliver. But the biggest reason is that there is an entrenched section of society which does not want democracy; it will only countenance the appearance of democracy if they control it. The simple fact is that the revolutions were betrayed by people who never accepted them and were foolishly left in place and were just biding their time. Any revolution needs to get the old guard firmly out of the way to succeed, which is why a revolution brought about by military force is more likely to effect lasting change than one in which a government steps down because of popular protests but many significant people it relied on remain in office, including the military top brass. The resurrection of the old regime in Tunisia is a disaster; the Bourguiba and Ben Ali regimes did not tolerate dissent, imposed heavy censorship (many people in Tunisia had not heard of The Satanic Verses when it was a major controversy elsewhere, for example) and were particularly repressive to practising Muslims, and the new dictator has shown signs of returning to that system. This is not just par for the course but a serious attack on the liberty of Muslims in a Muslim country.

Image source: Citizen59, via Wikipedia. Released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 licence.