Feminism and the Tunisian Revolution · 2015
Did terrorism or the response threaten Tunisia more?
The seminar question: “Did the terrorist attacks of 2012–2015 threaten Tunisia’s democracy more than the government’s response to them?”
After 2011 the jihadist group Ansar al-Sharia recruited in poor suburbs and interior towns; its supporters attacked the US embassy in September 2012 and members were linked to the 2013 murders of two left-wing politicians. Libya’s collapse supplied weapons and camps, and attacks in 2015 brought back emergency rule.
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Jihadism grew after 2011 because the revolution removed the police state faster than it built a new state. Three words need separating: Islamists, such as Ennahda, the party that led the 2011 government, seek to shape law through elections; Salafists want a return to the practice of the earliest Muslims; and jihadists, a small minority, use violence to impose their version of Islamic rule. A general amnesty in early 2011 freed hundreds of imprisoned Islamists, including veterans of foreign jihads. Ansar al-Sharia, founded by a veteran jihadist known as Abu Iyadh who had been freed in the amnesty, ran charities and preached in mosques whose imams had fled, recruiting unemployed young men in poor suburbs and interior towns. On 14 September 2012 its supporters stormed the US embassy compound during protests against a film insulting the Prophet, and four people were killed. Ennahda’s government designated it a terrorist organisation only in August 2013. A transition that is busy writing rules can leave gaps that armed groups fill.
The short answer
- Freedom for preachers and recruiters. The revolution ended the surveillance of mosques and released political prisoners, including jihadist veterans, and the new government was reluctant to repress religious activists after Ennahda’s own members had suffered for decades. Salafist groups gained a freedom to preach, organise and recruit that they had never had, which they used among young men with few prospects. Some preachers banned under Ben Ali returned to their pulpits, and Salafist groups took over other mosques by force.
- A security state in transition. The police, who had been the backbone of Ben Ali’s rule, were distrusted by the public and partly purged, while the army was small and inexperienced in counter-insurgency. Intelligence networks built to watch dissidents were poorly suited to tracking armed groups. A state that dismantles its repressive apparatus without building effective democratic policing in its place leaves a security gap. Officers who feared prosecution for their conduct under Ben Ali were often reluctant to take risks.
- Libya’s collapse next door. The fall of Gaddafi in 2011 and Libya’s slide into civil war by 2014 created an ungoverned space within a day’s drive of Tunisian towns. Weapons were plentiful, the Islamic State held territory around Sirte and ran camps near Sabratha, and smuggling routes across the border, long tolerated because border towns depended on them, carried fighters as easily as fuel. A Tunisian recruit could reach the Libyan camps in a few hours and return almost as easily.
- Grievances the revolution had not met. Unemployment, especially among young graduates and in the interior, was higher in 2015 than in 2010, and the economic gains promised by the revolution had not arrived. Jihadist recruiters offered young men without work a sense of purpose, belonging and pay. The same blocked hopes that drove the protests of 2010 could drive a minority toward violence. Many recruits came from the same towns and suburbs that had protested in 2010–11.
THE TURNING POINT
Port El Kantaoui, 26 June 2015. The attack near Sousse is the hinge of this chapter because of what followed it. Coming three months after the Bardo Museum attack, it convinced foreign governments to advise against travel to Tunisia and tour operators to cancel their programmes, so tourism, which employed hundreds of thousands of people, collapsed for the next two years. It also led the government to declare the state of emergency and pass the counter-terrorism law, returning the country to powers that had been lifted only sixteen months earlier. From this point the transition faced a choice between security and liberty that it never fully resolved.
What it changed
Emergency rule returns. The state of emergency declared on 4 July 2015, lifted on 2 October and reimposed on 24 November, was renewed continuously for years afterwards. It gave the executive powers over gatherings, strikes and movement that later leaders could use against political opponents as well as against armed groups, so a measure adopted to protect democracy became one of the tools that would later undermine it.
An economy without visitors. Tourism receipts fell by about 35 per cent in 2015, growth almost stopped and unemployment stayed around 15 per cent. Coastal resorts emptied, and the interior, which had seen few of the revolution’s economic benefits, saw even fewer. Some resort towns lost most of their visitors for two years. Economic disappointment became the most common reason Tunisians later gave for losing faith in democratic politics.
A prize for compromise. The award of the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize to the National Dialogue Quartet, announced on 9 October between the two declarations of emergency, recognised Tunisia’s achievement while it was under attack. The prize brought international attention and aid, and it confirmed the idea of Tunisia as the Arab Spring’s one success story, an image that both helped and burdened the governments that followed.
The full answer, argued
The attacks were a direct threat: they killed soldiers, police, politicians and tourists, aimed to destroy the economy the transition depended on, and sought to provoke a conflict between secular and religious Tunisians. Their economic effect was severe, with tourism receipts falling by about a third in 2015. Yet the government’s response carried its own danger. The state of emergency, renewed for years, and the 2015 counter-terrorism law restored powers over gatherings, movement and detention that resembled the old regime’s, and human-rights groups documented abuses under them. In the short term the response helped democracy survive, since elections continued and the Nobel Prize rewarded the 2013 compromise. In the long term the emergency normalised exceptional powers that a later president would use to dismantle the democratic institutions themselves after 2021. The most persuasive judgement is that terrorism weakened democracy by damaging the economy and the public’s trust, while the response weakened it by eroding the habits of liberty, and that the second threat proved more lasting. The transferable lesson is that how a democracy defends itself can matter as much as the attack it faces.
An interesting fact
The National Dialogue Quartet that won the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize was led by four people from very different worlds: Houcine Abassi of the UGTT trade-union federation, Wided Bouchamaoui of the employers’ union UTICA, Abdessattar Ben Moussa of the Tunisian Human Rights League and Mohamed Fadhel Mahfoudh of the Order of Lawyers. Bouchamaoui, elected in 2011, was the first woman to lead Tunisia’s employers’ federation, so the prize honoured, among others, a woman heading the business lobby sitting beside the leader of the trade unions. It was the first Nobel Prize ever awarded to Tunisians.
This is the study layer of Terrorism in Tunisia, chapter 11 of Protest and Change: Second-Wave Feminism and Tunisia, 1945–2015; the full index of the atlas is here.
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