Harvard University 03-04-2017
Thank you very much, Professor (Massoud) for this generous introduction.
Ladies and gentlemen
First of all let me express my deepest gratitude for this invitation.
It’s a major honor and a precious opportunity to address such an esteemed assembly about such an important issue as the Arab Spring and its lessons.
Someone once asked the former Chinese Prime Minister Chou En lay, who died in 1976, what he thought of the French revolution. He replied, “It may be too early to make a final judgment.
If a man as wise as Chou en lay thinks he has no right to make judgment on a revolution that took place more than two centuries ago, how can I make any judgment or prediction on revolutions that are only six years old?
One must remember how, all of us, main political actors, have failed to predict the uprisings and continue probably not to fully understand them.
Until his last days the dictator Ben Ali and his supporters believed that the people could never challenge a strong and brutal police state. And yet, the people did.
The Islamists thought that the revolution to come would be Islamist.
But it was a secular and a democratic one.
The Jihadists believed that only an armed uprising could topple the dictatorship. But revolutionaries were nonviolent.
Leftists worked hard in order to infiltrate unions and universities, thinking that workers and students would lead the revolution. But the uprisings were led, instead, by unemployed graduates and people with no university degrees.
A few self-proclaimed moderates bet that the regime could be reformed from within. But the dictatorship never accepted any meaningful reform and made no concession.
Some people would argue that Tunisian democrats were not wrong. Didn’t they fight for a democratic revolution, and wasn’t this exactly what happened? True, but secular democrats did not predict that the first free elections would give the majority to the Islamists in 2011 or that the second elections would bring back the ancient regime in 2014.
Western governments, despite all the data collected by their intelligence agencies, and their powerful academic institutions, have failed to predict the Arab Spring.
I am not going to exclude myself from the list.
In 2006, I was certain that the democratic revolution I had always dreamed of was very near, at least in Tunisia. I went to Aljazeera studio in Paris, where I was living in exile since 2001, and called the Tunisian youth to take to the street and topple down the dictatorship. I said in my speech that I would come back to participate in a peaceful revolution. I did what I had already said. I returned to Tunisia expecting to be arrested at the airport and believing that it could trigger protests. I was not arrested and nobody took to the street. Disappointed and a little bit upset I returned to Paris after two months of harassment by the secret police and unsuccessful meetings.
In 2010 I began to think that probably my life would end like my father who was opposed to Bourguiba and died in exile in Morocco in1988.
What a surprise: to find myself that day of December 2011 in the very office of the dictator that ruled Tunisia during 23 years after being elected as president by the National Constituent Assembly.
When I try to understand why we were all wrong, I cannot find a simple explanation but a set of different reasons interacting in complex and subtle way.
Whether we are Islamist, leftist, or democrat, we do need ideologies or at least conceptual frameworks to interpret the world, and to act accordingly. But these ideologies and frameworks can be also confusing and misleading. Ideologies, including democratic ideology, can function as distorting lenses, and blind us from the reality. All of us indulged into wishful thinking. All of us ignored the problem raised in 1972 by Lorenz in meteorology and very relevant in politics: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set off a Tornado in Texas?
How could we predict that a totally unknown young Tunisian setting himself on fire to protest against the harassment of the local police in a small rural town in Tunisia would lead to a revolution in Egypt and a civil war in Syria, Libya and Yemen?
The first lesson from the Arab Spring is that one must be extremely careful and humble when analyzing what is going on around us especially when pretending to guide the course of history.
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Having said that, I have to assume a certain number of opinions drawn from 30 years experience as a human rights activist and as a head of the Tunisian state for 3 years.
Allow me to begin with the countries that are said to have failed their revolutions
How many times have I heard the most well-meaning people tell me: “Wouldn’t have it been better for Syrians to keep quiet? What did the Libyans or the Yemenis gain from revolting if not the destruction of their states or their societies? Why don’t you admit that corruption is the price, (a small price after all!), so that people can enjoy peace. Isn’t injustice preferable to civil war?
My answer is always the same: Nobody takes to the streets without a good reason. The corrupt elites pushed our youth to revolt and they are the only responsible for the suffering of the people before the revolution happened, during the outburst, and now during the counterrevolution.
The Arab revolutions were created essentially by the Arab dictators themselves. It is they who are responsible for all the mess that preceded them and the chaos that followed them. In Syria, the people demonstrated for months peacefully. But instead of drawing the right lessons and starting reforms, the regime chose to push ahead throwing its own country into a war waged against its own people that destroyed society and delivered the country to foreign occupation.
It’s striking to see that no leaders or supporters of the dictatorships have expressed regret, assumed responsibility or apologized. All denied that they acted wrongly and all took the pretext of the situation of the chaos that followed the revolution to justify their past.
Journalists today and historians tomorrow will have a difficult task identifying the individuals, the states and the methods used to abort non-violent uprisings and transform them into bloodbaths. I hope that some of the responsible for the violence in Syria, Yemen and Libya will be brought to the International tribunal court and made accountable for their crimes.
Arab revolutions did not fail only for internal reasons .The corrupt elites close to the overthrown rulers enjoyed the support of foreign powers that helped them restore some of their power.
The persons and states behind the counterrevolution are wasting their money and their time. The course of history is not easy to stop or to reverse. The Russians lost their first round against their emperor in 1905, but won the second round in 1917 and the Romanov never regained their throne. Prior to them, the French after their revolution in 1789 had to suffer throughout a whole century before building their first democratic republic in 1870.
Our revolutions have not been able so far to rid our countries of corrupt elites. But these corrupt elites have not been able to restore totally the old system that has definitely died in the people’s hearts and minds.
A revolution is always a turning point in a country’s history, a process that sometimes takes decades to achieve some or all of its objectives. Changing a society and a state is the most difficult and complex thing in the world. It is a long war with multiple battles.
From this point of view, we can say that the Arab revolutions lost the first battle but have not lost the war.
But every body has to keep in mind that we are at the beginning of a process and not at its end.
I would like here to make a few remarks on the attitude of the major Western governments, which are part of what is happening in these countries.
During the last fifty years, their policy has been to provide unconditional support to the regimes in place regardless of their human rights record. For them, a stable regime fighting terrorism, protecting the southern borders of Europe from illegal immigration and opening markets to Western influence regardless of the social costs, is the ideal regime and it does not matter if it is a corrupt dictatorship.
All these states were unable to foresee the explosion of the Arab World despite the heavy presence of their intelligence services and their famous research centers. They did not realize that our dictatorships provided only apparent stability, that they actually nourished terrorism and prepared the waves of clandestine immigration that would sweep across the West.
When the revolution broke out in the name of freedom and dignity, we were surprised by the mixed reception of western governments. Most western leaders have not seen the triumph of democracy but the triumph of Islamism… The fact that the first free elections gave power to the moderate Islamists, as in Egypt and Tunisia, is the most likely explanation for this icy reception. In Tunisia, we were hoping for a substantial economic aid without hindering restraints, and we never had such aid. Even for the fight against terrorism, we could only rely on weapons given by Turkey.
It is striking to see that the same errors are committed , western Governments relying once again on dictatorship , the best example of this old new policy being the support by The French or the Us government to the Egyptian dictator Al sissi
I am afraid that western politician did not draw any lesson from the arab spring , that they are resuming the same policies that woul lead to more violent explosion in the neat future that woul cost the west more than policies promoting democracy and economical development .
It obvious for me and for all Arab democrats that the westerners if they want to defend their strategic and long term interests must refrain from supporting regimes condemned by their people, push their friends to do real reforms supporting sustainable development in countries such as Tunisia, which could be the first country that breaks with the so called tragedy of the Arabs.
Allow me now to talk about my country Tunisia.
How many times was I asked to explain our ”success story” ?
Our revolution caused ”only” 308 deaths and is not comparable to the civil war that is still raging in Syria with a half million killed and seven millions displaced.
The situation is not that catastrophic in Libya and Yemen, but the civil war there claimed thousands of lives.
While the coup has stopped the democratic transition in Egypt in 2013, the process in Tunisia of political negotiations led to the fragile democracy we have now.
Of course this huge difference has nothing to do with any superiority that Tunisians might have. They are neither smarter nor more peaceful or tolerant than other Arabs or any human beings.
Fortunately the population of Tunisia is much more homogeneous than that of the neighboring countries. Made of 99% of Arab Moslem Sunnis.
The middle class represents a large proportion of the society.
Our military is professional, has no history of being involved in economic activity or in politics
Civil society is strong, vigilant and yet responsible, inflexible and yet peaceful.
Most importantly, secular and Islamist opponents to the dictatorship have learned to go beyond their disagreement and work together at least since the late 1990s.
It’s easy to understand that reaching a political consensus is much less probable in countries where you have an extremely heterogeneous population like Syria; or in countries where you have a military institution deeply involved in politics and economy like in Egypt; or in societies without a strong civil society like in Yemen or Libya.
Whether it is because of structural characteristics or because we were more lucky than Egyptians , Libyans , Yemenis and specially Syrians ; we can be proud of what we have achieved
Our revolution caused ”only” 308 deaths and is not comparable to the civil war that is still raging in Syria with a half million killed and seven millions displaced.
The situation is not that catastrophic in Libya and Yemen, but the civil war there claimed thousands of lives.
While the coup has stopped the democratic transition in Egypt in 2013, the process in Tunisia of political negotiations led to the fragile democracy we have now.
We have proved to ourselves and to the rest of the world that Islam and democracy are compatible. We learned that secularists and Islamists can work together, and that a genuine national dialogue can avoid violence.
Tunisians do not live any more in fear of the secret police. They feel free and safe from the arbitrariness they suffered from for decades.
Tunisians enjoy freedom of speech, of association, and free elections.
We have a new constitution, one of the best in the world not only because of its content, but also because of its writing process. Hundreds of meetings, including in the most remote regions of the country, hearings and debates of rare intellectual quality, lengthy negotiations sometimes surrealist about a single word, had made the constitution a collective work.
We are also proud to have set up the Truth and Dignity Commission, which is tasked with the delivery of transitional justice and is now doing an extraordinary job to provide Tunisians with a genuine opportunity to rewrite their history and hopefully to immunize future generations from dictatorship.
But the glass also is half empty
Our democracy is still very fragile. The level of corruption is even higher than before the revolution, in the media, in political parties, and in the deep state; corruption, in fact, has been generalized.
I do believe that our main shortcoming during the transitional period between 2011 and 2014, is that we did not tackle the problem with tough measures .We were too busy with the constitution building process, the terrorist attacks, the rise of unemployment and we thought that after the end of the transitional period we will have time to deal with the problem. In fact corruption mainly in the media sector helped the restoration of the former regime, which fighting corruption is the least of its concerns.
The Question now is the following: how to resume the process blocked or threatened by the restoration of the former regime?
Under the dictatorship, the rule of law was an interesting problem for me as an intellectual and a dream as a Human Rights activist.
As many others Tunisians I experienced the rule of arbitrariness being harassed more than two decades by the secret police, arrested many times, jailed in solitary confinement, sacked from my university and forced to exile.
Once elected the rule of law became my main objective, even my main obsession.
The problem is how do you implement the rule of law when you have inherited from the former regime a judiciary, a police, a bureaucracy, that have to be totally audited and reformed? How do you deal with when so many political parties and media outlets are deeply connected to suspicious financial sources and to corruption?
We have to promote by all political means the independence of the judiciary. We need to pass strict laws to control the funding of political parties and the media.
We need to empower our citizens by promoting decentralization and further supporting the civil society.
To ensure a future for our fragile democracy we must involve what I call the e-generation in the process of keeping alive our project to become a country living under the rule of law.
But the most important challenge is to build a solid and equitable economy free of corruption; otherwise no democracy would be sustainable.
The rule of law is not a question of legislation or politics but a question of culture and changing a culture needs determination, patience and obstinacy.
The most important thing I have learned is how complex and difficult is to build a democracy on the ruins of a dictatorship.
History has taught us that the future is not made of what we fear most or hope most, but what surprises us the most.
Let us hope that the good surprises will be as numerous as the bad ones even when we know that the contrary is probably more likely.
This is why I am always repeating to myself: It might be too naive to try to change the world but it is criminal not to try. It
So let us keep trying. Because do we even have others choices than to keep trying?
Thank You.
