Tunisia: Trade Unions Under Attack by Government, Islamists

Workers Vanguard

The following article is translated from Le Bolchévik No. 199 (March 2012), newspaper of the Ligue Trotskyste de France, section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist).

The so-called “Arab Spring,” hailed by social democrats, is turning into a nightmare for workers, and particularly for the Tunisian workers who were at the forefront of last year’s struggle to overthrow the Ben Ali police dictatorship. As the economic crisis continues to worsen, Tunisian workers are fighting to defend their meager gains against the Tunisian capitalists and the imperialists, who seek to take advantage of the recession to escalate their attacks.

A major four-day strike by sanitation and other municipal workers that began on February 20 was attacked jointly by Islamist thugs and cops. Offices of the General Union of Tunisian Workers (UGTT) federation were attacked, not only provincial offices but also the headquarters in Tunis. Across the street from the police station in the Casbah, the mausoleum of Farhat Hached—founder of the UGTT and a hero of the struggle for independence who was murdered by the French colonialists in 1952—was desecrated. A mass demonstration called by the UGTT on February 25 against these anti-union attacks itself ended in bloody police repression (L’Humanité, 27 February). Down with the attacks against the UGTT! Victory to the sanitation workers struggle! For workers defense groups to repel attacks by Islamist thugs against union activists and unveiled women!

One year after the uprising against Ben Ali, it is essential to draw the political lessons in order to move forward. The rise of Islamism throughout the region, the threats against women, the continuing subjugation to imperialism, the immiseration of peasants and workers and rising unemployment—all this shows that the aspirations of the Tunisian masses to democracy, the emancipation of women and the eradication of urban and rural poverty will not be satisfied without overturning the capitalist order and establishing a workers and peasants government. The working class is the only class with the social power, in struggle against the bourgeoisie and its Islamists, to overthrow capitalism and establish its own state.

This is the Trotskyist program of permanent revolution, which was validated by the Russian Revolution of October 1917. That revolution placed the working class in power for the first time. Workers must take power in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere and spread the revolution to France and other imperialist centers. To achieve this, it is necessary to build revolutionary workers parties that will link the struggle for socialist federations of North Africa and the Near East to the struggle for proletarian revolution in the imperialist countries.

With this perspective, we wrote last February that the Tunisian working class needed its own organs of power: strike committees, factory committees and, ultimately, soviets [workers’ councils]. This call was counterposed to the bourgeois-democratic perspective of the entire left, including the Communist Party of Tunisian Workers (PCOT, originally Maoist), which channeled the uprising toward the election of a constituent assembly—a bourgeois parliamentary body—leading to the current situation.

Now the Islamists dare to openly attack a prominent union like the UGTT that played such a key role in the fall of the Ben Ali regime. Nevertheless, in our solidarity with the Tunisian workers, we reaffirm our denunciation of last March of the UGTT’s joining the “National Council to Safeguard the Revolution.” This council was a nationalist, class-collaborationist body encompassing reformists and bourgeois formations including Ennahda, a reactionary Islamist party. The small, left-reformist Tunisian working-class organizations (the PCOT and the League of the Workers Left [LGO] associated with the French New Anti-Capitalist Party of Olivier Besancenot) also participated in this bloc. We wrote: “By tying the workers to their class enemy, the union bureaucrats and the reformists are paving the way to bloody defeat for the workers and oppressed. Break with class collaboration!” (Le Bolchévik No. 195, March 2011).

The UGTT, PCOT and LGO thus created a supposed revolutionary pedigree for the Islamists, even though the Islamists played no role in the uprising against Ben Ali and did not conceal their reactionary intentions—particularly against women’s rights. Nor did they hide the support lavished upon them by the imperialists, who were eager to restore capitalist order. The fraudulent certificate of “revolutionary” merit granted by the left to Ennahda greatly helped the Islamists win the elections a few months later, amid massive abstention.

Now Ennahda spokesman Walid Bennani has the nerve to accuse workers in struggle of being “anti-revolutionary forces, trying to ensure that difficulties persist” (www.lapresse.tn, 27 February). But the union bureaucrats have learned nothing from their previous betrayals because they cannot envision any framework other than the oppressive capitalist system. (Besides, the UGTT leadership supported Ben Ali almost to the end.) Sami Tahri, spokesman for the UGTT, said that “it is in the best interests of the country for Ennahda and UGTT to cooperate and work together. As a union we have to have a partner with whom we can negotiate, especially since at this stage we must address issues such as employment, economic development, skyrocketing prices, etc.” (ibid.). In ceding political independence of the working class, the union bureaucrats and the reformist organizations are leading Tunisian women and workers straight to disaster. There must be a fight in the unions to replace the treacherous bureaucrats with a revolutionary leadership!

In France, class solidarity with Tunisian workers requires fighting for class independence, against the capitalist parties and their reformist agents in the workers movement, and for the overthrow of the French capitalist imperialist order, which is sponsoring Tunisia’s new Islamic “coalition” regime. The millions of people of Maghrebian (North African) origin in France, concentrated in the proletariat and the most oppressed layers of the population, form a living link between the countries of North Africa and France in the struggle for socialist revolution. A proletarian revolution in Tunisia would immediately have a huge impact in France, and vice versa. We struggle to forge revolutionary internationalist parties to lead the working class to power on both sides of the Mediterranean. Down with the attacks against the UGTT by the Islamists and the government! For permanent revolution throughout North Africa!

Tunisia: Islamist Furor over Persepolis

TV Executive on Trial for Blasphemy

Workers Vanguard

Following on the popular revolt that ousted hated despot Ben Ali early last year, a ruling coalition dominated by the Islamist Ennahda party was brought to power in elections last fall. In an ominous sign of what the Islamists have in store for the Tunisian population, Nabil Karoui, the director of the TV station Nessma, is facing up to eight years in prison. His “crime” was to air the French movie Persepolis, which recounts the childhood of an Iranian woman during the last years of the Shah and brilliantly captures the terror that followed the rise to power of the Islamic hierarchy under Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979. Following the broadcast, thousands of Islamists stormed the TV station, setting it on fire. They later firebombed Karoui’s house, claiming that the fantasy scenes in the movie where God is seen talking to a young girl are an insult to Islam. Ennahda leader Rached Ghannouchi hailed these reactionaries as “defenders of Islam.”

Karoui has been charged with “insulting sacred values, offending decent morals and causing political unrest.” While the government is eager to prosecute him, it was forced to postpone the trial several times in the face of massive support for Karoui. Huge crowds of supporters have been gathering at the courthouse, and on January 28, thousands marched through the capital, Tunis, in one of the biggest demonstrations in recent months. On February 1, the National Union of Tunisian Journalists joined with media associations such as Independent Radio Stations in a one-day nationwide strike in support of press independence and freedom of expression and in defense of the rights of journalists and communicators. As we demanded in our article “Tunisian Elections: Victory for Islamic Reactionaries—Workers Must Fight for Their Own Class Rule!” (WV No. 993, 6 January): Drop the charges! Stop the persecution of Nabil Karoui!

Persepolis is an award-winning animated film based on the Iranian artist Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical graphic novel, which has sold over a million copies and been translated into dozens of languages. The movie, which has been seen by millions, is alive with humor and warmth. What might have infuriated the Islamists is not the depiction of God as an old bearded man; rather it was the movie’s presentation of Satrapi as a rebellious, fiercely independent young woman straining against the forces of intolerance and superstition. When she is not preaching communism, she is predicting her future as a religious prophet, or she is out in the streets of Tehran buying contraband western pop tapes and wearing a Michael Jackson button. When she was 14 years old, her parents sent her to Europe to study, where she discovered boys, booze and drugs.

More galling for the reactionaries are the representations of her intellectual family: her charismatic father, who adores his wine and life of luxury as much as his Marxist-Leninist ideology; her thoroughly modernized mother; her sexy grandmother, who used to bathe her breasts in a bowl of ice water to keep them firm; and her beloved uncle, a Communist who was involved in the establishment of the short-lived Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan during World War II and was later executed by the mullahs’ regime. The Islamists were no doubt further incensed by Satrapi’s depiction of a dream where Karl Marx gets God to repeat: “The struggle continues.”

Since the fall of the Ben Ali regime, Islamists in Tunisia, which was long regarded as the most secular country in North Africa, have been targeting unveiled women, secular intellectuals and journalists. In February 2011, hundreds armed with Molotov cocktails and knives raided the red-light district of Abdallah Guech Street in Tunis, torching the brothels, yelling insults at prostitutes and declaring that Tunisia was now an Islamic state. Brothels in other cities were also attacked. The red-light districts in Tunisia have thrived since they were regulated and legalized by the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century.

Islamists occupied a university campus in Manouba, near the capital, for two months until their eviction last month. They were demanding segregation of the sexes in classes and the lifting of the ban on wearing the full-face veil on campuses. We are opposed to the veil, no matter what form it takes, as both a symbol and instrument of women’s oppression. At the same time, we are equally opposed to state bans or restrictions on it. The reality is that these bans mean the expulsions of Muslim girls and women from schools, universities and the workforce, deepening their isolation from society and oppression within the confines of the family.

As Marxists, we uphold the democratic principle of separation of religion and state, everywhere. Islamic fundamentalists will use any easing of bans on the veil to exert social pressure on women to cover themselves. Nonetheless, we oppose state interference in private religious practices, which paves the way for broader intrusions by the state into other aspects of social life. It is the task of the workers movement to champion the rights of women and all those under attack by the forces of religious reaction.

The historic aim of the Ennahda party is to establish a theocratic state ruled by sharia (Islamic law). Following the October election, Rached Ghannouchi pledged to maintain a secular course, declaring that his party has no interest in establishing sharia. However, Hamadi Jebeli, secretary general of Ennahda and currently the head of the government, was more forthright when he told a rally in the city of Sousse: “We are in the sixth caliphate, God willing,” referring to reviving an Islamic state. One can practically hear Mahdi, the hero of Haydar Haydar’s Arabic-language novel Banquet for Seaweed, screaming, “In the age of the atom, space exploration and the triumph of reason, they rule us with the laws of the Bedouin gods and the teaching of the Koran. Shit.” (For a review of this book, see “Islamist Furor in Egypt Over ‘Heretical’ Novel,” WV No. 770, 7 December 2001).

The aftermath of the mass upheavals in Tunisia and Egypt last year has been marked by the growing influence and dominance of Islamic fundamentalists. In the absence of an established revolutionary Marxist leadership, the working class in Tunisia and Egypt, whose strikes played a major role in bringing down their despotic rulers, has been politically engulfed by the forces of Islamic reaction and bourgeois nationalism. The fight against such reactionary forces is integral to the proletariat becoming a class for itself, fighting for the liberation of all the oppressed.