Away from the continuing drama in Egypt, Tunisia's Islamist-led government is also in trouble. In many ways the developing conflict in Tunisia is similar to that of Egypt: protests have broken out against a government which seems more interested in pursuing its religious agenda than solving the...
Blog archive: Tunisia
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9th December 2012
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3rd November 2012In the first of the "Arab Spring" countries – Tunisia and Egypt – political debate now centres on the drafting of a new constitution. In both cases there is much discussion about the role of Islam in relation to the state and the rights of women (here and here, for example). But there is...
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12th December 2011The approval of a "mini-constitution" by Tunisia's newly-elected constituent assembly has been largely overlooked by western media, along with the controversy inside Tunisia about its discriminatory content. The 26-clause document, intended to pave the way for appointing a president and...
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21st November 2011The Ennahda (al-Nahda) party, which won the largest number of seats in the recent Tunisian election, has declared its support for the counter-revolutionary forces in Bahrain, according to the official Bahrain News Agency. A report from the agency says the party's political bureau "...
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18th November 2011It's almost a year since I wrote a series of blog posts about the scandal of human trafficking in the Sinai desert of Egypt, and the Mubarak regime's ludicrous denials than anything untoward was happening (here, here, here and here). Well, the trafficking is still going on...
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17th November 2011TUNISIA After some delay, the definitive results in Tunisia's hung election were announced earlier this week. There are some minor changes (the Ennahda party has 89 seats out of 217 – one less than originally reported). The Tunisia Live website has produced useful a graphic showing...
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16th October 2011Next Sunday, October 23, will deliver the first tangible fruits of the uprising that toppled President Ben Ali in Tunisia when voters elect a 218-member National Constituent Assembly. The assembly will not be a parliament as such: its main task is to draft a new constitution and prepare for...
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14th April 2011Following the revolution in Tunisia, I have begun updating theTunisia section here on al-bab. Links to several historically interesting documents had stopped working because of the deletion of websites belonging to the old regime. I have retrieved some of them through the Wayback archive...
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25th January 2011In an article for The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal, formerly of Wired magazine, takes a detailed look at the recent battle between the Tunisian authorities and Facebook – and how Facebook responded to it. He writes: After more than ten days of intensive investigation and study, Facebook...
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18th January 2011Having got rid of Ben Ali and his family, the question now for Tunisians is how to dismantle the system of control that he established over the last 23 years – and it's looking far from easy. Without continuous pressure from the public, the Ben Ali loyalists are likely to retrench and continue...
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18th January 2011Almanara, the Libyan opposition website whose disappearance I reported yesterday, is now back on line and saying that it was attacked by Gaddafi's security people. Al-Jazeera has a storyabout it (in Arabic). Besides declaring his support for the ousted Tunisian president...
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16th January 2011Just in case you are wondering about the pet tiger belonging to Ben Ali's 30-year-old son-in-law, Mohamed Sakhr el Materi – it has been killed. There's an unpleasant video here if you want to see. Materi himself fled Tunisia last week, reportedly to Paris. Rumours of the...
