Béji Caïd Essebsi: "My three goals as Tunisia’s president"

Earlier this week, Béji Caïd Essebsi became the first Tunisian freely elected president of the country.

"While Tunisia's commitment to elections and other democratic processes has been inspiring, building deep roots for the democratic institutions and values that can stand the test of time will take years. Still, the country offers more hope than any other Muslim country shaken by the 2011 political upheavals and deserves as much political and economic support as the United States and Europe can muster."

-- the conclusion of a NYT editorial, "Tunisia Wins Again"

by Ken

The corner in the middle of the coast of North Africa which is now Tunisia once held considerable strategic importance as a meeting point for shipping lanes to the eastern and western Mediterranean Sea and as the gateway between northern Africa and southern Europe. Even those of us with dim memories of high school World History are apt to have some glimmering of the time when Carthage, located in modern-day Tunisia, was a rival to Rome for regional domination.

It could well be lucky for Tunisians that this ancient land and sea crossroads doesn't have the strategic importance it once did, and that Tunisia itself isn't blessed with the richness in natural resources of any number of other North African and Middle Eastern states. If this doesn't sound to you like the kind of great good luck that calls for celebration, look at the fates and ongoing ongoing struggles of the countries in the region that do have significant strategic and/or resource importance, where local citizens' interest in how their countries should be governed tend to be overwhelmed by powerful political and economic forces from within and, especially, without.

I imagine that, like me, DWT readers have been generally aware that Tunisia, the country that pretty much alone survived the once-hope-engendering Arab Spring as a cause for hope, has been undergoing the delicate experience (I first wrote "experiment") of electing a president after enduring a rocky transitional period since the January 2011 ouster of longtime dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, with first-round elections in November and the decisive second round this past week.

A New York Times editorial earlier this week, "Tunisia Wins Again," responding to the second-round voting that gave the country its first-ever freely elected president-elect, began:

With the election of its first freely chosen president, Tunisia has taken another important step on its post-Arab Spring transition toward democracy. Although the country faces many difficult challenges, it remains a symbol of hope and sanity in a region consumed by chaos and dominated by authoritarian governments.

Mr. Essebsi served as interior minister under Tunisia’s repressive first president, Habib Bourguiba, and as speaker of Parliament under Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, who was ousted in the 2011 Arab Spring revolution. During the campaign, he promoted himself as an establishment figure whose experience could help ensure Tunisia’s security. Mr. Marzouki, a former human rights advocate, embodied the ideals and fervor of the revolution.

A lot of hopes are riding on the shoulders of the 88-year-old president-elect. A country with more than its share of problems to contend with is rife with forces, internal and external, that are far more interested in "getting theirs" than in contending with those problems. Which is why I think a lot of readers may be curious about the Washington Post op-ed piece in which President-elect Essebsi himself sets out "My three goals as Tunisia’s president":

* "solv[ing] daunting economic and social problems;

* establish[ing] security in a country surrounded by insecurity; and

* strengthen[ing] our young democracy at a time when hopes for democracy elsewhere in the region are failing to take root."

Or, to be more specific (links onsite):

Tunisia’s extraordinary political experience since the Arab Spring stands as a testimony to the openness, tolerance and moderation that Tunisians owe to their 3,000-year history as a Mediterranean state crisscrossed by invaders, traders and missionaries of all kinds.

It was trade and exchange with Europe — in particular, with France and Italy, Tunisia’s closest Mediterranean neighbors — that opened the country to the Enlightenment. Sadiki College, established in the 19th century, provided a strong bilingual education for the country’s elite: the modern sciences were taught in French, Arab history and Islamic heritage in Arabic. The leaders who built the postcolonial state after securing Tunisia’sindependence from France in 1956 were largely Sadiki alumni.

Those founders brought to their task a commitment to anchor the young republic in modernity. They instituted universal education, gender equality and separation of religion and state, and they promoted a strong work ethic in a country that lacked the oil wealth of other countries in the region — which has proved a blessing in disguise.

Thus, when revolution swept the Arab world in 2010 and 2011, the vision of our founders paid off. The protesters who ended both Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali’s corrupt dictatorial reign and now the Ennahda party’s recent Islamist regime are the educated sons and daughters of the large, secular middle class that was built over decades by the independence generation.

The constitution agreed to by both Ennahda and the secular camp after the Tunisian Revolution followed the example of the one adopted in 1959 under the leadership of President Habib Bourguiba, the father of Tunisian independence. Both constitutions are devoid of ideological intent and state that the country’s religion is Islam while affirming the civil character of the state.

In 2012, I formed a new political party — Nidaa Tounes (the Call of Tunisia) — to challenge Ennahda following the Islamists’ victory in the first post-revolution elections. Thanks to Bourguiba’s modernist legacy, which helped us mobilize the large, educated middle class, and particularly women, to vote for our candidates, Nidaa Tounes met with success in theOct. 23 legislative elections and again in the Dec. 21 presidential elections.

Winning democratic elections is, however, only a means to an end.

For Nidaa Tounes, and for me as Tunisia’s new president, our goal has three interconnected parts: We must solve the daunting economic and social problems that began in the Ben Ali era and were aggravated by three years of incompetent Islamist administration. We must establish security in a country surrounded by insecurity. And we must strengthen our young democracy at a time when hopes for democracy elsewhere in the region are failing to take root.

On the economic front, we face high youth unemployment, a struggling middle class and unacceptable disparity in regional development, which divides the country into coastal “haves” and interior “have-nots.” These challenges are exacerbated by the persistent economic slump in Europe, which is Tunisia’s principal trade partner. We must invest in youth employment, particularly through training for new jobs in the digital economy and service sector. We must also integrate the regions of the interior by upgrading their transportation systems, improving health care and creating jobs in solar energy and agricultural industries suited for these arid lands.

Security concerns add to these challenges and affect both foreign and national investment. Despite a robust tradition, our tourism suffers — as does our enchanting environment for lack of means to protect it.

We must also confront the fact that poverty is producing terrorism, a new phenomenon for Tunisia. The scourge of terrorism should have been addressed more decisively by Ennahda. Instead, the Islamist government allowed in radical foreign preachers who lured thousands of vulnerable young people to join al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. The same extremist ideology motivates others to take up arms — made readily available by the turmoil in nearby Libya — against their fellow Tunisians.

To fight extremism, we will need to pursue a two-pronged strategy: both “hard,” through stricter control of our borders and a more robust and technologically advanced security response, and “soft,” based on better intelligence-gathering, working to return our mosques to their spiritual function and barring entry to foreign preachers.

Despite all these challenges, the Tunisian people have hope: Our recent elections were some of the most impressive democratic achievements in recent times. Peacefully, fairly and with full transparency, Tunisians voted for accountability. Voters punished the Islamists for their failures of governance and offered secular democrats a chance to solve the country’s problems.

Particularly impressive to me — as a marker of our culture of democracy — is that the leader of Ennahda, Rachid Ghannouchi, called last month to congratulate me for Nidaa Tounes’s victory in the legislative elections. I truly appreciated his gesture and look forward to working with him and all Tunisians to overcome our difficulties and establish our nation as a solid democracy.

We hope that Tunisia’s Islamists will continue on this path. If they opt to be a normal part of a functioning political landscape, Tunisia will prove to the world that, after all, an Arab Muslim country can indeed be a full democracy.

I don't have a clue how this is all going to work out; I would just point to the conclusion of that NYT editorial, quoted at the top of this post. Although recent world experience doesn't provide mountains of optimism on any of the president-elect's three counts, I sure hope Tunisians can defy those odds.

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