Tunisia's president is a former doctor and human-rights activist who was
jailed under the previous regime. In an interview with NPR Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep, he says expectations are high and jobs are scarce following last year's Arab Spring revolution.
NPR Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep is taking a
Revolutionary Road Trip across North Africa to see how the countries
that staged revolutions last year are remaking themselves as they write
new social rules, rebuild their economies and establish new political
systems. Steve and his team are traveling some 2,000 miles from
Tunisia's ancient city of Carthage, across the deserts of Libya and on
to Egypt's megacity of Cairo. In Tunisia, he sat down with the country's
new president, Moncef Marzouki.
Decades ago, the founder of
modern Tunisia built a palace for himself. Habib Bourguiba managed to
peacefully win his country's independence from France in 1956, and then
proceeded to monopolize political power for three decades, a fact
represented by his palace.
The palace is a complex of buildings on
a spectacular site, facing the Mediterranean Sea and beside the ruins
of ancient Carthage. Visitors arrive through iron gates into a courtyard
vast enough to bring London's Buckingham Palace to mind.
From
there they enter through a hall decorated with grand columns, and wait
for the president in a special room with green stuffed furniture and a
Romanesque mosaic on the wall.
At some point, Bourguiba had his
portrait painted. Unlike so many leaders who have had themselves
portrayed as solemnly gazing up and into the distance as if seeing the
future, Bourguiba is smiling brilliantly. And he's also gazing up and
into the distance as if seeing the future.
In 1987, one of
Bourguiba's aides deposed him in a bloodless coup. Zine El Abidine Ben
Ali took charge of the palace, and the portrait of the smiling Bourguiba
disappeared.
Then, in early 2011, Ben Ali was ousted by
protesters and took up exile in Saudi Arabia. The new occupants of the
palace discovered the old portrait of Bourguiba and hung it up in the
entrance hall. The smiling face greeted us as we walked in to interview
Moncef Marzouki, the new president.
Marzouki seemed out of place when he arrived to sit in his predecessor's spectacularly overstuffed chair.
Rather
than being a strongman, he's a soft-spoken doctor and human-rights
activist who was jailed for several months by Ben Ali back in 1994. And
the palace no longer seems to fit the job description of its current
occupation.
The president of Tunisia no longer calls every shot.
Marzouki was chosen by the elected members of a new constitutional
assembly. And his current term, which began last December, is only
supposed to last a year while the assembly writes a new constitution.
Yet
he calls it a "dangerous year" because expectations are running high
and jobs are scarce following the revolution. When we visited, Marzouki
was wrestling with the assembly.
Preventing A New Dictatorship
We asked him how he was adjusting to his new job, whose parameters are still being defined.
"When
you have been under dictatorship for over five decades your main
problem is to prevent a new dictatorship," he said. "So now we are
discussing about how to share power between the prime minister and the
president so that no one can become dictator."
One example of this
balancing act concerns the former prime minister of neighboring Libya,
who fled to Tunisia as Moammar Gadhafi's regime was crumbling.
Tunisia's
justice minister said the former Libyan official would be returned home
for trial. But Marzouki said he would block the extradition.
"They
came to me and said, 'Mr. President, it's the national interest of
Tunisia to return this man back to Libya.' And my response is that
Tunisia has interests, but also has honor," Marzouki said. "You want to
make sure he gets a fair trial when he goes back to Libya — if he goes
at all."
The Tunisian president said his position was informed by his earlier work.
"Before
being president of Tunisia, I was a human-rights activist and I will
never return a man that I'm quite sure that he could be subjected to
torture, or the death penalty, and so forth, so I'm not going to return
him," Marzouki said.
We asked if there would have ever been such a discussion under in Tunisia under Ben Ali.
"Of course not, and you know it," he said.
A Troubled Economy
We
also asked the president about the economy, which has been struggling
since the revolution and suffers from an unemployment rate of about 18
percent.
"It's our main problem. It's a huge challenge. And we do
know that if we cannot succeed in tackling this issue — giving jobs to
people — then we can have a revolution within the revolution," he said.
"This is why we're working hard to attract investment. Because it's
really a matter of death or life for democracy in Tunisia."
As a
Mediterranean nation, Tunisia has been outward-looking and open to other
countries, including those in Europe, whose tourists have long flocked
to Tunisia's sunny beaches. But the revolution has hurt tourism and
other industries, and the president called on the West to assist Tunisia
and its troubled economy.
"We badly need the help of our friends
in Europe, in the United States, because Tunisia is now a kind of lab —
the whole Arab world is watching," he said. "This year, which is the
most dangerous year because it's the year after the revolution, and the
level of expectation is very, very high. And people are waiting for
everything — for a miracle."
The new government, he said, faced great pressure to deliver.
"People
are really expecting a rapid and massive solution to the problems," he
said. "But what we are trying to do is to tell them that now for the
first time they are free. For the first time they have no corrupt
government. For the first time they have men and women working hard to
resolve their problem and they don't have any other solution, [any]
other choice, than to wait for the result of this policy."
