New Leader’s Reforms Awaited : ‘Wheel of Change’ Turns Slowly, Tunisians Learn

Nearly three months after having deposed Habib Bourguiba in a “constitutional coup,” President Zine Abidine ben Ali is learning that it is harder to keep promises than it is to make them.

Succeeding Bourguiba on Nov. 7 after having had the octogenarian founder of modern Tunisia medically certified as being too senile to continue in office, Ben Ali promised to democratize his predecessor’s authoritarian and increasingly capricious regime.

Since then, he has won considerable praise, even from the opposition, for granting an amnesty to most political prisoners, relaxing press censorship and abolishing the kangaroo State Security Court.

But other changes have been slow in coming, and the government remains notably vague about calls for election law reforms and new parliamentary elections, without which the political process is likely to remain closed to genuine opposition.

This, in turn, has fueled fears that Ben Ali, who as interior minister presided over the brutal human rights abuses that characterized the final months of Bourguiba’s reign, ultimately may be less interested in building a new democratic order than in giving the old authoritarian era a fresh and more attractive coat of paint.

“The wheel of change is turning, but too slowly,” says Ahmed Mestiri, a former interior minister who now heads the opposition Social Democratic Movement, known by its French initials as MDS. “We are still under a one-party system, the media is still by and large under state control and there is still a confusion between the apparatus of the state and that of the ruling party.”

A 51-year-old army general trained in the United States and France, Ben Ali is nevertheless riding a wave of popular support for having finally booted out Bourguiba, whose upper-class elitism, indifference toward religion and, in the end, truly pathetic senility alienated him from Tunisia’s 7.5 million people, two-thirds of whom are under 25.

Most Tunisians today were born well after Tunisia’s independence from France in 1956 and have little appreciation for Bourguiba’s role in winning it. They look not to the past but to the future, and from their present vantage point, with Tunisia’s double-digit inflation and 20% unemployment, that looks dismal indeed.

“Bourguiba was like a lock on the country’s future,” said Khemais Chamari, secretary general of the Tunisian Human Rights League. “His despotic character blocked all possibility of development.”

Embodies Hopes

As the key that opened that lock, Ben Ali, for the moment at least, embodies Tunisians’ hopes for change after more than three decades of “Bourguibaism.” Perhaps this helps to explain why the gray and forbidding Interior Ministry, which during Ben Ali’s tenure was a place that Tunisians hurried past, their eyes averted from its barred windows, has in recent weeks become the rallying point for several enthusiastic and apparently spontaneous pro-government demonstrations by thousands of young flag-waving citizens.

“The country breathed a collective sigh of relief on Nov. 7,” said a longtime foreign resident of Tunis. “Ben Ali came to power on the strength of that sigh and on the hope that change--any change--would make things better.”

How long he can coast on the strength of this hope while Tunisia makes the difficult adjustments necessary to steer itself into the post-Bourguiba era remains an open question, however. One of the problems with blaming Bourguiba for everything that was wrong with Tunisia is that it encourages the popular expectation that now everything will quickly be set right. But, as diplomats and other officials note, Ben Ali’s task is only just beginning.

Still ahead is a painful period of austerity as Tunisia, in line with its agreements with the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and other foreign creditors, seeks to complete the transition from a centrally planned economy to a free market one.

“They’ve made a good start. They have a coherent economic policy in place. But they still have a long way to go,” says a Western economist, adding that, if this were a race, “Tunisia would be halfway through the first mile in a 26-mile marathon.”

Price supports, which the government can no longer afford amid declining revenues and the demands of servicing a $5.5-billion foreign debt, are being eased, albeit surreptitiously in some cases, with the price of bread remaining stable but the size of the loaf shrinking by 15%.

Slowly, the state is shedding its 60% share of Tunisian industry by selling off viable companies to private interests and shutting down inviable ones, even though this risks raising unemployment, Tunisia’s most politically explosive problem, in the short run. Officials cite the recent decision to close STIA, the unprofitable state automobile manufacturing plant, as evidence of Ben Ali’s commitment to serious economic reform.

Unfortunately, from the Tunisian point of view, neither nature nor the Reagan Administration seems as equally committed to helping Tunisia out.

A severe drought is likely to cut this year’s wheat crop by at least 50%, forcing Tunisia deeper into debt. The government has already bought 225,000 tons of wheat from the United States and is expected to have to go back for more.

Tourism is strong, but revenues from oil and phosphates, the other major foreign exchange earners, remain depressed. Worse, because of a borrowing spree in the 1970s, Tunisia will be paying back to the United States this year substantially more than it will receive in U.S. aid--an equation that Foreign Minister Mahmoud Mestiri, in a recent interview, described as “a catastrophe for Tunisia and U.S.-Tunisian relations.”

Fundamentalist Pressure

While the economy remains Ben Ali’s major challenge, it is by no means the only one. Like other Muslim countries, Tunisia faces growing pressure from Islamic fundamentalists, whose militancy only appears to have been hardened by the vicious campaign waged against them during Bourguiba’s last year in office.

The excesses of that campaign, which included mass arrests and widespread torture, deeply shocked Tunisians who, while not the most observant of Muslims, nevertheless have a respect for religion that Bourguiba, who once insulted Islamic sensibilities by publicly drinking during Ramadan, the month of abstinence, frequently ignored.

Ben Ali is not a particularly observant Muslim either, but shrewdly he has moved to cut the ground out from under the fundamentalists by adopting a number of Islamic gestures. The state-controlled radio and television now broadcast the five-times-a-day call to prayer while Ben Ali himself begins and ends his speeches with the devout and de rigueur phrase, “In the name of God, the merciful and compassionate. . . .”

It is in the area of political reform, however, that Ben Ali has so far done the most but, some fear, may ultimately end up doing the least.

Victory for Ruling Party

Parliamentary by-elections, billed as the first real test of the new democracy, were held last month in five districts, with the ruling Destourian Socialist Party sweeping to victory in all five contests amid widespread allegations of fraud. Part of the problem appeared to lie with the system that Ben Ali inherited from Bourguiba: The officials who supervised the elections were themselves members of the ruling party.

Ben Ali, described by associates as furious over the voting irregularities, is now said to be planning a purge of nearly one-third of the Destourian Party’s 100-member Central Committee when its meets later this month.

“I think Ben Ali is trying to liberalize, but he’s finding out that it’s much harder than he expected,” said a Western diplomat. “The people in the party grew up under a very paternalistic system and there’s a lot of resistance to reform. It will take time to really develop a more participatory system.”

Other diplomats disagree.

“They’re looking to emulate the Egyptian model,” one senior envoy said. “They want to democratize, but not to the extent of threatening the power of the state.”

Chamari, the human rights advocate, says he hopes that this is “not the case and that disillusionment won’t come too quickly.”

“We will accept a minimum of fraud,” he added, “because the Destourian Party will never accept being in a minority. But they must put into a place a system that allows us to participate.”

Broad acceptance of the hard economic reforms that lie ahead can only be achieved through a “social consensus” that cannot be forged without a genuinely representative government, he argues.

Removing Bourguiba was the easy part. Now comes the hard one, erasing the negative aspects of his 32-year legacy.

Tunisia’s Lincoln

“If Bourguiba was Tunisia’s George Washington, Ben Ali will have to be its Abraham Lincoln,” said one foreign analyst.

Can an ex-cop, who three months into his new job still conducts factory and school inspection tours as if they were police raids, really midwife the birth of democracy in Tunisia?

“We don’t know,” said the opposition’s Mestiri. But, voicing a hope heard virtually everywhere in this tiny country these days, he added: “Now, at least, Tunisia has a chance.”