Tunisian despot’s downfall sparked Arab Spring that swept others from power
Life Story Zine el-abidine Ben Ali dictator b September 3, 1936 d September 19, 2019
Zine el-abidine Ben Ali, who has died aged 83, was a Tunisian despot whose ousting in 2011 after a public uprising sparked the Arab Spring, a revolt that ricocheted across North Africa and the Middle East.
Ben Ali and his family fled from the capital city of Tunis on January 14, 2011, to Saudi Arabia, after weeks of protests over high unemployment, rising food prices, corruption and political repression.
Security forces wielding machine guns and clubs were unable to crush thousands of nonviolent demonstrators who flooded the capital’s broad avenues. Ben Ali’s lack of support from the army, which declined to fire on the crowds, was crucial in his demise.
His downfall, after more than
23 years as president, was widely credited as a transformative moment in the region and sent a wave of revolutionary fervour coursing through the streets of Egypt, Bahrain, Iran, Libya and Jordan. Unable to stop antigovernment protests, embattled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Libya’s Moammar Gaddafi were forced from office.
Ben Ali’s government was ranked among the most brutal in the region, according to Amnesty International and other experts. Noureddine Jebnoun, a Tunisian-born scholar at Georgetown University, said in a 2012 interview that Ben Ali encouraged a ‘‘thug state’’ with contempt for human rights and a bloated security apparatus.
The regime, Jebnoun said, was ‘‘characterised by numerous human rights violations, total lack of freedom of press and freedom of association, and only the barest facade of political pluralism’’.
Ben Ali, a burly, dark-haired man with a stern bearing, was Tunisia’s second leader since independence from France in 1956. As a founder of Tunisia’s military security agency, his chief business was to spy on his countrymen.
The West initially greeted Ben Ali as a saviour when, six weeks into his job as prime minister, he led a bloodless coup in November 1987 that toppled President Habib Bourguiba, a lawyer and anti-colonial resistance hero. At the time, Ben Ali essentially declared Bourguiba senile and ushered the former ‘‘president for life’’, who was in his mid-80s, into retirement.
He oversaw a brief liberalisation of his country’s repressive laws and tore down the personality cult that Bourguiba had encouraged. Yet the veneer of a republic – on what was in reality an authoritarian state with a secular gloss and a rare degree of freedom for women – continued to be stripped away under Ben Ali.
‘‘Freedom of expression, association and assembly remained severely restricted,’’ Amnesty International wrote in 2010. ‘‘Government critics, including journalists, human rights defenders and student activists, were harassed, threatened and prosecuted. Hundreds of people were convicted following unfair trials on terrorism-related charges. Torture and other ill-treatment continued to be reported, and prisoners were subjected to harsh prison conditions.’’
Ben Ali maintained a tight grip on the intelligence services and took a huge slice of the economy for personal gain. He altered the constitution to circumvent the three-term limit on the presidency and remain in office for life. He was elected to a fifth term in 2009, receiving just under 90 per cent of the vote.
His approach, said Jebnoun, was to ‘‘terrorise Tunisians, telling them it’s either me or the vacuum, it’s either me or the Islamists’’.
His second wife, Leila Trabelsi, was 20 years his junior, and her unremitting embrace of a lavish lifestyle earned her the distinction of being ‘‘the Imelda Marcos of the Arab world’’. Her family became gatekeepers to anyone seeking to do business in Tunisia. ‘‘Seemingly half of the Tunisian business community can claim a Ben Ali connection through marriage,’’ US ambassador Robert Godec wrote in a 2008 cable released by Wikileaks.
The conspicuous consumption of the Ben Ali and Trabelsi families threw into sharp relief the privilege of the few in power and the privation of most Tunisians. The surging violence in late 2010 quickly grew from a movement of poor and working-class communities – symbolised by a vegetable trader who set himself aflame in protest at government policies – to include a professional class that had tired of one-man rule.
Zine el-abidine Ben Ali was born in Hammam Sousse, a town on the coast of northern Tunisia, which was then a French protectorate. His first wife, Naima Kefi, was the daughter of a Tunisian army general who held a high position in the post-independence government.
Ben Ali headed Tunisian military security from 1964 to 1974, then was sent to Morocco as military attache and Poland as ambassador before rising to national security jobs of increasing power.
He divorced his first wife in the early 1990s and married his longtime mistress. –