A DISPARATE coalition of Tunisian unionists, employers, lawyers and human rights activists has won the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize for helping to prevent the Jasmine Revolution from descending into chaos like the uprisings in other Arab Spring countries. The Tunisian national dialogue quartet was given the award by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, beating an array of high-powered nominees including Angela Merkel, the Pope, the US Secretary of State, John Kerry, and his Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif.
Reading the citation, the new committee chair, Kaci Kullmann Five, said the Tunisian coalition had helped bring the country back from the brink of civil war in 2013, and had made a “decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy”. The prize was intended to reward and bolster such efforts in Tunisia and beyond.
The quartet was set up in the summer of 2013 at a time when the country’s Jasmine Revolution, which had first sparked the Arab Spring, looked like it would go the same way as Egypt’s brief democratic awakening, which had succumbed to a military coup in July of that year. Tunisia was suffering from some of the same symptoms as Egypt: a high-handed Islamist-led government that was ignoring the views of the secular opposition in writing up a new Constitution, street clashes, high-profile assassinations and the appearance of Salafist extremists on the fringes.
The quartet – made up of The Union Federation UGTT, The Employers’ Institute, The Tunisian Human Rights League and The Order of Lawyers – brokered talks between the different forces and got them to agree on a roadmap that included compromises on the Constitution, a technocratic caretaker government and an independent Election Commission.
The members of the quartet have gone their own way since its peak in 2013 and Tunisia still faces severe problems, including public disillusion with the government – which has been largely recaptured by pre-revolutionary elite – and terrorist attacks culminating in the massacre of 38 tourists in Sousse in June. But, alone among Arab Spring states, Tunisia has kept its democratic aspirations alive in the wake of the Egyptian coup and the conflicts that have consumed Libya, Syria and Yemen.
The Prize rightly denotes the triumph of civil society and its power to broker a dialogue between disparate parties to make them agree on a roadmap. It shows that key elements of any society can, if they want to, bring about a solution to political problems created by the various parties which make up the body politic of a nation without there being any resort to violence or civil unrest.
In short, political matters where an impasse exists – such as the formation of a caretaker government in our country, can be brought to an amicable solution by pre-eminent members of our society, working in harmony with all parties.
