Kamel labidi biography of barack

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Muhammad Talbi, the historian and former dean of the faculty of literature in Tunis, believes that: “Apart from the many humiliations inflicted on Tunisians, I agree that under the French protectorate political opponents, starting with Habib Bourguiba, were entitled to speak their minds. There were clubs, political parties, unions and newspapers. I wouldn’t think of praising colonialism, but I have to say nowadays we have none of those things.” At the age of 84, Talbi has lost neither his fighting spirit nor his lucidity (1).

Talbi is one of the few Tunisian intellectuals old enough to have lived under French rule, and he also experienced the excitement about independence on 20 March 1956 and the enthusiastic start to building a modern state, long hailed as exemplary. Fifty years on, it is just another Arab dictatorship. Tunisia’s first president, Bourguiba, tightened his grasp on power, only to be ousted in November 1987 by General Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, who has done his best to suppress all political freedoms.

Bourguiba, writing in newspapers such as La Voix du Tunisien, took advantage of the relative freedom as described by Talbi to criticise the protectorate, which had been set up in 1881. In 1932 he launched a militant newspaper, L’Action tunisienne. Two years later he founded the Neo-Destour party, a modern political organisation inspired by socialist and communist parties in Europe. He and his followers were determined to seize power and transform society.

Under colonial rule in the 1920s the first independent trade unions had emerged amid unprecedented public debate (2). In 1946, with the launch of the Tunisian General Labour Union (UGTT) Neo-Destour gained a valuable ally in its struggle to win independence and build a modern state. But a campaign to tame UGTT, which was one of the finest unions in Africa and the Arab world, began almost immediately after independence. The authoritie

* Tunisian journalist

1. http://www.tunisiaonline.com/news/news.html
2. Al Hayat, London, 12 April 2000.

(3) Les Echos, Paris, 27 March 2000.

(4) Al Watan, Algiers, 10 April 2000.

(5) Quoted in Tahar Belkhodja, Les Trois Décennies de Bourguiba, Arcanteres-Publisud, Paris, 1998, pp. 14-15.

(6) Emma C. Murphy, Economic and Political change in Tunisia: From Bourguiba to Ben Ali, St Martin’s Press, London, 2000.

(7) BBC Arabic service, 6 April 2000.

(8) The police have been harassing Taoufik Ben Brik, the Tunis correspondent of the French newspaper La Croix and other European media for over two years. He started a hunger strike at the beginning of April. Fethi Chamkhi, the Attac representative in Tunisia, has been arrested in addition to other members of this organisation. Trial proceedings begun on 20 April leave much to be desired.

(9) Speech by Habib Bourguiba entitled "From the reality of nations to the ideal of Arab unity", 16 December 1972.

Tunisia’s uprising has transfixed Egypt’s elite but Mubarak’s survival strategy proves he has learnt nothing from Ben Ali’s fall, writes Kamel Labidi

I was in Cairo on Friday 14 January, attending a lengthy meeting on ways to protect freedom of association and expression in Tunisia, when the country’s long-ruling dictator suddenly fled the country and became an unwelcome asylum seeker, particularly by his former Western allies.

The stunning collapse of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, following four weeks of an unprecedented uprising against tyranny and corruption in Tunisia’s recent history, spurred indescribable feelings of joy and pride, not only among millions of Tunisians, but also in different parts of the Arab world still kept under the thumbs of dictators.

That evening, activists rushed to the heavily guarded Tunisian embassy in Zamalek, one of Cairo’s most affluent residential districts, chanting slogans welcoming the end of Ben Ali’s 23-year nightmarish “Era of Change” and expressing hope that Hosni Mubarak’s three decades of rule would be brought to a halt soon. “We are next, we are next, Ben Ali tell Mubarak he is next,” the protesters chanted.

Ben Ali confided to a Tunisian journalist, in the wake of his bloodless coup against President Habib Bourguiba in 1987, that he was looking forward to leading Tunisia the way Mubarak led Egypt since the assassination in 1981 of President Anwar Sadat. Both Mubarak and Ben Ali are former army officers, like most Arab rulers over the past 60 years. Each of them also paid lip service to democratic rule before settling into autocracy.

Egyptian dailies like the state-owned Al Ahram, the opposition Al Wafd, and the privately owned Al Osboe, which used to regularly publish anonymous and boring articles praising Ben Ali’s alleged “commitment to human rights” and “remarkable economic and social achievements” or insulting his critics rapidly turned their back on the fugitive dictator.

For the past 20