Tunisia Makes Progress on Minority Rights — And the World Ignores It

[Valin]

Jewish Daily Forward:

Three Years Since the Revolution, a New Constitution

Robert Zaretsky

January 13, 2014.

 

 

Equality: Tunisian Ennahda’s executive board member Amer Larayedh (right) laughs with leftist MP Selma Baccar (left) during a session at the National Constituent Assembly on January 8 in Tunis.

 

“News of disaster is the only narrative people need. The darker the news, the grander the narrative.” This observation, made by a character in Don DeLillo’s novel Mao II, has never seemed truer than today. Just ask the citizens of Tunisia, who are marking on January 14 the third anniversary of the overthrow of Zine El Abedine Ben Ali. In their remarkable effort to reject disaster at home, the foreign media, particularly our own, have mostly denied them any attention. Nothing, it seems, fails like political success.

 

 

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On the same day Friedman shared his grim (and grimly predictable) tidings with Times readers, Tunisia’s political representatives were already well on their way to codifying into law the great hopes of the Arab Spring. Since January 4, the nation’s Constituent National Assembly has been laying the foundations to a new constitution. Or, rather, building upon the foundation that has been in place since Tunisia’s independence from France in 1956. Under its leader Habib Bourguiba, the fledgling nation enacted a constitution that created a vital space between secular and Muslim law. To be sure, its first article states that Islam is the nation’s religion, but in terms of jurisprudence, this was tantamount to recognizing the Dallas Cowboys as America’s football team. Not only did the 1959 constitution dismiss sharia as the basis for its law, but it also insisted upon the “civil character” of the Tunisian state.

 

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The enormous social and historical significance of this law was not lost on the more extreme factions within Ennahda, the Muslim party that has been in power since 2011. When one of its members threatened a secular deputy during the public debate over the proposed law, declaring him an infidel, the assembly responded immediately by adding a new wrinkle, outlawing “tafkir,” or excommunication, as well as incitation to religious violence. Not surprisingly, the debates have been, well, robust — i.e., shouting matches, sudden scrums, clenched fists and death threats have peppered the sessions. But underlying the sound and fury is the conviction, shared by both Ennahda and the secular parties, that compromise and concessions are essential. They have understood that believers and unbelievers, Muslims and secularists, are condemned to live together.

 

 

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[Valin]

Tunisian Constitution, Praised for Balance, Nears Passage

CARLOTTA GALL

JAN. 14, 2014

 

TUNIS Tunisias National Constituent Assembly is close to passing a new Constitution that legislators across the political spectrum, human rights organizations and constitutional experts are hailing as a triumph of consensus politics.

 

Two years in the making and now in its third draft, the charter is a carefully worded blend of ideas that has won the support of both Ennahda, the Islamist party that leads the interim government, and the secular opposition. It is being hailed as one of the most liberal constitutions in an Arab nation.

 

They finally found some equilibrium, said Ghazi Gherairi, secretary general of the International Academy of Constitutional Law in Tunis, the capital. It is a result of consensus, and this is new in the Arab world.

 

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