The New York Review of Books: Is Tunisia Ready for Gender Equality?

And yet to many Tunisians that accomplishment feels scant. Since 2011, Tunisia has held several free elections. It has weathered terrorist attacks, deep polarization between Islamists and secularists, and the evident desire of elements of the old regime to turn back the clock. But its leaders have been unable or unwilling to enact economic reforms that would deliver the greater growth and equality that were among the people’s fundamental demands. “In the last four years, we achieved stability, we protected the state,” Abdelhamid Jelassi, a senior member of the Islamist Ennahda party, which is part of the governing coalition, told me. “But we didn’t turn stability into wealth. People don’t eat stability.” [...]

Inheritance inequality is the “bedrock” of discrimination against women, Bochra Bel Haj Hmida, the head of COLIBE, told me: “It’s at the center of all discrimination: cultural, economic, social—it’s about power.” Hmida is a lawyer, the cofounder of a major feminist association, and a parliamentarian. When the law was proposed, most of Tunisia’s imams preached against it in their Friday sermons. Bel Haj Hmida was targeted personally—the law was often referred to as “Bochra’s law,” and she received insults and death threats on social media. The debate spread beyond the borders of Tunisia. Scholars at the Islamic institute of Al Azhar in Egypt—one of the Arab world’s oldest universities—denounced the idea.

The COLIBE report made a number of other far-reaching recommendations intended to harmonize the country’s laws with the principles of its constitution. It suggested ending capital punishment, decriminalizing homosexuality, and ensuring greater protections for detainees during the garde à vue, the initial period they are held by police before being charged. But President Essebsi has focused almost exclusively on inheritance. On August 13, National Women’s Day in Tunisia, he announced he would be proposing a law to make inheritance equal. The law has now been approved by the cabinet and submitted to the country’s fractious parliament, where it could be discussed and voted on in the following months. Or it could go nowhere, used as a bargaining chip in a much larger political game or stalled and buried, as so many laws and reforms have been in recent years.[...]

Ennahda has decided to vote against the inheritance reform, Labidi told me. “We represent conservative people,” she said. “And when this project was made public a majority of Tunisians rejected it.” The party is willing to introduce an amendment that would allow people to stipulate that they want to divide their inheritance equally, but it insists that the traditional sharia-based division should be the default. The proposed law does the opposite, making equal separation of property automatic unless someone opts out. Both sides know that the default option will be the prevalent one.

read the article

Al Jazeera: The myth of Tunisia's exceptionalism

What is central to these narratives is a rather superficial comparison between the relative peacefulness of Tunisia's transition and the state disintegration in Libya, Syria and Yemen. After all, having an example of a "successful revolution" can always provide a glimpse of hope and optimism especially in these dystopian times. But this framing of the democratic transition in Tunisia since 2011 dismisses a dismal reality.    

The construction and consolidation of the idea of "Tunisian exceptionalism" support the fetishisation of Tunisia's democracy as a political commodity. In turn, this process of fetishisation enables neoliberal political campaigns and interventions to be implemented while it denies the possibility of establishing radical democratic frameworks and policies. 

During Ben Ali's era, exceptional improvements in women's rights and the implementation of dogmatic secularism were used to promote the "impressive accomplishments" of the regime and hide its widespread and systematic human rights violations such the persecution of political opponents and abuse of government critics. France and the EU were complicit in promoting the "successes" of Ben Ali's regime and establishing Tunisia as "a pillar of stability and peace" despite a deteriorating social and political reality. [...]

The ongoing protests, for example, erupted after the Tunisian government implemented austerity measures that caused commodity prices to go up dramatically. These policies, pushed onto the government by neoliberal institutions like the International Monetary Fund, fall in line with the ones Ben Ali's regime implemented. It was these very policies that led to the mass impoverishment of the Tunisian population and ultimately a pervasive popular malaise.  [...]

"Tunisian exceptionalism", this logic goes, must be maintained through peace and stability; any demands for radical change are seen as dangerous and disruptive. Hence, when the latest wave of protests erupted, the Tunisian political elite called for unity and peaceful demonstrations and reminded Tunisians how we are being perceived abroad. The angry protestors were portrayed as a threat to the "success story". 

read the article

Al Jazeera: The Death of Fear

In an exclusive documentary Rageh Omaar traces the roots and repercussions of the uprising in Tunisia - a revolution which ended half a century of autocratic rule and inspired a wave of public protest that swept across the Arab world. [...]

Mohammed Bouazizi's self-immolation and the demonstrations which followed might have caught the public imagination, but protest in Tunis remained unthinkable for most. Ben Ali's interior ministry, the headquarters of a police state of more than 200,000 agents, was still in control.

Further demonstrations in the south led to the shooting dead of several protesters and ultimately to people coming out on to the streets of the capital. It was at this point that Ben Ali decided it was time to apply his personal touch.  [...]

Ben Ali recognised that the population were losing their fear and decided to deliver a lesson in terror. He deployed sniper units in the southern town of Kasserine, it seems with orders to shoot to kill. There are still no accurate casualty figures but at least 20 people were shot dead and the injuries caused by the use of military weaponry were horrific.

watch the documentary