Back to Tunis
The Arab Spring roils on, this past week returning to Tunis, Tunisia's capital. Chokri Belaid, a lawyer, and leader of a leftist opposition coalition, was assassinated, shot four times on Wednesday as he sat in his car. Belaid's supporters are blaming factions of Ennahda, Tunisia's largest Islamist group led by Hamadi Jebali, the Prime Minister over the past year. There have been no arrests.
Tunisia was the birthplace of the so-called Arab Spring, a movement that started in December 2010, and led first to the fall of its long-time dictator, Zine al-Abedine Ben Ali, then spread, bringing down similar regimes in Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, and now threatening others, notably in Syria. Hosni Mubarak, Muammar Gaddafi, and Ali Abdallah Saleh were all forced out; Bashar al-Assad may be next. But some two years on, it's evident that ousting autocratic leaders is the relatively easy part - replacing them with stable governments that can represent the very broad, vocal and polarized political spectrum in these and other Arab states is proving the much more difficult part. The Arab Spring is far from complete, and slipping back into instability seems like the most probable short-term scenario.
A tiny step towards ultimately establishing political legitimacy may be underway, however, in Tunis. The secular party (the Congress for the Republic) of Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki announced it will withdraw its ministers from the Islamist-led coalition government tomorrow. And perhaps more importantly, Prime Minister Jebali, attempting to quell ongoing violence, has announced his intention to replace his government with a cabinet of technocrats not associated directly with any political party. This is a bold step, as his own Islamist party, Ennahda, is opposed. Jebali has even staked his personal political career on the move, saying he will resign if his efforts to re-structure the government along more secular lines by the middle of this week fail.
These developments, still unfolding and unclear, will be crucial, not only for Tunisia, but across the Arab world, as the fundamental struggle between religious and secular forces to establish new political regimes, capable of addressing urgent economic and social issues, remains not nearly resolved.