Tunisia

Tunisia: new government tries to calm revolt

In Tunisia, strikes are continuing, notably in transport, the national airline and among agency workers. Workers at the national radio station are protesting against the appointment of new management without any kind of negotiation or consultation. There are reports that during the height of the revolution, many enterprises came under effective workers’ control, with managers being sent on “holiday” by workers. The fall of the Ben Ali dictatorship has created a breathing space for Tunisian politics. Political forces can operate more-or-less openly. Meetings can be held and political...

Tunisia: the defeat of fear

Two Tunisian activists spoke on 26 January to a French libertarian-left group, the Collectif Lieux Communs. We've translated sections of the interview about grass-roots organisation in Tunisia, about the role of the UGTT trade union, about the army, and about the Islamists. These are longer extracts than in the printed paper . The fear and depression which dominate the whole world today have been spectacularly defeated all over the place in Tunisia.... At the start, in the two or three days after the fall of the regime, what everyone talked about was corruption and about the political parties...

Tunisia: two declarations from "committees for the defence of the revolution"

Founding declaration of a local and regional council to protect the revolution and organise public affairs (extracts) - originally published on the French New Anticapitalist Party website Siliana, 16/01/2011 […] We call for the continuation of the struggle and the mobilisation against manoeuvres which aim to take over our intifada and instrumentalise the blood of our martyrs. We reject the installation of Mebazaa (president of the Parliament) and the decision to give to Ghannouchi (former Prime Minister under Ben Ali) the mission of forming a provisional government basing itself on an illegal...

Interview with Tunisian socialist

The NPA interviewed Nizar Amami, postal worker trade unionist and spokesperson for the Workers’ Left League. Translated for Workers’ Liberty by Ed Maltby Why can we talk about a revolution in Tunisia? It’s a revolution in every sense of the word, but according to a new schema: as much in the manner in which the movement was built as in the new impetus it has found to carry on. What is happening in Tunisia is the first revolution of the 21st Century, with the objective of a new society and a Constituent Assembly capable of founding a real democracy which can respond to the social and economic...

How revolution can be confiscated by counter-revolution

Is it good sense, or "Islamophobia", to warn against the danger of the great uprisings in the Arab world being confiscated by fascist-like Islamist movements? Against the "Third Camp" socialists who said in the 1950s and 60s that revolutionary Stalinism, in China or in Indochina, was a reactionary and not a progressive alternative to the established order, other leftists jeered that they were enthusiasts for revolution in theory, but never in practice. It was an easy jibe, but glib. What are the facts? In the modern capitalist world, do mass plebeian upheavals - based on working and poor...

Tunisia: left calls for constituent assembly

Two Tunisian socialists based in the UK, Nadim Mahjoub and Shawky Arif, spoke to Solidarity . Nadim : On 23 January, about 300 people set off in a “Caravan of Liberty” from rural areas, to join demonstrators in Tunis. They quickly grew to 1,000. People from other towns tried to do the same, though some were blocked by the police. When the protesters arrived in the capital, some of them sat down in front of the Prime Minister’s office. They changed slogans, calling for the overthrow of the government, and the dissolution of the RCD ruling party. Tents have been put up. The organisation that...

Tunisia: behind the "jasmine revolution"

Tunisia's uprising is the first mass movement toppling an established government in the Middle East and North Africa since the Iranian revolution of 1979. It is the first time ever in history that an Arab dictator has been removed by a popular revolution rather than a coup. There have been mass movements before in the Arab world, notably the one in Iraq in 1958 which overthrew the British-linked monarchy and installed a left-talking military regime and a period of ferment before the Ba'th party clamped down in 1963; but the nationalist, developmentalist, statist regimes introduced in the 1960s...

Tunisia: "The dictatorship not just the dictator!"

Shawky Arif, a Tunisian political activist, spoke to Solidarity. The situation is still fluid and fast-moving. The head is gone, but the body of the dictatorship remains. So-called “new” leaders coming forward are all members of the old regime and its truly-criminal system. The people of Tunisia continue to demand a wholesale break with the decades of dictatorship. We need the dissolution of the old ruling-party. We demand that members of the ruling party face justice for their corruption and for sanctioning the use of violence and torture against opponents. The head of the main union is a...

Islamist threat in Tunisia?

We don’t know how strong the Islamist threat is in Tunisia. The country has a long tradition of secularisation, and some vocal secularists. Yet that was true in Iran, too, in 1978-9, in the tumult which ended with the coming to power of Khomeini’s Islamist dictatorship, more crushing even than the Shah’s. That tumult included tremendous workers’ strike movements on democratic and secular demands; but the fact that the mosques had become the only tolerated place of opposition under the Shah, the strength of the Islamist cadre of clerics and religious students, and the complaisance of the left...

It's all normal out there!

When an event as earth-shattering as the uprising in Tunisia happens, the BBC has its finger on the pulse. A BBC News Channel presenter turned on Frank Gardner, the security correspondent who was once shot while on assignment in Saudi Arabia, leaving him wheelchair bound for life, and asked the all-important question: “Frank, there are reports that President Ben Ali has fled the country, how will that change things for the British tourists still there?” Gardner, to his credit, discussed the serious part of the question first. But never fear, the BBC had a correspondent at Gatwick airport who...

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