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Este blog trata basicamente de ideias, se possível inteligentes, para pessoas inteligentes. Ele também se ocupa de ideias aplicadas à política, em especial à política econômica. Ele constitui uma tentativa de manter um pensamento crítico e independente sobre livros, sobre questões culturais em geral, focando numa discussão bem informada sobre temas de relações internacionais e de política externa do Brasil. Para meus livros e ensaios ver o website: www.pralmeida.org. Para a maior parte de meus textos, ver minha página na plataforma Academia.edu, link: https://itamaraty.academia.edu/PauloRobertodeAlmeida.

Mostrando postagens com marcador Tunisia. Mostrar todas as postagens
Mostrando postagens com marcador Tunisia. Mostrar todas as postagens

domingo, 23 de abril de 2023

Tunisia, a primeira nação árabe a iniciar a primavera democrática é a última a recair na ditadura, depois de todas as outras - David D. Kirkpatrick (The New Yorker)

 Triste evolução da democrácia islâmica, estrangulada pelas suas contradições internas.

Tunisia Arrests Its Most Prominent Opposition Leader

Rached Ghannouchi has been a voice for democracy in his nation and across the Muslim world.

Tunisia, the birthplace of the Arab Spring, was the last place where it failed. After a decade of freedom and democracy, in 2021 a new strongman, President Kais Saied, shut down the parliament and, soon after, began imposing an authoritarian constitution and arresting his critics. This week, the police finally came for Rached Ghannouchi, the leader of Tunisia’s largest political party and the Arab world’s most influential thinker about the potential synthesis of liberal democracy and Islamic governance.

Born in 1941 to impoverished peasant farmers in remote southern Tunisia, Ghannouchi studied in Cairo, Damascus, and Paris; worked menial jobs in Europe; and returned to Tunis, in 1971. Muslim Brotherhood-style Islamist politics was on the rise across the region, as an alternative to the autocracies in power, and, in 1981, Ghannouchi co-founded a Tunisian Islamist movement. He was jailed and tortured for three years, and in 1987 he was arrested again, sentenced to death, and exiled to London. (Other Arab states would not take him.)

Ghannouchi’s examination of Britain’s liberal democracy through an Islamic lens set him apart from a generation of Arab intellectuals. Islamic scholars had long ago concluded that in the true “Abode of Islam” a Muslim must feel secure in his liberty, property, religion, and dignity, Ghannouchi wrote in his landmark treatise, “Public Freedoms in the Islamic State,” which he began writing in prison and published, in Arabic, in 1993. So why had he found that security only in the West? A true Islamic state, he concluded, must be founded on “freedom of conscience” for Muslim and non-Muslim alike. Quoting a revered twelfth-century scholar, Ghannouchi urged Islamists to learn from Western democracy—to benefit “from the best of human experiments regardless of their religious origins, since wisdom is Shari’a’s twin.”

He returned to Tunisia, in 2011, when a spontaneous wave of protests against police brutality drove its longtime ruler into exile and set the Arab Spring revolts in motion. Ghannouchi helped make the country’s political transition the most liberal in the region, and he did his best to salvage the prospects for democracy elsewhere. In the late spring of 2013—a decade ago—he flew to Egypt to offer advice to its first democratically elected President, Mohamed Morsi, of the Muslim Brotherhood. The hopefulness of those months is now difficult to remember. Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya had all held credible elections and had started drafting new charters. Western experts cited Yemen as a model for the peaceful handover of power. Even in Syria most rebels still marched under the banner of democracy, rather than of extremist Islam; the uprising had not yet devolved into a sectarian civil war. But a sandstorm was blowing toward Tahrir Square, where two and a half years earlier an eighteen-day sit-in, inspired by Tunisia, had toppled President Hosni Mubarak and opened the way for Morsi. Now Morsi’s opponents were calling for protests to demand his resignation, and the head of the armed forces was sending mixed signals about his allegiance.

Ghannouchi had spent more than two decades thinking and writing about the same promises that Egypt’s Muslim Brothers had campaigned on—combining Islamic governance with democratic elections and individual freedoms. During his trip to Cairo, he told me a few months later, at his party’s headquarters in Tunis, he had tried to convince Morsi that, in order to achieve those goals, he should voluntarily forfeit some power. (Morsi advisers later confirmed the broad outlines of Ghannouchi’s account, which he told me on the condition that I keep it private at the time.) After revolutions like those in Egypt and Tunisia, a majority party should understand the anxious vulnerability of political or religious minorities, such as Egypt’s secular-minded liberals and Coptic Christians. They had been afforded at least some protections under the old authoritarian order, and those were now gone, with little reason yet to trust promises about the rule of law, checks and balances, and individual rights. Precisely because of the Brotherhood’s electoral success—Morsi had already won ratification of the new constitution—in the interest of democracy and to reassure the Party’s weaker rivals, it should bring in a unity government ahead of another election. Why remain the lightning rod for his opponents’ fears or resentments? “The democracy of consensus succeeds—not the democracy of the majority,” Ghannouchi told me.

Morsi rejected that advice, convinced that yielding power under threat of protests would be a capitulation to political extortion and set a dangerous precedent.. Had Morsi followed Ghannouchi’s advice, perhaps he could have defused the protests that filled the streets on June 30th, demanding his ouster, or at least won over more Egyptian liberals. We’ll never know: on July 3, 2013, General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi—now President Sisi, possibly for life—ousted Morsi from power, ending Egypt’s thirty-month experiment with democracy and freedom.

More than a thousand Egyptian Islamists were killed in the streets for opposing the coup. Tens of thousands more were jailed. Those who were underground or in exile demanded retribution against the ostensibly liberal factions who initially supported Sisi’s takeover. But Ghannouchi still urged reconciliation. “The Egyptian ship needs to include all Egyptians and not throw some of them into the water,” he told me. “There should be no collective punishment. The cure for a failed democracy is more democracy.”

In the months after the Egyptian coup, one Arab Spring revolt after another foundered in despair and extremism—a reversal of 2011, when the Tahrir Square sit-in stirred democracy movements in capitals across the region. Tunisia was the exception to the dark turn after the coup, in part because Ghannouchi followed his own advice there the following year. The Islamist party that he co-founded and led, Ennahdha, meaning “the renaissance,” had won the dominant role in a transitional parliament. By late 2013, the assassinations of a pair of left-leaning, secular politicians had brought the political process and constitution-drafting to a halt; opponents suspected Islamist extremists of carrying out the killings, and blamed Ennahdha for failing to prevent them. Ghannouchi, who held no elected office at the time, defied many in his party to reach a power-sharing agreement with the main leader of the secular opposition. Ennahdha voluntarily handed power to a caretaker government to oversee new elections. Ghannouchi’s concession broke the logjam. Tunisia’s revolution celebrated a fourth anniversary—it was the only Arab Spring uprising that appeared to succeed—and the civil-society organizations that helped sponsor the talks between Ghannouchi and the opposition received a Nobel Peace Prize. “We are not angels. We would like to have power,” Ghannouchi said on a visit to Washington. “But we fervently believe that a democratic constitution is more important.”

His leadership made Ennahdha a unique example of what some called liberal Islamism. In fact, Ghannouchi helped persuade Ennahdha leaders to jettison the label “Islamist” and to begin describing themselves as Muslim democrats. (He published an essay in Foreign Affairs explaining the change.) His party, which led the drafting of the constitution, pushed through a charter with explicit protections for the rights of women and of religious minorities. When we spoke in 2014, he also noted that Tunisia’s was one of the few Arab constitutions that made no reference to Islamic law. He assured me that Tunisia guaranteed freedoms for mosques, churches, synagogues—and even “pubs.” He stopped short of endorsing same-sex marriage but described sexuality as a strictly personal matter—a more liberal stance than that taken by almost any Arab government.

Tunisia’s tourism-heavy economy, however, never fully recovered from the images of turmoil in the aftermath of the Arab Spring uprising, and the pandemic shut down its resorts. Years of relative inaction by Tunisia’s caretaker government and its successors fuelled a backlash against the whole political class, and especially against Ennahdha. During the next elections, in 2019, Ghannouchi also made the questionable decision to seek a seat in parliament and was then chosen as its speaker. He had become a politician. Emad Shahin, a scholar of political Islam in exile from Egypt, who is now a visiting professor at Harvard, said, “That parliament was a circus—not a place for a leader of his intellectual calibre to preside over, and he was consumed by petty politics.”

In the 2019 elections, voters rejected every Presidential candidate who had held public office. Two populists—a prominent media mogul and an obscure law professor, who together received only a third of the vote—went to a runoff. The professor, Saied, won in a landslide. In many ways, Saied is an inverse of Ghannouchi. He has eschewed any known political philosophy or faction. He routinely rails against the West, directing particular vitriol toward the International Monetary Fund, whose support Tunisia now desperately needs. His constitution promises the state “will work to achieve the objectives of pure Islam” and gives the government control over Islamic interpretation and teaching. He has called gay people “deviants” and supported the criminalization of homosexuality. This year, in his own adaptation of “replacement theory,” he set off a wave of anti-Black violence by scapegoating dark-skinned African migrants for Tunisia’s economic travails.

Saied initially cited the crisis of the pandemic as a pretext to dissolve the parliament and to rule by decree. It was not long before he began detaining a long list of critics and opponents, culminating this week with Ghannouchi. His alleged crime involves a statement that he made last weekend: “Tunisia without Ennahdha, without political Islam, without the left or any of its components is a project for civil war.” Shortly before dusk and the breaking of the fast on Monday, the holiest night of Ramadan, more than a hundred plainclothes police officers raided his home, his party said in a statement. After two days in custody, Ghannouchi, now eighty-one, was interrogated for eight hours. On Thursday, a judge sentenced him to an extended pretrial detention. Initially accused of incitement, he now faces charges of conspiring against the security of the state—a crime that can carry the death penalty.

The blow to Tunisian democracy is clear. But the imprisonment of a leader as singular as Ghannouchi is also a setback to the wider world. For Islamists who espouse violence, his imprisonment is a vindication—new evidence of the futility of the ballot box. And the silencing of his voice is a loss to the West, too.

“Marrying Islam and liberalism and democratic governance,” Robert Kagan, a historian of U.S. foreign policy, told me, “is the solution to our problems in the Arab world, and it is the solution to their problem with us.” That was also the hope that Ghannouchi tried to salvage in Egypt ten years ago.

Ghannouchi, in a prerecorded video released on Thursday, urged patience. He told Tunisians, “Trust in the principles of your revolution, and that democracy is not a passing thing in Tunis.”

domingo, 5 de janeiro de 2014

Tunisia: tensao entre religiao e nacao persiste na Constituicao (LeMonde)

Constitution : la Tunisie adopte la liberté de conscience et rejette la charia

Le Monde.fr avec AFP |  • Mis à jour le 
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L'assemblée nationale constituante tunisienne, le 3 janvier.

L'assemblée constituante tunisienne a approuvé samedi 4 janvier les premiers articles de la future Constitution, garantissant la liberté de conscience, faisant de l'Etat le « protecteur du sacré », mais rejetant l'islam comme source de droit – des points qui ont suscité de vives controverses pendant des mois.

Les deux premiers articles, non amendables, définissent la Tunisie comme une République guidée par la « primauté du droit », un Etat « libre, indépendant, souverain » et « civil » dont la religion est l'islam. Deux amendements, proposant comme « source principale de la législation » l'islam, et le Coran et la sunna (ensemble des paroles du prophète, de ses actions et de ses jugements), ont été rejetés.
En revanche, conformément à un compromis entre le parti islamiste Ennahda (majoritaire) et l'opposition, la Constitution fera de l'islam la religion du pays.
COMPTE À REBOURS AVANT LE 14 JANVIER
Si la constituante, élue en octobre 2011, a consacré l'Etat comme « garant de la liberté de conscience », malgré la vive opposition de certains élus, le même article 6 lui confère le rôle de « protecteur du sacré » et de « gardien de la religion ». Cette formulation vague a été critiquée par des ONG craignant l'interprétation qui pourrait être faite d'une notion qui n'a pas été définie. Pour la Ligue tunisienne des droits de l'homme, il pourrait « aboutir à des interprétations menaçant la citoyenneté, les libertés ».
L'assemblée constituante avait approuvé samedi en début de journée douze articles, sur un total de 146. Les députés vont continuer de travailler dans le butd'adopter la loi fondamentale, ainsi qu'une loi électorale avant le 14 janvier, troisième anniversaire de la révolution qui marqua le début du printemps arabe. Ce calendrier est la clé de voûte d'un accord entre opposants et Ennahda pourrésoudre une profonde crise déclenchée par l'assassinat le 25 juillet du député de gauche Mohamed Brahmi – le deuxième meurtre en 2013 attribué à la mouvance djihadiste.

quarta-feira, 15 de maio de 2013

Salafismo em ascensao no norte da Africa - Tarek Osman

Salafism's March Through North Africa (Tarek Osman, The Cairo Review of Global Affairs)

""This is not the Tunisia we know," the head of a respected Tunisian think tank told me as thousands of Salafists marched through the heart of Tunis's old Medina, steps from one of its most exclusive restaurants, one that serves premium French wine under the watchful eye of a stern sommelier.

But the city was Tunis, and the protestors were Tunisians. One of the Arab world's most progressive societies, with one of the most active civil society environments in the entire Arab world, and a notable history of gender equality and secularism, is clearly witnessing the rise of an assertive socio-political force that defines itself exclusively under a strict religious frame of reference. The scale of these marches -and various other forms of assertiveness-and the frequency with which they take place indicate that this trend is far from marginal or dismissible.

In Egypt's last parliamentary election, Salafist parties won about a quarter of the votes. Amid the polarization that the country is currently witnessing, several Salafist voices and parties are increasingly influential in the political sphere. And the rise of Salafism is also taking place in Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Syria, Sudan, and in other Arab countries.
(...)
Modern Salafism was a lucky ideology. It found a fertile ground in Saudi Arabia, which, for the past four decades, had emerged as the most influential Arab country. But following the current transformations that the wave of uprisings has given rise to, the center of gravity in Arab socio-politics will return to the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa. And Salafism will lose the momentum that Saudi backing (and petrodollars) have given it.

Salafism's traditional approach of trying to "purify" their societies from what they consider impurities that have been imposed on them  will not resonate with the  almost 200 million Arabs under thirty-five years of age, whose priorities are largely economic, not ideological, and who are mostly ill-disposed to indoctrination. Salafism's ability to evolve in the culturally richest parts of the Arab world-become capable political forces as opposed to missionaries, and locally integrated players as opposed to harbingers of purely Islamic identities-will be its fundamental challenge."