Feminism and the Tunisian Revolution · CHAPTER 8 ·
Tunisia under Ben Ali
Chapter 8 of Protest and Change: Second-Wave Feminism and Tunisia, 1945–2015: “Ben Ali: Stability and Silence”
Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali took power on 7 November 1987 by having doctors declare Bourguiba unfit to govern, then ruled for 23 years through a police state, economic growth and patronage. After Ennahda’s strong showing in 1989 thousands of Islamists were arrested, and the 2008 Redeyef revolt in the Gafsa mining basin failed.
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The map above is the world of Tunisia, April 2008 — One-party rule; the mining basin rises.
Part of IB History: Second-wave feminism and Tunisia →
BRIEF EXPLANATION — THE ESSENTIAL ARGUMENT
Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali held power for 23 years by combining three tools: a police state, economic growth and patronage. A police state is one in which security forces watch, intimidate and punish citizens without effective legal limits, much like a surveillance system that monitors everything a person writes or says online, except that the people watching can also arrest them. Patronage means handing out jobs, loans and favours to loyal supporters, as a political machine does in a modern city. Ben Ali took power on 7 November 1987 by having doctors declare the 84-year-old Bourguiba unfit to govern, and he promised pluralism, meaning open competition between several parties. He then crushed Ennahda, an Islamist movement, one that wants Islam to shape law and public life through politics, after it showed its strength in the elections of 1989. His ruling party, the Constitutional Democratic Rally (RCD), controlled jobs, credit and permits, and he was re-elected four times with between 89 and 99 per cent of the vote. Western governments praised Tunisia as a stable, secular and growing economy that protected women’s rights, which gave the regime foreign protection and made its repression easy to overlook.
The “Tunisian miracle” was real on the coast and absent in the interior, and the gap between the two was where silence first broke. By 2010 about 13 per cent of Tunisians were unemployed, and about 23 per cent of university graduates, while families connected to the president, above all his wife Leila Trabelsi’s relatives, captured a large share of private-sector profits. The map shows April 2008: the whole country tan under one-party rule, except the Gafsa mining basin in red, where young unemployed people and local trade unionists revolted for six months after the state phosphate company published hiring results that seemed to reward connections. The arrows show the basin’s phosphate leaving by rail for factories on the coast and young people leaving by boat for Italy. The regime crushed the revolt and jailed its leaders, but Gafsa had shown that the system could be challenged.
The full story
Ben Ali’s regime began with the promise of freedom and became one of the most thoroughly policed states in the Arab world. The “medical coup” of 7 November 1987 used Article 57 of the constitution, which transferred power if the president was incapacitated, and seven doctors signed the certificate. Ben Ali released political prisoners and in 1988 signed a National Pact with the opposition, the UGTT and even Islamist leaders. The UGTT, the General Tunisian Labour Union, was the national trade-union federation, large enough to call a general strike, much like a national union congress elsewhere. In the elections of April 1989, candidates backed by Ennahda, standing as independents because the party was not allowed to register, won around 14 per cent of the vote by the official count, and possibly more. That result convinced the regime that free competition was too dangerous. From 1990 thousands of Islamists were arrested, tortured and tried, and Ennahda’s leader Rached Ghannouchi went into exile in London. Newspapers, opposition parties and human-rights groups survived only as long as they were harmless. A regime that offers pluralism and then withdraws it teaches its citizens that only silence is safe.
The regime’s bargain with Tunisians was prosperity and order in exchange for political obedience, and for many years it worked. The economy grew by about five per cent a year, tourism and export factories expanded along the coast, and girls’ education and women’s legal rights advanced, which allowed Ben Ali to present himself to Europe and the United States as a bulwark against Islamism. Yet the education system produced graduates faster than the economy produced skilled jobs, and those jobs were concentrated in the coastal regions around Tunis, Sousse and Sfax, outlined on the map. In 2010 poverty stood at about 32 per cent in the Centre-West around Kasserine and Sidi Bouzid, against about 8 per cent in the coastal Centre-East. Meanwhile the Ben Ali and Trabelsi families took over banks, telecoms and import licences; a US embassy cable of 2008, published by WikiLeaks in December 2010, described them as a “quasi-mafia”. Growth bought consent only where it arrived.
The mining-basin revolt of 2008 showed every ingredient of 2010–11 except one. On 5 January 2008 the Gafsa Phosphate Company, the region’s main employer, published the results of a competition for 380 jobs, and unemployed young people in Redeyef judged them rigged in favour of insiders. Sit-ins, marches and hunger strikes spread to Moularès, M’dhilla and Métlaoui, led by local union activists such as the schoolteacher Adnane Hajji, while the UGTT’s national leadership, close to the regime, held back. Security forces sealed off the region, and on 6 June police shot Hafnaoui Maghzaoui dead in Redeyef. In December 38 people were sentenced to up to ten years in prison. Videos filmed on phones circulated online, but national media were silent and the protest never left the basin. Gafsa had grievance, leadership, martyrs and images; what it lacked was a way to spread, and the next revolt would find one.
DEEP EXPLANATION — EVIDENCE & INTERPRETATION
Repression or consent?
The political scientist Béatrice Hibou argued in The Force of Obedience that Ben Ali’s rule rested on much more than the police. She showed how ordinary economic life tied citizens to the state: loans, subsidies, licences and jobs passed through the ruling party and its networks, and the National Solidarity Fund, a supposedly voluntary charity known by its postal account number 26-26, collected “donations” that few dared refuse. Domination therefore worked through daily dependence and a widespread wish for security, a kind of negotiated obedience, as well as through prisons and torture, which the regime used on thousands of Islamists and leftists. Critics reply that consent obtained under surveillance is impossible to measure, since Tunisians who feared the police had every reason to appear loyal, and the speed of the regime’s collapse in 2011 suggests that support was thinner than it looked. The two views are compatible if consent is understood as conditional. Tunisians accepted the bargain while it delivered order and rising living standards, and withdrew from it when it delivered neither, which is why the regime’s strongest areas of support lay on the coast and its weakest in the interior.
Why Gafsa did not spread
The Gafsa revolt stayed local for three reasons, geography, organisation and media, and the comparison with 2010 shows why each mattered. Larbi Chouikha and Éric Gobe, who studied the revolt as it happened, called it the most important social movement in Tunisia since the bread riots of 1983–84, when price rises set off nationwide protests. The mining towns lie at the end of a single road and railway, so police could cordon them off and arrest leaders one by one. The national leadership of the UGTT, whose officials depended on the regime, negotiated quietly and called no solidarity strikes, so the movement had local union organisers but no national federation behind it. Although activists filmed demonstrations and the journalist Fahem Boukadous broadcast reports, for which he was sentenced to prison, the images reached relatively few Tunisians and no major television channel made the story its own. Each of these conditions changed in December 2010: the unions’ regional federations joined, Al Jazeera broadcast amateur footage daily, and protests broke out in many towns at once, faster than the police could contain them. The comparison is one of the most useful for explaining revolution, because it holds most causes constant and isolates the mechanisms of spread.
Measuring the miracle and the grievance
Ben Ali’s Tunisia is a good test of how economic evidence can mislead, because its headline figures were genuinely impressive. International institutions praised steady growth, a rising middle class and falling official poverty, and Tunisia regularly ranked as one of Africa’s most competitive economies. Yet official statistics were produced by a state that controlled publication, and the poverty figures were later revised sharply upwards after the revolution. A study by the World Bank economists Bob Rijkers, Caroline Freund and Antonio Nucifora found that by 2010 firms connected to the Ben Ali and Trabelsi families earned about 21 per cent of all private-sector profits while producing a small fraction of output. The reason was that regulations restricting investment in sectors such as telecoms and transport had been written to protect them. The same economy therefore looked like a miracle in aggregate figures and like a locked door to a graduate in Sidi Bouzid without connections. The lesson for evaluating any source is that national averages describe a country that no individual lives in, and that the distribution of gains matters as much as their size.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
A coup that promised freedom. Ben Ali removed a senile president constitutionally and without bloodshed, released prisoners and promised democracy, so many Tunisians, including opponents of Bourguiba, welcomed him in 1987. The promise bought him time to take control of the party, the police and the media. When he withdrew it after 1989, the opposition was divided and exhausted, which explains why resistance was so weak for two decades. His first months brought an amnesty, the abolition of the state security court and a new law on political parties.
The Islamist threat as justification. Ennahda’s strong showing in 1989, and the civil war that began in neighbouring Algeria in 1992 after Islamists won an election there, allowed Ben Ali to present repression as protection. Many secular Tunisians, including some feminists and leftists, accepted the trade, because they feared an Islamist government more than a police state. Western governments accepted it for the same reason. The trade-off allowed the regime to present every critic, secular or religious, as a threat to stability.
Education outrunning jobs. Tunisia expanded universities rapidly, and by 2010 graduates made up a growing share of the unemployed, about 23 per cent of them without work. Young people who had done what the state asked, studying hard, found no jobs without connections or bribes. Frustrated expectations are a classic cause of protest, because people revolt less against poverty than against blocked hopes. Graduate unemployment was highest in the interior, where private firms were fewest.
A family that owned the economy. From the 1990s the president’s relatives and his wife’s family seized stakes in banks, airlines, car imports, telecoms and property. Their greed became visible to ordinary Tunisians and offended the coastal business class that had supported the regime. Corruption at the top turned a regime that claimed to deliver order into one that seemed simply to steal, weakening its support among its own elites. The US diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks in December 2010 gave Tunisians written proof of what they had long whispered.
THE TURNING POINT
Redeyef, January–June 2008. The mining-basin revolt is the hinge of this chapter because it broke twenty years of silence and revealed both the regime’s weakness and its strength. For six months a small region defied the police state, organised by union activists and unemployed graduates, and made the grievances of the interior visible. The regime survived by isolating the basin and jailing its leaders, which proved that local revolts could still be contained. Yet the networks of activists, lawyers and union officials who defended the Gafsa prisoners in 2008 and 2009 were the same networks that spread the revolt of 2010. Failed protests often prepare successful ones by training the people who will lead them.
What it changed
A template for revolt. Gafsa established a repertoire that reappeared two years later: sit-ins outside local government buildings, hunger strikes, marches led by unemployed graduates, union backing at the local level, and videos filmed on phones. The protesters of Sidi Bouzid and Kasserine knew what had happened in the basin, and some of the same activists took part. What 2008 lacked, a way to spread, is the subject of the next chapter.
A divided union federation. The gap between the UGTT’s regime-friendly national leaders and its militant local and regional branches widened after 2008. In January 2011 the regional unions pushed the national leadership into authorising strikes, and the UGTT became the organisation that turned scattered protests into a national movement, and later the broker of the democratic transition. Its double character, part ally of the regime and part popular movement, made it the ideal intermediary between the street and the state.
Exit by sea. For many young people in the south and interior, the alternative to revolt was emigration, often illegal: the harga, literally “burning” the border, by boat to Lampedusa or Sicily. When the police state collapsed in 2011, about 20,000 Tunisians crossed to Lampedusa in three months, showing how many had been waiting to leave. For many young men the boat was a private answer to a public failure.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Was Ben Ali’s regime maintained more by repression or by consent?
Repression was real and systematic: thousands of Islamists and leftists were imprisoned and tortured, the press and internet were censored, and the Gafsa revolt was crushed with bullets and long prison terms. Yet repression alone cannot explain twenty-three years of stability in a country without a large army. Hibou shows how economic dependence, through credit, subsidies, licences and party networks, gave many Tunisians a stake in the regime, and growth, rising education and women’s rights won the approval of the coastal middle class and of Western governments. The geography of protest suggests that consent was conditional and uneven: it was strongest where the economy delivered and weakest in the interior, where the regime relied more on the police. The best answer is that consent maintained the regime on the coast while repression maintained it in the interior, and that the balance shifted when growth stalled and corruption became visible. The transferable insight is that authoritarian regimes rarely rule by fear or by bribery alone, so they become vulnerable when the material side of their bargain fails in the places where fear was already doing most of the work.
An interesting fact
Tunisians gave their internet censor a nickname: “Ammar 404”, after the “Error 404, page not found” message that appeared when a blocked website was requested, as if an official called Ammar had personally switched it off. Under Ben Ali sites such as YouTube and Dailymotion were blocked for long periods, and police were reported to hack the email and Facebook accounts of dissidents. In November 2005 the same government hosted the second phase of the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis, an international meeting about the free flow of information, while human-rights activists who tried to hold a parallel meeting in the city were harassed and beaten.
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