Tunisia: new government tries to calm revolt

Submitted by Matthew on 9 February, 2011 - 12:57

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 discussions can take place in public, in the streets, and in the newspapers.

The transitional government is trying to restore normal economic functioning and promising elections. The pages of the country’s newspapers are carrying debate between prominent intellectuals about how the new-style Tunisian parliamentary democracy should look.

In cities and towns, grassroots organisations like the neighbourhood “committees for the defence of the revolution” and local trade union (UGTT) organisations are organising demonstrations to root out the remnants of the power of the RCD, Ben Ali’s former ruling party, now formally dissolved.

Last week in the mining town of Gafsa, the site of the last big strike wave in 2008, demonstrations forced out the newly-appointed, RCD-linked governor, Mohammed Gouider, who had to leave in an armoured car while demonstrators demanded “total rupture… with the old regime”. The Guardian reports similar demonstrations in Sfax and other cities.

The UGTT national executive, previously dominated by RCD-aligned bureaucrats, has come under huge grassroots pressure and is demanding “a government that breaks completely with the old regime”.

Thugs, paid by the RCD in cash and alcohol, have been sent to rampage through towns like Kasserine, where 1,000 destroyed public buildings in a riot last week.

In an interview in the Tunis newspaper Le Temps, Rached Ghannouchi (no relation to ex-RCD member Muhammad Ghannouchi, the new Prime Minister) says that his Islamist Ennahda Party is planning to re-group, holding its congress later this year, and launching a newspaper and a radio station. The party is currently taking a legalistic, moderate tack, emphasising its commitment to “democratic salafism".

But “democratic salafism” is a sort of contradiction in terms: “salafism” means taking the words of Muhammad and the two generations of Muslims after him, in the 7th and 8th centuries, as eternal and literal prescriptions for society today.

Ennahda is a threat. The revived workers’ movement has the potential to dispel that threat, and take Tunisia forward, if it organises politically in an independent way.

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