Revolutie in Tunesië - waar de president gevlucht en men bezorgd is

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Tunesische politie drijft protest uiteen

De Tunesische politie heeft vandaag traangas ingezet tegen een groep demonstranten in de hoofdstad Tunis. Enkele honderden mensen, vooral jongeren, namen deel aan het protest.

De politie had ongeveer een uur nodig om de betogers uiteen te drijven. De betogers demonstreerden omdat de interim-regering in hun ogen geen gehoor geeft aan de wensen van het volk.

Hassene Dridi, een fotograaf van Associated Press die verslag deed van het protest, werd in elkaar geslagen en korte tijd vastgehouden door de politie.

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Tunesië:250 vluchtelingen vermist
Update: donderdag 2 jun 2011, 18:45

In de Middellandse Zee worden zo'n 250 mensen vermist, melden Tunesische media. De vluchtelingen zaten op schepen die hen illegaal naar Europa hadden willen brengen en die voor de kust van Tunesië in problemen kwamen. Volgens de Tunesische kustwacht zijn er 570 mensen uit het water gered.

Volgens sommige bronnen zaten de vluchtelingen op één boot die verging. Andere bronnen zeggen dat een vloot van kleine bootjes was uitgevaren.

De problemen ontstonden op 20 kilometer uit de kust, bij de Kerkennah-eilanden. Duizenden Afrikanen zijn dit jaar al van Noord-Afrika naar Europa gevlucht.

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Op maandag 20 juni 2011 21:40 schreef rakotto het volgende:
Ben Ali is veroordeeld tot 35 jaar cel voor corruptie.

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Nederland neemt voortouw overgang Tunesië

DEN HAAG/VILNIUS - Nederland gaat samen met Slowakije een werkgroep leiden die de overgang naar een democratie in Tunesië ondersteunt.

Minister Uri Rosenthal van Buitenlandse Zaken meldde dat vrijdag in Litouwen op een conferentie van de Community of Democracies, een netwerk van ruim honderd landen.

Rosenthal zei dat Nederland zich gaat richten op drie punten: ''vrije en eerlijke verkiezingen, het bevorderen van de rechtsstaat en mensenrechten en banen, vooral voor jongeren en vrouwen.''

Daarbij pleitte de minister opnieuw voor de verdere openstelling van de grenzen van de Europese Unie voor producten uit de Arabische regio. Zijn Amerikaanse ambtgenoot Hillary Clinton bedankte Nederland voor het initiatief in Tunesië.

Tunesië stelt nu eerst een actieplan op, waar de werkgroep van uit zal gaan. Maatschappelijke en onafhankelijke organisaties zullen hierbij ook een grote rol spelen.

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Tunis crowds gather for anti-censorship march

REPORTING FROM TUNIS, TUNISIA -- 305851_10100450506218755_3402052_53823322_1966855242_n-1In the latest turn in an increasingly heated debate between Islamic conservatives and secularists in Tunisia, thousands of liberal demonstrators descended on the Tunisian capital Sunday afternoon to take part in a march for freedom of expression and against censorship.

The demonstration, dubbed "Aataqni" or "set me free" in Tunisian Arabic, came only two days after throngs of Islamist protesters marched through central Tunis calling for the implementation of Islamic law and the shutting down of Nessma TV. The station recently outraged Islamists by airing the animated feature film Persepolis, which includes a scene depicting God, forbidden under Islamic law.

Liberals, meanwhile, appear to be alarmed at the fervor of Islamists, with just one week until landmark elections for a constituent assembly, which will write a new constitution after the overthrew this year of President Zine al-Abedine ben Ali.

"If we accept this kind of censorship, it could lead to censorship of other programs, such as educational ones," 32-year-old demonstrator Tarek Marsouguy told World Now. "So we have to fight for freedom of expression."

Other marchers said they had come out to "defend their freedom" and to preserve the revolution so that it continues "on the right path."

Liberté d'Expression Grande Manif a Tunis

About 2,000 marchers waved Tunisian flags and carried banners saying "freedom of expression is sacred" and "I'm Tunisian and free."

As the crowd began marching down a central Tunis street, demonstrators broke out in song and sang the national hymn. Then they switched to chanting slogans calling for a civil state and condemning censorship.

"With my soul, my blood, I sacrifice myself for freedom," they shouted. Some protesters also decried hard-line religious conservatives.

Sunday's march was calm, in contrast to Friday's Islamist rally which -- although initially peaceful -- ended with riot police firing tear gas at the crowds as they approached the Casbah, sending demonstrators running for cover in nearby buildings.

The dispute over Nessma TV has highlighted the struggle between religious conservatives and liberals over the direction of the country. Organizers of Sunday's demonstration wrote in a post on the march's Facebook page that the rally was not about Nessma TV but rather for the greater cause of preserving freedoms.

"This event does not defend Nessma TV in any way, this event defends the freedom of the individual," the post says. "We do not want a dictatorship in the name of the sacred. We do not want to go from a police dictatorship to an Islamic dictatorship."

-- Alexandra Sandels

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Why are elections important for an international audience?

The elections for the Constituent Assembly that will take place on October 23rd are the first democratic elections in the Arab world. The international audience will be focusing on these elections as it will either determine the success or the failure of democratic experience in the Arab world, especially since Tunisia is the country from which the Arab Spring sparked.
For more details, click here.

How long will it be before the results are released?
The Independent High Authority for the Elections (known by its French acronym ISIE) declared that the final results will be announced 12 days after the day of the elections (October 23rd), but that primary results will be announced progressively as the counts are done.

Who is monitoring the elections?
There will be national and international observers who will monitor the elections. They will be present on October 23rd in the polling stations in all 33 electoral districts to make sure that there is no fraud. They will also monitor the vote counting.

How does the voting process work?
Please click here to find a detailed example that shows how the voting process works. (Question 5)

When do polls open and when do they close?
On October 23rd, polling stations are open from 7am to 7pm. For Tunisians living outside of the country, polling stations will be open from October 20th to October 22nd at times determined by local working hours.

Who are the top candidates/ profiles? (top 3 parties)
Among the 112 political parties existing in Tunisia, the top 3 parties are:
Ennahda (The Islamic Renaissance Party)
The Progressive Democratic Party (PDP)
Ettakatol (Coalescence party)

How much power will the Assembly have?
The Constituent Assembly will be the supreme power in Tunisia as, first, it will be responsible for writing the Constitution of the Tunisian Republic, and second, it will be responsible for appointing a Prime Minister who will in turn create the second interim government that will stay effective until the new Constitution goes into effect.

What are current unemployment figures? Adult and youth? Graduates/non-graduates?
The latest statistics show that unemployment rates in Tunisia have reached 14%.
Unemployment rates among youth amount 30%, 3 times higher than rates among the adult population.

Unemployment figures among graduates have continuously increased in the last few years, reaching 22% in 2009; while it has decreased for non graduates as the government have been creating jobs that don’t require qualifications.

How badly has Tunisia’s economy been affected after the revolution?
The Tunisian economy has seriously been affected by the revolution. The rates revealed by the National Institute for Statistics show that the GDP has decreased by 7.8% in the first trimester of 2011 compared to 2010. The Central Bank of Tunisia is expecting a 1% growth in GDP in 2011, compared to 3.7% last year. But tourism, which represents 7% of Tunisia’s GDP, was considerably affected. The sector’s income has decreased by 35%, while transport saw a 18.5% decrease.

What do Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch say about the current human rights situation?
In its report released on September 27th, 2011, Amnesty International is pushing political leaders to sign the human rights manifesto, and many parties have shared their opinion about it.

Human Rights Watch reports that the Tunisian government lifted restrictions on the Women’s Rights Treaty.

Who is likely to be voted / who are the main candidates?
The main candidates for the Constituent Assembly are:
Abdelfattah Mourou (independent candidate)
Mustapha Ben Jaafar (Head of Ettakatol)
Moncef Marzouki (Head of CPR)

Even if Rached Ghannouchi (Head of Ennahda) and Hamma Hamami (Head of PCOT) are major political leaders, they are not candidates for the Constituent Assembly.

Who are the main female candidates?
The main female candidates are:
Maya Jribi (General Secretary for PDP)
Radhia Nasraoui (Lawyer and Human Rights Activist – Head of list for PCOT)
Bochra Bel Haj Hmida (active member of the Democratic Women’s Tunisian Association - Head of list for Ettakatol)

What do latest polls show?
The latest polls show that among the chosen population, 74% of respondents have a preference for a party and 26% don’t know for whom to vote.

The latest poll reveal the following voting intentions:

Ennahda – 25%
PDP – 16%
Ettakatol – 14%
CPR – 8%
Afek Tounes – 3%
Al Moubadara – 3%
Al Moustakbel – 3%
Al Watan – 3%
Mourou’s List – 3%
PCOT – 3%

But the same poll shows that 35% of respondents are sure of their choice, while 44% could change their mind, and 21% have no opinion.

Source: Tunisia live

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Op donderdag 20 oktober 2011 02:24 schreef spoor4 het volgende:
Overigens erg ironisch dat de film 'persepolis' gewelddadige protesten uitlokte van islamisten in Tunesië.

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Moncef Marzouki plants seeds of change in impatient Tunisia

The pace of progress is grindingly slow but a strange political experiment is beginning to bear fruit

Moncef Marzouki strode into the room that former Tunisian president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali had used for an office, and sank with distaste into the sofa under the flag. Ben Ali had Marzouki arrested and exiled for 16 years, and the human rights activist turned interim president was not going to look comfortable in this gilded cage. Besides, faux Louis XIV with blue and gold tassles?

Ben Ali's palace may lack the taste of the one Emperor Hadrian built up the hill, but it is on a lavish scale. Marzouki refuses to live here. He is still, he says, the same man who worked as a doctor in deprived suburbs of Paris for 20 years.

Time is short. The transitional coalition government has until next April to succeed, before it returns to the country for a fresh mandate. It is determined not to stay beyond its welcome. In that time, the troika comprising the Islamist Ennahda party, Marzouki's leftist Congress for the Republic and the centrist Ettakatol promises to create 800,000 jobs, turn around an economy pillaged by the departed dictator and produce a constitution that will last.

In the face of a steady barrage of strikes, withering daily fire from the media not least state-owned TV and fresh clashes on Tuesday with Salafists in Tunis, the palace's new tenant admits his is an impossible job. "I keep telling the people, you can't expect to eat the fruits of the tree. You have to plant it and wait. They say OK, we understand, but we want them now," he said.

The armoured trucks and razor wire around Tunis's souk, the seat of the protests against the old regime, have not disappeared. The plat du jour on today's menu of crises is Muammar Gaddafi's former prime minister Al-Baghdadi Ali al-Mahmoudi: the Tunisian prime minister, Hamadi Jebali, an Islamist, wants to extradite him to Libya, but the president refuses. The prime minister says we don't need your signature; the president says yes, you do.

"Issues of human rights are extremely important to me, and I am not going to sign when this guy could be submitted to torture or to the death penalty," Marzouki said. The Islamists retort: how can Tunisia ask Saudi Arabia to hand back Ben Ali and his wife when Tunisia refuses to hand over Mahmoudi to Libya?

There are other issues. "They are too liberal for me in the American sense of the word and I am too socialist for them in the French sense of the word," the president said. But after six months the three parties have become firm believers in each other. And each has started to argue the other's case. The result is that Marzouki, an exile infused with the French understanding of laïcité, or secularism, now argues that the west is reading Tunisia's Islamists all wrong.

"When people tell me that we are going back to some new Islamic dictatorship, they don't understand the fact that Islam is not the main force; the main force is democracy. We secularists did not become Islamists, the Islamists became democrats, and this is why I think the Arab spring is the triumph of democracy and not Islamism," he said.

"Islam is just trying to use democracy but in fact when you use democracy, I would not say you become a slave of it, but you become part of it. So this must be understood by the west. Even if we have elections and Ennahda prevails, it does not mean that the Islamist mood is prevailing. It means that the Islamist movement has been co-opted by democracy."

The other secularist party, Ettakatol, makes a similar point. Its spokesman, Mohamed Bennour, said: "We are in a coalition, not a union. This is the first time this has happened in Arab history. We said we would enter this coalition 10 days before the election took place and we are sticking to our word. We are not doing it for ourselves. We are doing it to build a democracy that will last."

It is a strange political experiment. Each partner has had to compromise. For Islamists it was the use of the word sharia in the preamble to the new constitution. "I thought that we would lose a lot of time discussing whether the kind of state would be secular or religious and sharia, but fortunately Ennahda was wise enough to say: OK, we are going to use secular vocabulary instead," Marzouki said. "Now we are discussing what kind of political system would it be parliamentary or presidential and I think we are reaching a kind of consensus about it, half presidential, and half parliamentary."

The good news of political dialogue in Tunis has yet to percolate to the likes of Bechir Dridi, a law graduate who has been out of work for four years. In Béja, an hour's drive from Tunis, the wheat fields are full to bursting but the bumper cropis of little use to the town's college graduates.

"The head may have changed, but the body is still the same. In a town like this the administration is packed full of Ben Ali's placemen, who parcel out the jobs to each other's children. There are no posts. You can apply as often as you want but the door is closed. If anything, it's worse than before," Dridi said.

The pace of change is grindingly slow. The ministry of justice has kicked out 82 judges for incompetence or corruption and put 100 more under investigation. No judge is being told any more which way their decision should go. But all the records and the paperwork are stuck in the old logjam. It will take time for the new broom to reach Béja.

The private sector is weak, and no one trusts firms to last, so all the jobs are in the state sector. Modest signs of success are just starting to show: growth and investment began to return in the last quarter. The price of fruit and vegetables in the markets dropped back after a year of soaring inflation, because Tunis clamped down on the contrabandcrossing the porous borders with Libya and Algeria.

Opinion polls all point to a bigger and wider coalition next April. Before then, in October, the first jobs may appear. But Tunisia's newborn democrats must still prove they can deliver.

It is a hard, crisis-strewn slog. And Ben Ali's hired hands, like his furniture, are still around. The new government is determined to ensure they do not return to prominence.