The Dashed Hopes of the Tunisian Revolution: Complicity between Nidaa Tounes and Ennahda

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Mar 3, 2016 Tunisia
[An image of Beji Caïd Essebsi delivering a speech in Palais des Congrès. Image by Magharebia/Flickr] [An image of Beji Caïd Essebsi delivering a speech in Palais des Congrès. Image by Magharebia/Flickr]

The Dashed Hopes of the Tunisian Revolution: Complicity between Nidaa Tounes and Ennahda

By : Khadija Mohsen-Finan

In their hearts and minds, Tunisians were not in a mood to rejoice on the fifth anniversary of their revolution. While Tunisians are often told that theirs is the only revolution that remains from the "Arab Spring," they know full well that its goals have not been achieved.

The discrepancy between the way the Tunisian revolution is viewed around the world and the way the Tunisians who carried it out experienced it may account for the difficulties Tunisians now have in defining and evaluating it. On the anniversary of the revolution, 14 January, this difficulty was made all the greater as the center of the political stage was occupied by the crisis rocking the country`s largest party, Nidaa Tounes.

While this seemed like a good moment to review the last five years and respond to the people`s call for change, the party cadres were instead wrangling over the issue of succession. Béji Caïd Essebsi has always rejected a democratic process within the party he founded in 2012--the party that carried him to the highest office. At the end of the party`s congress held in Sousse on 9 and 10 January, the party appointed Caïd Essebsi`s son to succeed him as party leader, thus flaunting the party`s own by-laws. And after co-opting the leaders of Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali`s Democratic Constitutional Rally (DCR) into his party, Caïd Essebi revived all the methods of the previous regime.

The Sousse congress spectacle was all the more deplorable as it created enormous confusion. The Chief of State presided over the "enthronement" of Hafedh Caïd Essebsi, yet was he not supposed to be above the party system? Was the revolution not meant to abolish privileges and nepotism. 

Not content with confusing past and present, in the name of national unity, the old statesman chose to make Ennahda`s leader, Rachid Ghannouchi, the guest of honor at the congress. Yet, Nidaa Tounes was founded precisely in opposition to the Islamist party, and Nidaa Tounes voters have not forgotten the insults heaped upon their rivals during the 2014 election campaign. 

A New Man 

Tunisians spoke of the January 2011 uprising as a thawra (revolution), when the government fell and Ben Ali left the country on 14 January. The term was taken up throughout the Arab world to mark the importance of the event. For Tunisians, their revolt had become a revolution with all the enthusiasm the word implies but also in terms of a break with the past. An undeniable turning point in the history of the country, people assumed this revolutionary moment would overturn existing structures and mentalities, thus producing a "new man" and a new order.

Today many Tunisians who imagined the revolution would bring about such changes experience doubt and frustration. They now question the nature of those events. Revolution? Revolt? Popular uprising or putsch? For some, it was all of these at once, while for others it really does not matter what it is called. Historians will maintain that it was a social crisis that caused a regime to fall. The demonstrators` demands, conveyed largely through slogans on the placards brandished by young people, addressed issues of work, freedom, and called for an end to privileges. For even though purely economic and social questions were at the origin of the revolution, over the past five years, public debate has focused on the place of religion in society and on demands for freedom. The politicians who have taken turns governing the country all seem to have forgotten that it was economic demands that sparked the initial uprising, in the winter of 2010-2011.

The More Things Change...the More They Stay the Same

Five years on, disappointment is rampant. The economy continues to flounder:  the rate of growth for 2015 is 0.5 percent. To stimulate the economy, Beji Caïd Essebsi came up with a law meant to promote economic reconciliation. Ostensibly, the idea was to favor investments by restoring confidence. In fact, it was meant to suspend the prosecution of business executives for fraudulent activities under the Ben Ali regime.  For many Tunisians, this law, not yet approved by parliament, looks more like an amnesty, a whitewashing of corrupt practices. All the more so as the break with the past did not happen and the DCR networks, which had been keeping a low profile, are active again under the cover of Nidaa Tounes.

This coexistence of past and present has had a paralyzing effect on the economy. Unemployment is on the rise and young people see no improvement coming their way. But young Tunisians faced with the lack of opportunity in their own country and unable to give meaning to their life no longer set fire to themselves in public like Mohammed Bouazizi did in 2010. They join the ranks of the Islamic State (ISIS) in Libya or Syria, and come back to perpetrate terrorist attacks, like the three Salafist actions on Tunisian soil in 2015. According to a United Nations report, nearly 5500 Tunisians are currently fighting under the flag of the Islamic State or AQIM (Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb). Tunisia has more jihadists fighting on foreign battlefields than any other nation in the world.

Politically, the country is witnessing a massive return to conservatism. The two biggest parties--Nidaa Tounes and Ennahda--have commandeered the multi-party system, which was accepted after the revolution. This takeover recreates the pre-revolutionary political landscape, except that Ennahda is no longer underground. And this conservatism goes hand in hand with measures at odds with article 2 of the Constitution, which guarantees individual freedom. New laws against homosexuality and the use of cannabis allow police to humiliate youngsters before jailing them.

While some have denounced such practices, including members of the president`s own party, everyone is outraged by the dynastic character of Nidaa`s last congress and by the coalition with Ennahda, which is in the air. Some twenty Nidaa MPs out of eighty-six left the party, protesting both the way the president`s son was appointed to succeed him, and the alliance with Ennahda which, as a consequence of these departures, has again become the largest party in parliament with its sixty-nine seats.

A Moralizing Neo-Authoritarianism[1]

This return to the political past is expressed in neo-authoritarianism, societal conservatism, and a general moralizing mood all seem much to the liking of Ennahda, which is now a full-fledged partner of the party that outstripped it in the 2014 elections. Part of society is worried about this new arrangement and wonders what happened to the revolution. Indeed, although a judicial body was created to carry it forward, transitional justice has been a failure. Many wonder whether the crimes of the old regime will ever be prosecuted, given that most of the politicians associated with it have been co-opted into the administration and new political parties. While the president`s party has become the main instrument for “recycling” politicians ousted in 2011, the phenomenon has become so banal that the press, and particularly television, is happy to do their share. And a number of high-ranking figures from the old regime are regularly invited to debate on television. In the name of freedom of speech, they give sober accounts of their participation in the governing bodies, speak of Ben Ali`s timid personality, and claim that he loved his people so much that he can scarcely be called a dictator. The deposed president`s former aids even have the gall to praise Ben-Ali`s far-sightedness: did he not think up those committees that were created after his departure?

Of course there is some resistance to the methods of the past, as attested by the rejection of Beji Caïd Essebi`s abuse of dynastic privilege. Resistance has developed within the party itself where there have been departures and a factional split. But in the society as a whole, it takes the form of a kind of political disaffection. This is in sharp contrast with the huge demonstrations of 2011 and the sit-in of the summer of 2013, when civil society rose up against political society and forced a democratically elected government to resign. 

Today, however, civil society is showing signs of fatigue. It is unable to demonstrate its condemnation of the return to political practices that belong to the past, or to decriminalize so-called deviant behavior. And yet the climate of fear created by the terrorist attacks and the urgency of economic and social problems may well overshadow issues of individual freedom and, more generally, the fundamental victories of the revolution of 2011. 

[This text was originally published in French by Orient XXI and translated into English by Noël Burch. In case of any inconsistency between the texts, the French version shall prevail.] 

[1] The "other" of neo-liberalism “requiring a strong leader aided by dedicated advisers who could overcome all obstacles to push the economy forward." (Thomas B. Gold, “Neo-authoritarianism won`t create economic miracle”, L.A. Times, 30/06/89.)
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Jul 9, 2013 Lebanon
Zeynep Gambetti By :
Zeynep Gambetti

Occupy Gezi as Politics of the Body

Since the Gezi resistance started with bloodshed on 31 May, it has had an “anti-depressant” effect, as a friend of mine puts it, as much as it has been nerve-racking. During this period where each day has been prone to new crises and normalcy was completely disrupted, we simultaneously experienced the peaks of ecstasy and the depths of sorrow.

Analyzing such an intense event naturally requires taking some distance. Pending systematization, however, the vivid memory of each day impels one to put on paper multifarious ideas that resonate well with the resistance. Each morning, many bodies with sleep deprived eyes wake up in Istanbul, Ankara, Antakya, Urfa, and Denizli to take to the streets once again, after having quickly checked the latest news in the social media. They are astonished and impressed that they can still walk, run, stand up, and carry provisions for those in the parks. Exhausted bodies rejuvenate with every new threat that the government utters, and with thousands, tens of thousands of others they begin flowing to Taksim, Kızılay, Kuğulu Park, Gündoğdu, Abbasoğlu, and Yeniköy Park carrying home-made gas masks, swimmer goggles, anti-acid solutions, and whistles.

No one does or can govern these bodies. The masses that gather in public spaces are not formed by virtue of transferring tax money into the wallets of partisans. No one provides shuttle buses for them; no one gives them flags, or feeds them with sandwiches. No one assigns them the slogans they shout out during the demonstrations. Bodies that take heart from knowing that they are not alone do not count, or count on, numbers to meet with others in communal or virtual spaces. One standing man suffices for thousands of others to take to the streets. After all, “one” is also a number…

The government, whose tactlessness prompts these resisting and standing bodies to convene again and again every single day, could not have missed the significance of this body politics. These bodies naturally do have a language, even a few languages that are at times congruent and at others incongruent; however, as a whole, they constitute a politics of the body. The rage and dreams that have been embodied in tweets and graffiti since 31 May turn into material realities through the physical existence, visibility, and endurance of the bodies. If history is being rewritten, then its subject is the body.

Four of these bodies lost their lives during this war that the government has waged on society. Thousands of bodies have been beaten up: some lost their eyes, some received irretrievable injuries. Skins were burnt under the water from the cannons, “laced” with chemicals for maximum harm; lungs were choked with tear gas. Pounded arms, legs, and heads got crushed and broken. The long-term effects of the tons of chemicals dumped on bodies are still unknown. What is known, however, is that these chemicals killed hundreds of cats, dogs, and birds, and that they did harm to countless insects, butterflies, and other smaller organisms.

The apparatuses of the state, and the vehicles of death that responded to Gezi’s politics of the body, attempted to imitate the life force that they failed to extort. In response to the huge numbers that filled the parks and squares and astonished everyone without exception, they hoped to gather partisans together in scripted rallies. They began comparing head counts; they calculated representative percentages. When the calculations did not match, they increased the number of police in body armor and helmets and moved them from protest to protest. They built walls of flesh and steel against the wave of resisting flesh. When that did not work, they offered these bodies—which have been in contact with each other physically and virtually through meetings, banners, and tweets—a mise en scène of dialogue, the conditions of which were more or less already determined. They could not even wait for this attempt to yield fruit; two warnings and a command were enough to launch an assault to remove the bodies that produced an alternative sociability from the park, from the space in which physical resistance could be transformed into a life style. They freed the public space of the public. They collected all the banners, pictures, and colors one by one to erase them from social memory. They stripped all the trees, each dedicated to victims of state violence; they appropriated the barricades that were named after tens of people who had undergone physical and psychological torture, and they tore them to tatters. They destroyed the efforts to keep alive the memories of Fikret Encü, who was a victim of Roboski; Metin Göktepe, who was tortured and killed in detention; Dicle Koğacoğlu, who could not take all the sorrow inherent in this society any more; and the Surp Hagop Armenian Cemetery, which was destroyed by Turkish racism.

The only thing that remains is a politics of the body—but the bodies that produce this politics differ from what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.” They are not “mere” bodies that the arbitrary will of a sovereign can isolate from society, oppress unceremoniously, or push to the margins of the symbolic world. Rather, they evoke what Ernst Bloch calls “the upright man,” the collective Prometheus. Bloch writes:

Nothing is more fortifying than the call to begin from the beginning. It is youthful as long as it is; to it there belongs a young and aspiring class. It is innocent of the bad things that have happened, for it has never had a real opportunity to be guilty. When this happens, justice has the effect of a morning; it opposes itself to that eternal sickness which was handed down before it. Beginning anew is freshness through and through; it is a first if it appears completely ahistorical, and if it seems to lead back to the beginning of history….It carries the image of the pastoral mood, of the shepherd, of the simple and upright man; one can play with it even in the dark.[1]

Gezi is the struggle of disorderly bodies, those who do not have any dispositif other than their own bodies, against the death machines. If the machines are regulatory instances that follow commands and extort public spaces of mobility with force and violence, then the force they face is the resistance of life itself. Life flourishes at the most unexpected moments and places, just like weeds that crack the concrete and spring out of it. No apparatus of the state can succeed in dominating life absolutely.

The state seeks order; it can control only those whom it orders. It cannot cope with the demand of "freedom"; it has to ask questions such as “freedom for whom,” “freedom for what,” or “freedom under what circumstances” in order to tuck freedom into neat boxes. Order draws borders, fixes identities, and defines. It attempts to establish a hierarchy. By telling parents to take their daughters and sons home from the park, it both brands the resisting bodies as "children" and tries to trigger into action the nucleus of society: family. Through its rhetoric of security, it attributes the risks of its own making to the resisting bodies. It hangs its own flag or banner on the bodies that it prefers knocking down rather than protecting. It punishes those who do not obey; it uses punishment as retaliation. It operates through censorship, threats, and propaganda.

Life, on the other hand, is a constant flux. It challenges borders and moves beyond them. It opens up to circulation those spaces that are closed off due to construction; it paints such destructive vehicles as bulldozers pink; it transforms steps into tribunes, pieces of iron into wish trees, and trees destined to be cut down into monuments. It walks on highways and bridges that are closed to pedestrians. It does not like the empty and the sterile; it covers them up with banners, slogans, tents. It leaves its mark on every surface. It disrupts silence at times with pots and pans, and at other times with a tune from a piano. It plays with identities and definitions; it makes them fluid; it renders them indistinguishable. It can make fun of both itself and the established order thanks to its humor. By changing one single letter in a word, it can ridicule the heaviest of symbolisms. When the state apparatus sends a riot-intervention vehicle to pour tear gas on it, life stops to catch its breath for a while and goes right back to resisting. When a body grows tired, it gets replaced by a reinvigorated one. Life turns into thousands of fingers that tweet and take photographs when the state apparatus sends down vehicles of propaganda. It stops its wheelchair to grab the flag that fell on the ground while escaping from tear gas. It apologizes when it steps on someone`s foot while running; it calms down those who panic.

It is obvious that these bodies that fascism wants to militarize will not assume any ideological identity. When they do not drink alcohol, they ridicule conservatism; when they lie under a TOMA, they make fun of liberalism, which claims that life is the most valuable good. Orthodox Marxism cannot decide under which class struggle these "çapulcu" bodies are to be subsumed. As long as they stay in physical contact, as long as they remain as collective Prometheuses, as long as they—have to—continue the resistance, they grow accustomed to each other`s colors, languages, and genders. They disrupt the behavioral rules that ideologies and institutions expect from them. The natural or moral instinct of protection that has been attributed to mothers loses ground when female bodies participate in the resistance alongside their children. The nationalist and the Kurd exchange anti-acid solutions in gas-filled hotel lobbies. The upper-class college kid drinks the water handed over by the kid with an Anonymous mask without needing to ask what neighborhood he’s from. Soccer fans save their curses for the police rather than for their rivals.

What comes out of all this is trust, not chaos. That`s why the bodies multiply with every gush of tear gas, spaces expand with every police attack, and the quality of contact among the bodies increases with every propaganda speech. The life woven together by bodies born in Gezi is so tenacious that the government is right in fearing it. The power of these bodies stems from their capacity to mutualize endurance, rather than vulnerability (as Judith Butler envisioned they would). One would need to look into the extensive interstices of this politics of the body, rather than into macro-level discourses, to begin deciphering it.

NOTES

[1] Ernst Bloch, Natural Right and Human Dignity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 61.

[An earlier version of this article was published on 26 June 2013 on BIA ("Independent Communication Network"). The link to that version can be found here. This article was translated from Turkish by Gülfer Göze.]