{"id":431316,"date":"2011-05-27T10:12:40","date_gmt":"2011-05-27T10:12:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ghanamma.net\/2011\/05\/27\/tunisian-revolution-did-not-come-out-of-nowhere\/"},"modified":"2011-05-27T10:12:40","modified_gmt":"2011-05-27T10:12:40","slug":"tunisian-revolution-did-not-come-out-of-nowhere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2011\/05\/27\/tunisian-revolution-did-not-come-out-of-nowhere\/","title":{"rendered":"Tunisian Revolution Did Not Come Out of Nowhere"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Fahamu<\/a><\/p>\n

Sadri Khiari<\/p>\n

26 May 2011<\/p>\n

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interview<\/p>\n

B\u00e9atrice Hibou speaks to France-based Tunisian dissident and intellectual Sadri Khiari about the roots of the Tunisian revolution and why no-one saw it coming.<\/em><\/p>\n

The Tunisian revolution has been the detonator of the wave of protests and uprisings which have spread across North Africa and the Middle East since January, 2011. Sparked by the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi on December 17, 2010, the Tunisian revolution quickly spread from the towns in the central mining and agricultural regions of the country to the coastal cities, including the capital Tunis. Mass demonstrations, riots and strikes compelled President Ben Ali to flee the country on January 14. The ultimate outcome of the still fluid revolutionary process remains undetermined. So far popular mobilization and the forces activated by them – a series of parties, associations, unions, and intellectuals now organized in a loose coordinating committee (Le comit\u00e9 de salut public la tunisienne) have succeeded in forcing the retreat and partial dissolution of the networks of repression of the Ben Ali regime, changing the composition of the interim government a number of times and implementing their demand for a constituent assembly, from which Ben Ali’s old ruling party, Le Rassemblement constitutionnel d\u00e9mocratique (RCD) will be excluded for ten years. Governed by a new electoral law passed on April 11, elections for this assembly are scheduled for July 24.<\/p>\n

Sadri Khiari is a Tunisian dissident now living in France, where he is a leading intellectual of Le Parti des Indig\u00e9nes de la R\u00e9publique (PIR), an anti-racist political party founded in 2010. He has published a number of books on Tunisia ‘Tunisie, le d\u00e9litement de la cit\u00e9 – coercition, consentement, r\u00e9sistances’ (Paris: Karthala, 2003) and on the post-colonial situation in France [Pour une politique de la racaille (Paris: Textuel, 2006); La contre-r\u00e9volution coloniale en France (Paris: La Fabrique, 2008), and Sainte Caroline contre Tariq Ramadan (Paris: La Revanche, 2011)].<\/p>\n

B\u00c9ATRICE HIBOU: What is your interpretation of the Tunisian events?<\/strong><\/p>\n

SADRI KHIARI: One can explain a popular revolution as little as one can anticipate its beginning. It appears as a break in the normal course of things, an abrupt acceleration of political temporality, a historical rupture that expresses itself by the surging crowds that insert themselves into the centres of power in order to brutally push aside those who are supposed to lead and represent them. The popular revolution can thus be identified in the exceptional moment when politics dispenses with its mediations; direct democracy becomes reality, raw, tumultuous and alive. On the occasion of recent developments in Tunisia, numerous commentators remembered Lenin’s famous formula: ‘a revolutionary period is characterized by the inability of those at the top to rule and govern in the old way and the stubborn refusal of those below to be governed in the old way.’ From this point of view, the revolution is the instant when the conflict between those ‘at the top’ and those ‘below’ reaches a boiling point.<\/p>\n

The Tunisian revolution is no exception in this regard. Mohamed Bouazizi’s tragic suicide represented this breaking point. But the strategist of Russia’s October Revolution spoke of a ‘revolutionary period,’ not of revolution. He recalled the period of uncertainty when the conflict rages on but is not yet settled, when the relations of force are unstable and open up a horizon of multiple possibilities without guarantees. In Tunisia, the powerful popular mobilization that forced Ben Ali to take to his heels is a revolution, a moment in a revolutionary period which is obviously not over yet today. In ‘the land of Jasmin,’ the pot was about to boil over. The question that imposes itself is the following: why did we not see that the revolution was imminent?<\/p>\n

B\u00c9ATRICE HIBOU: If one cannot explain the revolution, can one nevertheless explain why no one saw it coming, or, to put it differently, why the situation before the revolts was explosive?<\/strong><\/p>\n

SADRI KHIARI: If there was one country in the Arab world that appeared sheltered from revolutionary influence, it was Tunisia. Saturated with publicity about the peaceful tranquility of a Tunisia destined to produce sand and parasols, and a few golden-skinned waiters as well, European public opinion could not possibly imagine this country as the site of dramatic political conflicts. Tunisia seemed to be a country without history. This tourist imaginary did not necessarily determine all of the political, intellectual and media spheres, in which there was general confidence in the ‘stability’ of Tunisia. However, the blindness of these spheres undoubtedly grew out of a measure of self-delusion. One only sees what one wants to see and what one wants to show to others. Determined to support the regime of President Ben Ali, the big powers (U.S., France, the E.U.) and the international financial institutions never stopped promoting a discourse of Tunisian ‘stability’: proper levels of growth and satisfactory macro-economic equilibrium; slow but sure integration into the world market; the formation of a ‘middle class’ destined to play the role of social shock absorber; reasonable and peace-loving foreign policy; and, finally, a democratic transition, albeit one slowed by a lack of ‘transparency’ in ‘governance’ and hampered by the imperative of maintaining security against the ‘threat of Islam.’ In other words, the only potential of political destabilization was detected where it did not exist: in Islamic fundamentalism.<\/p>\n

This type of discourse was carried widely by the big international media outlets and a good number of commentators and social scientists. It was not only a result of self-interested complacency vis-\u00c3\u0192\u00c2\u00a1-vis the Tunisian regime. It was also helped along by elitist, bureaucratic and state-centred ways of understanding society. There was little interest in observing the real development of public opinion among the disadvantaged strata of the Tunisian population; their (occasionally spectacular) forms of resistance garnered no, or very little, attention. All that analysts took into account were the attempts of organized oppositional forces to act in the ‘rational’ sphere of politics, even as they were either not officially recognized or severely repressed.<\/p>\n

But no matter how active they were, political organizations and resistance groups represented an extremely small fringe of the population. In part because of repression, their marginality was frequently but wrongly interpreted as a sign indicating the absence of effective opposition against Ben Ali’s regime. I could also evoke this suspect ideological representation of Tunisians as docile and peaceful, with a penchant for reform and negotiation. This form of culturalism is congruent with the tourist imaginary that confuses the professional servility of the elevator attendant with an almost natural tendency to prefer reconciliation to conflict. While I cannot elaborate further on this point, I would like to finish by pointing to the tendency of numerous researchers to focus only on structures, institutions and other mechanisms of power without taking into account the forms of resistance they provoke. Politics, understood as relations of force, is thus emptied of its content and Tunisian history appears condemned to eternal inertia.<\/p>\n

B\u00c9ATRICE HIBOU: Did this appearance of stability only exist in the eyes of foreigners? Why did the domestic opposition not see the revolts coming?<\/strong><\/p>\n

SADRI KHIARI: Indeed, even in Tunisia, the explosive political situation was hardly recognized by observers, even those engaged in one resistance movement or another. Or, to be more precise, if a large-scale spontaneous revolt similar to the bread riot of 1984 was considered possible, this revolt was not expected to take on an explicitly political dimension, let alone lead to the downfall of the President of the Republic. Outside a few far left groups like the Communist Workers’ Party of Tunisia (Parti communiste des ouvriers tunisiens (PCOT)) directed by Hamma Hammami, or a personality like the former leader of the Tunisian human rights league, Moncef Marzouki, the prospect of large popular mobilization did not figure prominently in the strategic horizon of oppositional forces. In this light, it is significant that in 2008, during the revolt in the mining basin of the Gafsa region, the decisive moment I will come back to later, most opposition forces stayed quiet for a number of weeksbefore demonstrating timid support. This support was meant to underline the severity of the social situation and the urgent need to pass reforms rather than to widen the realm of popular contestation.<\/p>\n

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