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Many Tunisians do not share Lassaad’s confidence in the country’s recent record-keeping. Rumors have circulated widely since the revolution that the Interior Ministry archives have been strategically cleaned and those of the ATCE, the ministry charged with targeting propaganda to foreign media, simply destroyed.

Jallab confirmed that much of the archives of the ATCE were indeed largely destroyed shortly after the revolution. Additionally, the files of certain municipalities and local police bureaus, as well as most regional branches of the RCD, Ben Ali’s ruling party, have also disappeared

there is indeed still interference by government officials in the work of archivists at Tunisian ministries

A law granting amnesty to thousands of people linked to former President Zinedine Ben Ali has sparked outrage with critics saying it whitewashes corruption. But, despite protests in parliament and on the streets, the ruling coalition is sticking to its guns.

President Beji Caid Essebsi's ruling party has been pushing the reconciliation law since 2015, arguing it will improve the investment climate and help reviveTunisia's ailing economy. "I don't understand what all the fuss is about," says Labidi, arguing that it fills a legal loophole in Tunisia's 2013 Transitional Justice Law.

many civil society leaders fear the law will whitewash the entrenched corruption that fuelled the public anger behind the 2011 Arab Spring. "This reconciliation bill is a set back to freedom and liberty in Tunisia," Amine Allouche, a member of parliamentary watchdog Bawsala told RFI.

“Tunisian authorities have already hampered the work of the Truth and Dignity Commission by refusing to fully cooperate with it and by adopting a controversial law on administrative reconciliation,” said Amna Guellali, Tunisia director at Human Rights Watch. “By voting ‘no’ to extending the commission’s work, parliament would be voting ‘yes’ for impunity.”

known by its French initials IVD

It said an extension was necessary in light of the numerous hurdles it had encountered, including the government’s lack of cooperation, and difficulties in accessing government archives and military court case files.

In eight hearings over five months, the commission has opened a Pandora’s box of emotions for Tunisians. After long averting their gaze from past horrors, Tunisians are now digging deep into the dirt. Even former President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali has been watching the proceedings from exile in Saudi Arabia, according to his lawyer.

The commission’s effort to confront past horrors and bring some perpetrators to justice, even while pushing reconciliation, has been painful in more ways than one. Opponents have been vociferous and have undermined public confidence in the process.Nevertheless, hundreds of thousands remain transfixed by the hearings, and the victims’ humanity is winning through, quelling some of the loudest critics. And there are the first signs that the truth-telling is changing attitudes and opening a path to reconciliation. If nothing else it has opened a national debate.

victims have continued to talk long into the night, describing a litany of killings, forced disappearances, torture and oppression from the nearly 60 years of authoritarian rule. Their testimony has shredded long-accepted official narratives and has exposed abuse, a topic that was taboo until the country’s 2010-11 revolution ousted Mr. Ben Ali.

an old script used by Tunisian rulers since the country’s independence in 1956 that pits identity against class, cultural modernization against social justice. Women’s rights — rather than gender equality or sexual freedom — historically played a central role in Tunisian government’s effort to showcase the country as modern and forward-looking. But women’s rights have always been left to the president’s discretion. State-led feminism has contributed to the stifling of grass-roots women’s movements. And women engaging in associations that did not fall in the rubric of good secular state feminism were harassed and tortured.

the law is widely perceived as a means for Essebi’s political party, Nida Tounes, to “pay back” the business leaders that supported its campaign in 2014

Another important site where the identity and class divide is made obsolete is civil society itself. The social movement Manich Msamah (I will not forgive) — which mobilized and organized against the various drafts of the amnesty bill since 2015 — is composed of young Tunisians who share a common interest in social justice, but hold very different attitudes toward religion and marked by significant political disagreements. However, movements like Manich Msamah and civil society organizations have successfully turned into platforms for reciprocal learning, where calls for dignity, social justice and rule of law take precedence over the old narrative opposing class and identity.

Kais Saied’s brand of populism can be identified based on two observations: on the one hand, this populism subscribes to a Tunisian dynamic of relentless fighting for equality that began with the revolution, and on the other hand, it is an extension of the populist waves rippling through different democratic regimes around the world.

people called for equality among regions against a backdrop of strong disparity between the coast and the hinterland as well as in their relations with the State (clientelism, nepotism, institutional violence, etc.) or among citizens themselves (abolishing discrimination, particularly based on gender, skin colour, or geographical origin, right to dignity in the name of equal belonging to the nation)

a population that has been systematically classified, compartmentalized, and segregated into two categories: the "forward thinkers" and the "backward thinkers", the "educated" and the "ignorant", the "modern" and the "traditional".

it appears that if there was "betrayal" of the revolution, it is not necessarily in the opposition between "religious conservatives" and "secular progressives." The partisan tactic of pitting these two camps against one another masks the difficulty of the entire political class to meet the popular demands for social justice.

the voices of social resistance are never killed: they occupied sites in the capital until the month of March, they occupied factories, besieged the ministries, and, more recently, occupied the streets of Sidi Bouzid in the summer of 2012. They no longer oppose and harass Ben Ali’s regime, but instead, shift their frustration toward the provisionary government led by the Ennahda party. They were reunited under a simple slogan, that of the revolution before the final “Dégage”: “Work, freedom and national dignity,” similar to the winter variety heard sometimes as “Bread, Water, No to Ben Ali!”

The consideration of social fractures shows to what extent the confrontation between the "secularists" and "religious," given so much scope in the French newspapers, is not a central concern. There is no denying that there were certainly demonstrations to protect the status of Tunisian women, and there is equally an obvious presence of radicalized young Islamists in the streets of Tunisia who intend to impose a puritan and orthodox rule. Yet, the reading of social tensions in Tunisia in terms of identity imposed both by the defenders of secularism (Tunisian specificity, Bourguibist inheritance) and by the Islamists (who, in this way, mask their inability to meet the social demand for justice) is an illusion. After the elections of October 2011 the Islamists, who had strongly emphasized their religiosity and the persecutions they had suffered under the former regime – deemed, in particular, to distance them from corruption – have suddenly lost their subversive potential. After being persecuted, after presenting themselves as "pure," they are now in power.

the Truth and Dignity Authority (Instance Vérité et Dignié or IVD), a body created at the end of 2013 to highlight abuses suffered by thousands of people, mostly before the 2011 revolution that toppled long-term president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali

More than 62,000 people and communities have filed cases with the IVD, a figure that includes those claiming to be victims as well as repentant perpetrators.

The alleged incident must have taken place between 1 July 1955, when Tunisia became independent, and 31 December 2013, when the country's new Transitional Justice Law came into force. The accused perpetrator must be the state or persons acting on its behalf or under its protection. Finally, crimes should be considered serious or systematic.

the central idea of journalism — the conviction, as my old boss Peter Kann once said, “that facts are facts; that they are ascertainable through honest, open-minded and diligent reporting; that truth is attainable by laying fact upon fact, much like the construction of a cathedral; and that truth is not merely in the eye of the beholder.”

the responsibility to separate truth from falsehood, which is never more important than when powerful people insist that falsehoods are truths, or that there is no such thing as truth to begin with

a period in which the executive branch of government is engaged in a systematic effort to create a climate of opinion against the news business

The challenge Egyptians faced throughout the transition was to build an inclusive polity in the face of their deep divisions. They could resolve these divisions either by suppressing disagreements through a forceful exercise of state power or by competing at the ballot box. The former strategy requires massive state violence in the short term and almost always leads to suspension of formal democracy, without any guarantee of a return to democracy in the medium or long term. The latter strategy involves less force, establishes at least the formal elements of democratic rule, and preserves the possibility of additional democratic gains in the future, even if it requires concessions to undemocratic or illiberal political groups in the present and is marked occasionally by episodes of political violence.

The 14th century Arab Muslim political thinker Ibn Khaldūn’s tripartite typology of regimes—natural, rational, and Islamic—is consistent, in broad terms, with Rawls’s analysis. Natural states are based on relations of domination between the ruler and the ruled, restrained only by the limitations of the ruler’s actual power. Rational and Islamic states, by contrast, impose moral restraints on the exercise of political power. According to Ibn Khaldūn, rational and Islamic regimes transcend the relations of domination characteristic of natural regimes and establish overlapping conceptions of the common secular good. Ibn Khaldūn’s rational and Islamic regimes both can foster the convergence in political morality that—like Rawls’s overlapping consensus—characterizes a just constitution. Critically, this convergence or consensus must occur organically. Ibn Khaldūn argued that coerced adherence to Islamic law fails to produce virtuous subjects. Likewise, coerced imposition of even a just constitution cannot produce an effective system of justice if large numbers of citizens are incapable of freely adhering to its terms.

The real issue, however, was the make-up of the Constituent Assembly and the substance of the constitution it would draft. The parties arrived at a deal, including the semi-presidential structure of the state—with executive power shared by a prime minister and popularly elected president—but the role of religion was a sticking point. Because Parliament had selected the members of the Constituent Assembly, and because Islamists had won Parliament, Islamists dominated the Constituent Assembly. Liberals argued, not unreasonably, that those parliamentary elections exaggerated Islamists’ long-term political strength. Liberals also thought that the draft sacrificed or limited too many personal rights and freedoms in the name of religion, morality, and family values. They argued that the constitution would not be legitimate unless it was a consensual document capable of gaining acceptance by all significant social groups in Egypt.

It is true that this president did not win by a vast margin, but there is no requirement in a liberal democracy that that be a condition of electoral success. And even if, as the protesters have also insisted, he has been acting largely on behalf of his Freedom and Justice Party rather than the country as a whole, that by and large is how politics works in liberal democracies. There is much rhetoric about “the nation” and “the people,” but electoral democracies work not in favor of all citizens but rather of special interests represented by the party that wins in the elections. 

The trouble, as I see it, is that the pro-democracy movement has not thought critically enough about how the grand alliance against Morsi has come about and how the aims of that alliance conflict with their own aims. They seem to take it for granted that, having been on the winning side in the conflict with the Morsi government, they can now successfully confront the army and its civilian allies (i.e., big business, the media, the judiciary, etc.).

there are so many forces already arrayed against them that there was not much scope for the Morsi government for independent action. Morsi could have tried military officers for crimes? You must be joking. He could have restored a bankrupt economy in a world where powerful institutions and governments, who have their own political agendas, control the flow of capital? He should have reduced poverty in a country dominated by a powerful neoliberal elite? This is not where the real evidence of their incompetence lies–especially considering the short period of one year in which he was president. In my view, their total incompetence, their total stupidity, lies in not anticipating, to begin with, that they would be demonized if they acquired governmental authority. And demonized they were, with a vengeance. Part of this can be related to the crude secularist ideas that dominate most Cairene intellectuals. They were also highly incompetent in their inability, or unwillingness, to reach out to parts of the opposition. In any case, in my view they should never have aspired to the presidency–first of all as a matter of principle, and secondly because the uprising had created colossal practical problems which would be extremely difficult to address by any government. Winning an election does not mean that you are strong, as the Muslim Brotherhood thought it was. It means you are responsible for failures of the state and economy. And, despite their electoral win, the Muslim Brotherhood and its Freedom and Justice Party are and were always weak. One of the things of which they were often accused was that they wanted totalitarian control of society, that they were on the verge of getting what they wanted, which is absolute nonsense, of course. They did not have such control, they could not acquire such control, and there is no real evidence that they wanted such control. This is one part of their stupidity: To be seen to behave as though they had real control of the state.

Turkish soccer pitches have reasserted themselves as political battlefields following the death of a protester and the emergence of pro-government football support groups in the wake of mass anti-government demonstrations in June.

Members of 1453 Kartallari (1453 Eagles), a religious Galatasary support group named in commemoration of the year that Ottoman Sultan Fatih the Conqueror drove the Byzantines out of Constantinople, shouted ‘God is Great,’ and attacked Carsi supporters, who played a key role in the Gezi Park protests in June against Islamist prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. 1453 is believed to have ties with Mr. Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). 1453 spokesman Fırat Aydınus denied that his group had links to the AKP, but conceded that none of its members were arrested in connection with the clashes.

The incident in Istanbul’s overcrowded Ataturk Olympic Stadium followed on the heels of last week’s anti-government protests in Kadikoy on the Asian side of Istanbul which is home to Fenerbahce, Turkey’s most popular club. Fenerbahce fans led the protests that were sparked by claims that a police tear-gas canister had killed 22-year-old Ahmet Atakan during demonstrations in early September in the southeastern city of Hatay.

Ennahdha insists that a new government should be grounded in legal legitimacy. Moreover, it holds that forming an apolitical government would marginalize Tunisia’s October 2011 electoral experience, dissolving a democratically elected government and replacing it with the old top-down ruling style of the past. This would effectively turn Tunisia’s political clock back to January 13, 2011 -- the night preceding Ben Ali’s escape to Saudi Arabia.  Conversely, the opposition argues that no legitimacy derived from an electoral victory could ride out the murder of political leaders for which it claims Ennahdha is responsible, or the incompetence it argues Ennahda has displayed in running the state. “Their compliance with political violence and perpetual attempts to ‘conquer the state apparatuses’ is conspicuous and intolerable,” said Hamma Hammami, spokesman for a major opposition front, Jabha Chaabia, in an address to protesters in front of the NCA building last month. “We will continue to mobilize the people to occupy governorates and bring down the traitorous government and Constituent Assembly.”

In February of this year, following the assassination of leftist politician Chokri Belaid, the opposition succeeded in pushing one government into resignation and forced Ennahdha to make tough concessions and ultimately withdrew its ministers from heading the foreign, justice and interior ministries. Remarkably though, the quota of political pressure on Ennahdha did not abate as the opposition kept boosting more demands adding more confusion to the ongoing struggle for a genuine consensus with the Troika.

Ennahdha’s biggest vulnerability has been its failure – either because of lack of will or inability -- to push the judiciary into faster substantial reforms. Ennahdha has likewise failed to reverse the rotten arsenal of laws through which those past abuses were carried out, leaving Tunisia’s old regime-era penal code intact

cross-regional protests are again breaking out in 2019 in Algeria, Sudan, Syria, Jordan and Palestine among other, which has prompted many commentators to herald these movements to be yet another Arab Spring.As this label is used each time, and will likely be used ad nauseum to describe popular movements in the Middle East, it’s worth pausing and questioning its utility.

The grievances around which these protests are organized—austerity, corruption, rising cost of basic food and utilities, have been served as a rally cry for movements in the region for the past half-century. Calling each an “Arab Spring” belies the cyclical, repetitive nature of these problems and simplifies the demands of the protesters.

Smaller protests have broken out as well. In March 2019, hundreds marched through Deraa, Syria, the first city that protested against the Syrian regime in 2011, to protest the re-erection of a statue memorializing Hafez al-Assad, the former ruler of the country.A subtler protest too has caused controversy in Egypt: Moataz Matar a popular TV host, accused the state of kidnapping two of his brothers and their families. Dissidents then wrote, “You are not alone Moataz, I swear to god. More than 50 million Egyptians are with you. Don’t be scared,” on Egyptian banknotes.

Despite Tunisia’s history of worker militancy under the more than 70-year-old Tunisian General Labor Union, Interior Ministry laws from prerevolution Tunisia read that police and other internal security services—which fall under the authority of the Interior Ministry—are not allowed to form professional unions, nor to strike. So as the post-Ben Ali era witnessed a blossoming of civil society, the creation of countless nongovernmental organizations, and the spread of public debate, internal security employees took advantage of the newfound opening to create unions

“The regimes [prior to and after the revolution] used us. They want to put all the blame for abuses on us,” he said. “Before, it was oppression. Anyone of us could be fired for any reason. The station chief could say, ‘Hand me your badge and pistol and get out.’ So we demanded union rights, and we demanded that our colleagues who’d been dismissed for technical reasons—of course not those who stole or kidnapped—are brought back.”

Many Tunisians, from ordinary citizens to politicians to human rights workers, say that the security unions often protect the interests of the security state embodied in the Interior Ministry and protect their members from accountability for past and ongoing abuses, including murder. The portrait that emerges is of a security sector that has managed to precisely use Tunisia’s newfound liberal freedoms to entrench its own authoritarian power—to turn the power of the Tunisian revolution against itself.

With the start of the Lebanese Revolution on October 17th, young feminists were an integral part of an unprecedented social movement in Lebanon.  In fact, young feminists have been engaged in formulating the revolution’s demands pertaining to equality, justice, inclusion, dignity, rights, and the rule of law in our country.   Feminist demands during the revolution included but were not limited to calls for an egalitarian family code, an end to violence against women, call out against sexual harassment, the abolishment of the Kafala system - which holds migrant workers in a servile relationship with their employers - inclusion of all women and girls, rights for LGBTQI, rights for individuals with disabilities and special needs, dignity, as well as freedom from oppression and violence for all.  Young feminists emphasized the right to individual freedoms and bodily integrity. These demands were beautifully and intelligently framed in an analysis of patriarchy and how it is reproduced by within the political, economic, social, and cultural spheres

the patriarchal/confessional system has affected all aspects of life, in both the private and public spheres

the social movement of 2015 revealed signs of misogyny and hostility especially with the brutal attacks against trans-women who were exercising their rights to participate in public mobilization.

Marginalization affects Tunisians across generations, but has particularly pronounced impacts on young people. This has led to deepening social and generational gaps and a growing mistrust in the state among the country’s youth. This in turn complicates the task of confronting the past in Tunisia: young people led the movements that sparked the revolution, but transitional justice mechanisms have not significantly incorporated young people’s voices.

photo essays of the four participants, which comprise the exhibition titled “Marginalization in Tunisia: Images of an Invisible Repression.”