C'est le premier syncrétisme
abouti de la pensée politique de Beji Caïd Essebsi (BCE) pour la
Tunisie. L'assurance enfantée par la victoire y est certainement pour
quelque chose. Mais au delà de sa dimension projective, cette
interview s'inscrit aussi dans l'immédiateté puisqu'elle est porteuse de
réponses et de messages directs et clairs concernant des thématiques majeures
mais aussi elle est truffée de signaux destinés en primauté au mouvement
"Ennahdha". Certes BCE lui fait porter clairement et
sans détours la responsabilité de la propagation de l'extrémisme et du
passage à l'action du terrorisme mais c'est une responsabilité
plutôt "passive" que BCE met en exergue : laxisme et
atermoiements.....BCE semble vouloir passer à une nouvelle étape où Ennahdha
serait présent, d'une manière ou d'une autre.
Décidemment, Béji
Caïd Essebsi et Rached Ghannouchi jouent les prolongations avec la bénédiction
des acteurs internationaux....
Nous reviendrons à
cette interview à travers une analyse plus complète très prochainement, parce
que finalement ce sont les choix de gouvernance de demain qui y sont esquissés.
A très bientôt et
Bonne année 2015 pour tous les citoyens du monde.
TERRA NOVA TUNISIE
My three goals as Tunisia’s president
Tunisia’s extraordinary political experience since the
Arab Spring stands as a testimony to the openness, tolerance and moderation
that Tunisians owe to their 3,000-year history as a Mediterranean state
crisscrossed by invaders, traders and missionaries of all kinds.
It was trade and exchange with Europe — in particular,
with France and Italy, Tunisia’s closest Mediterranean neighbors — that opened
the country to the Enlightenment. Sadiki College, established
in the 19th century, provided a strong bilingual education for the country’s
elite: the modern sciences were taught in French, Arab history and Islamic
heritage in Arabic. The leaders who built the postcolonial state after securing
Tunisia’s independence from France in 1956 were largely
Sadiki alumni.
Those founders brought to their task a commitment to
anchor the young republic in modernity. They instituted universal education,
gender equality and separation of religion and state, and they promoted
a strong work ethic in a country that lacked the oil wealth of other countries
in the region — which has proved a blessing in disguise.
Thus, when revolution swept the Arab world in 2010 and
2011, the vision of our founders paid off. The protesters who ended both Zine
el-Abidine Ben Ali’s corrupt dictatorial reign and now the Ennahda party’s recent Islamist regime are the
educated sons and daughters of the large, secular middle class that was built
over decades by the independence generation.
The
constitution agreed to by both Ennahda and the secular camp after the Tunisian
Revolution followed the example of the one adopted in 1959 under the leadership
of President Habib Bourguiba, the father of Tunisian independence. Both
constitutions are devoid of ideological intent and state that the country’s
religion is Islam while affirming the civil character of the state.
In 2012, I formed a new political party — Nidaa Tounes
(the Call of Tunisia) — to challenge Ennahdha following the Islamists’ victory
in the first post-revolution elections. Thanks to Bourguiba’s modernist legacy,
which helped us mobilize the large, educated middle class, and particularly
women, to vote for our candidates, Nidaa Tounes met with success in the Oct. 23 legislative elections and again in
the Dec. 21 presidential elections.
Winning democratic elections is, however, only a means
to an end.
For Nidaa Tounes, and for me as Tunisia’s new
president, our goal has three interconnected parts:
1-
We must solve
the daunting economic and social problems that began in the Ben Ali era and
were aggravated by three years of incompetent Islamist administration.
2-
We must
establish security in a country surrounded by insecurity.
3-
And we must
strengthen our young democracy at a time when hopes for democracy elsewhere in
the region are failing to take root.
On the economic front, we face high youth unemployment, a struggling middle class
and unacceptable disparity in regional development, which divides the country into coastal “haves” and interior “have-nots.” These
challenges are exacerbated by the persistent economic slump in Europe, which is
Tunisia’s principal trade partner. We must invest in youth employment,
particularly through training for new jobs in the digital economy and service
sector. We must also integrate the regions of the interior by upgrading
their transportation systems, improving health care and creating jobs in
solar energy and agricultural industries suited for these arid lands.
Security concerns add to these challenges and affect
both foreign and national investment. Despite a robust tradition, our tourism
suffers — as does our enchanting environment for lack of means to protect it.
We must also confront the fact that poverty is
producing terrorism, a new phenomenon for Tunisia.
The scourge of terrorism should have been
addressed more decisively by Ennahda. Instead, the Islamist government allowed
in radical foreign preachers who lured thousands of vulnerable young people
to join al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.
The same extremist ideology motivates others
to take up arms — made readily available by the turmoil in nearby Libya —
against their fellow Tunisians.
To fight extremism, we will need to pursue a
two-pronged strategy: both “hard,” through stricter control of our borders and
a more robust and technologically advanced security response, and “soft,” based
on better intelligence-gathering, working to return our mosques to their
spiritual function and barring entry to foreign preachers.
Despite all these challenges, the Tunisian people have
hope: Our recent elections were some of the most impressive democratic
achievements in recent times. Peacefully, fairly and with full transparency, Tunisians
voted for accountability. Voters punished the Islamists for their failures of
governance and offered secular democrats a chance to solve the country’s
problems.
Particularly impressive to me — as a marker of our
culture of democracy — is that the leader of Ennahda, Rachid Ghannouchi, called
last month to congratulate me for Nidaa Tounes’s victory in the legislative
elections. I truly appreciated his gesture and look forward to working with
him and all Tunisians to overcome our difficulties and establish our nation as
a solid democracy.
We hope that Tunisia’s Islamists will continue on this
path. If they opt to be a normal part of a functioning political landscape,
Tunisia will prove to the world that, after all, an Arab Muslim country can
indeed be a full democracy.
Pertinente introduction. Nous attendons l'analyse approfondie du sujet. Bonne continuation.
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