Tunisian Dominoes?
By ROGER COHEN
NYT
TUNIS — Liberated Tunisia has done away with its Ministry of Communications, really the Ministry of Censorship, and also seems to have dispensed with all but the most cursory immigration controls, to judge by the relaxed, wave-you-on-your-way scene at the airport. These are heady days in the Arab world’s fragile democratic bridgehead.
An independent “republic” was born here 54 years ago. Since then there have been just two presidents, both of whom applied an iron fist and neither of whom left office voluntarily, so a touch of Tunisian giddiness at finding themselves sans strongman and free to speak out is understandable.
I breezed from the airport to downtown in 10 minutes. Tanks stood at the entrance to Boulevard Bourguiba (known wistfully as the Champs-Élysées of Tunis) where several hundred protesters had gathered to hurl abuse at the deposed dictator’s party — the neither constitutional nor democratic Constitutional Democratic Rally party — and tell this misnomer to get the heck out of government.
Two high school teachers spoke to me, one in French, the other in English, and their message was identical: the thieves must go, blood had not been shed only for some of the same ministers to endure. A chant rose, using the French acronym for the hated party, “We’ll accept bread and water but never the R.C.D!”
(More here.)
NYT
TUNIS — Liberated Tunisia has done away with its Ministry of Communications, really the Ministry of Censorship, and also seems to have dispensed with all but the most cursory immigration controls, to judge by the relaxed, wave-you-on-your-way scene at the airport. These are heady days in the Arab world’s fragile democratic bridgehead.
An independent “republic” was born here 54 years ago. Since then there have been just two presidents, both of whom applied an iron fist and neither of whom left office voluntarily, so a touch of Tunisian giddiness at finding themselves sans strongman and free to speak out is understandable.
I breezed from the airport to downtown in 10 minutes. Tanks stood at the entrance to Boulevard Bourguiba (known wistfully as the Champs-Élysées of Tunis) where several hundred protesters had gathered to hurl abuse at the deposed dictator’s party — the neither constitutional nor democratic Constitutional Democratic Rally party — and tell this misnomer to get the heck out of government.
Two high school teachers spoke to me, one in French, the other in English, and their message was identical: the thieves must go, blood had not been shed only for some of the same ministers to endure. A chant rose, using the French acronym for the hated party, “We’ll accept bread and water but never the R.C.D!”
(More here.)
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