Revolution in the Arab World - Observation of a lost soul Blog

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foreign policy • revolution in the arab world • Tunisia invested in university educations but cannot find commensurate work. The challenge is particularly dire for young people in the interior. While estimates of national unemployment range from 13 to 16 percent, unemployment among university graduates in Sidi Bouzid ranges between 25 and 30 percent. The trade unions’ role is one of the most striking aspects of the protests. The government worked very hard, and with great success, to domesticate the Tunisian General Labour Union (UGTT), Tunisia’s sole trade union confederation, in the 1990s. More recently, however, activists in some unions have succeeded in taking a more independent and confrontational stance. In 2008 and again in early 2010, union activists organized prolonged protests in the southern Gafsa mining basin. The players and the grievances in those cases resemble what we saw in late December. Education unions, some of the most independent and aggressive within the UGTT, played a critical role in organizing unemployed workers, many with university degrees, who protested the government’s failure to provide jobs, its corruption, and its refusal to engage in meaningful dialogue. Human rights organizations, journalists, lawyers, and opposition parties then joined in to criticize the government’s restrictions on media coverage of the protests and the arrests and torture of demonstrators. In this way, a broad coalition of civil society organizations connected bread-and-butter employment grievances with fundamental human rights and rule-of-law concerns. They also pulled together constituencies that transcend class and regional distinctions—unemployed young people in Sidi Bouzid, Menzel Bouzaiene, and Regueb, and lawyers and journalists in Monastir, Sfax, and Tunis. Tunisia’s current political scene looks a bit like it did in 1975 and 1976, the beginning of the long slide for Ben Ali’s predecessor, Habib Bourguiba. Again, we see an aging president who seems increasingly out of touch and whose ability to co-opt and repress has deteriorated. We still see a political system that lacks strong possible successors and a clear mechanism for selecting one. We have a set of economic and political grievances that enjoys the support of a range of civil society organizations, including some with the ability to mobilize considerable numbers of protesters. The fact that unemployed young people took to the streets is much less important than the fact that their cause was taken up—and supplemented—by civil 48
foreign policy • revolution in the arab world • TUnisia society organizations that spent most of Ben Ali’s rule under his thumb or too cowed to act. Tunisia might have turned an important corner. However, nothing in the country’s history or its current state of affairs makes it easy to believe that the protests will lead quickly to a coherent, unified opposition movement with a clear message, a charismatic leader, and a national support base. Another long, slow slide toward chaos could simply set the stage for another Ben Ali—another unelected president who seizes power at the top and changes little below it. Christopher Alexander is Davidson College’s McGee director of the Dean Rusk International Studies Program, an associate professor of political science, and author of Tunisia: Stability and Reform in the Modern Maghreb. 49
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