Setback for unionists
THE re-election by acclamation of Ismail Sahbani as the leader of the
General Union of Tunisian Workers (UGTT) during the opening session of its 18th Congress further weakens the strength of Tunisian workers.
ALI BEN NADRA * — Tunis, 28 December 1994
International Viewpoint #253 February 1994
T HE "Achourist" tendency
led by Ali Romdhane claims loyalty to the tradition of militant UGTT trade unionism, and to its tradition of autonomy with respect to the government — as defended by Habib Achour at certain periods, notably the end of the 1970s.
The other current, organised around Ismail Sahbani, clings to the worst opportunist and bureaucratic traditions of Tunisian trade unionism, in which the plans of elected leaders coincide with their career plans and where they are the government's representative in labour circles. This current has certainly benefitted from the support of the government, but a large part of its success has been due to the structural weakening of the working class which has accompanied the application of the Structural Adjustment Plan. This has meant unemployment, job insecurity and the growth of the informal sector; and has gone hand in hand with a reduction in purchasing power and a deterioration in living conditions. No wonder that working people's ability to struggle has been hampered.
Repression, the opportunist policies of trade union leaders and the effects of the regional and international situation have all contributed to the disarray and demoralisation of the trade union vanguard which emerged from the heart of the struggles at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s.
The Achourist tendency - which itself has given priority to manoeuvres in the UGTT apparatus and taken a concessionary approach to government offensives - has been unable to reverse this process. Following the Sousse Congress in 1989, where the relatively balanced relationship of forces within the UGTT allowed it a place in its leadership, the current was quickly marginalised within the executive bureau, with one of its members being excluded. Yet at the same time it refused to clearly 24
TUNISIA pose itself as an alternative to the dominant current, as one based on the demands of working people.
The 18th Congress has once again confirmed the failure of this approach. The Achourists, while giving their speeches a more militant tone, took a defensive position in the hope of reaching some kind of agreement with the upper echelons of the bureaucracy.
Accordingly, they did not oppose the designation of the Secretary General directly by the Congress. Further, while Ismail Sahbani refused to include any significant number of them in the list of candidates for the Executive Committee, they themselves presented a slate with only seven of the required twelve names.
### Ejection
The attempt to compromise and win the votes of those in favour of reconciliation between the two trade union leaders was all in vain. The Achourists were ejected from the leadership by a majority of Congress delegates.
Although the left was out in force and very active at the 1989 Congress, it could only claim a few dozen of the more than five-hundred Congress delegates, who had been elected for the most part in accordance with the recommendations of the bureaucracy.
This time around, the left took no initiatives whatsoever. The only organised current, made up of sympathisers of the Communist Workers' Party (POCT),' set itself the objective of electing the General Secretary of the Post and Telecommunication Workers' Union (PTT) to the Executive Committee. He won with ease, as did the General Secretary of the Secondary School Teachers' Union, who is linked to a small Maoist group.
The result of this congress has been dispiriting. The new leadership is determined to support the government, for example Ben Ali's candidacy in the
Presidential elections, scheduled to be held in March.
Does this Congress signal the unstoppable decline of the UGTT? While it is too early to answer this question, it is clear that Tunisian trade unionism has reached a decisive turning point.
This trade unionism found strength in the growing quantitative and qualitative weight of the working class, in the central role of the UGTT in the national liberation struggle and in the setting-up of the post-colonial State. The UGTT was a central component of the Bourguibiste regime, and largely provided its personnel, ideology, and, above all, mass base (which extended well beyond the working class).
And it can be said without exaggeration that the social and political changes which were provoked by the crisis of the Bourguibiste regime are the cause of the crisis of the UGTT itself. To be sure, the most striking demonstration of the crisis of the Destourt regime between 1977 and 1985 was the attempt by the Achourist bureaucracy - shaken by working class mobilisations — to disassociate itself from Destour. But too many links tied the UGTT to the government, Achourism and Bourguibism; the fall of one could only bring about the fall of the others.S
This is the origin of the impasse in which the new version of Achourism, in the person of Ali Romdhane, finds itself. Romdhane is unable to break from Achour-type trade unionism, and more generally from the ideology of populist nationalism - mixed in with corporatism and social democratic ideas — which has historically characterised the UGTT and the Destour party.
* The author is a member of the Revolutionary Communist Organisation (OCR, Tunisian section of the Fourth International).
1. The POCT is an unreconstructed Stalinist party, specifically pro-Albanian.
2. Ben Ali is the current President who came to power through a coup on 7 November 1987. The then current President, Bourguiba, who had been in power since 1956. was sent into exile.
3. See note above.
4. The Detour party has been the sole government party since 1956.
5. It is difficult to say whether Bourguiba's 1985 expulsion of Achour was the cause of Bourguiba's fall or if, on the contrary, it was Bourguiba's ousting in 1987 (when declared to be "mentally and physically unfit to rule") which forced the trade union leader to retire.
International Viewpoint #253 February 1994
The 18th congress also signals the premature demise of a generation of the working-class vanguard. Skilled workers, who gave the UGTT a militant character from the mid-1970s onwards, have quickly lined up behind the leadership. Absorbed into an apparatus which they did not control, selected by Habibo according to clientelist and regionalist criteria, they were hit hard by the retreat from struggle and the crisis of the trade union federation. The sincere among them were ejected; the others were effectively absorbed into the bureaucracy. The degeneration of this vanguard was too fast and overall conditions too unfavourable for a new combative generation to emerge and take their place.
This phenomenon also struck the democratic opposition and the left. We are now witnessing the withering away of the opposition which developed in the 1960s and 1970s-era struggles against the Bourguiba dictatorship but was unable to build a base among newly radicalising generations.
Indeed, there is practically no organised democratic opposition. For example, the Movement of Democratic Socialists (MDS) excluded from its ranks a number of leaders who refused to support government policy unconditionally, and in the forthcoming elections it has decided to present Ben Ali as its candidate.
The former Tunisian Communist Party (PCT), which has perhaps a few dozen active members, has become a kind of movement for renewal, which has won it a few progressive intellectuals and some remaining far left elements. It also supports the Ben Ali candidacy, but stresses that he should be a candidate of national unity and not of any party. This is what the ex-Communists call being the opposition! Nor do the other legal parties have anything better to offer.
However, the Tunisian League for Human Rights offers a framework which, despite its limitations, has mobilised thousands of activists in defence of democratic freedoms. This is why the government is determined to get it under control, dissolving it in 1992 after it refused to submit to a new law on associations where the obvious goal was to annex it to the State).
Conditionally legalised in the spring of 1993, the League is now the scene of a fierce struggle between supporters of self-autonomy and a wave of manoeuvring careerists allied to the government. The date of its next congress was set for the first week of February following a compromise which limited the number of people from Destour's ranks who can join the organisation.
Last year several attempts were made to revive the democratic movement. A Committee for the Defence of Political Prisoners was set up. It gathered two-hundred signatures from well-known activists and figures in the country for a declaration which made severe criticisms of government policy following the November 1987 coup. However, it was immediately shut down and there was no organised protest.
Today there seems to be no hope of organising a significant alternative for the coming Presidential and Legislative elections. The government hopes to polish its rather tarnished democratic image by allowing a couple of dozen non-Destourist deputies into the National Assembly. This is the goal of this week's reform of the Electoral Code, which will introduce very limited proportional representation in certain
Lethargy
The student movement, which for decades was in the vanguard of the democratic struggle, is now mired in a thorough-going lethargy. Most activists have been won to Islamic fundamentalist positions, and the overwhelming majority of students are indifferent, even hostile, to activism and politics.
After the Gulf War, the student movement suffered repression even worse than under Bourguiba. The fundamentalist student union, the Tunisian General Union of Students (UGTE), was dissolved and its activists were arrested, tortured and imprisoned. Students were killed right in the middle of university campuses. In the name of the struggle against fundamentalism, the government banned all political activity, muzzled all unions and increased its police presence in university buildings.
While repression is a major reason for the ongoing crisis in the student movement, it is not the only one. The role of the major tendencies of the student left - Maoist and pro-Albanian — must be singled out for criticism. They took over the UGET, and emptied it of its militant content in order to make it a mechanism for self-enrichment and a dubious bargaining chip in its negotiations with the government.
The UGET congress, held several weeks ago, was one more step in the rapid degeneration of student union organisation. Student demands were only addressed in a formal manner. POCT sympathisers, who control the apparatus, expelled the last remnants of the Maoist groups from the leadership, and now the Maoists are threatening to split the union. Both factions accuse one another of collaborating with the government; and in this case, both are right.
Maoism has practically disappeared in the country, after having stagnated in the small groups where it had influence among educated youth and teachers. It could not survive the demobilisation of the student movement and the victory of the anti-Iraq coalition.
The POCT also suffered under the weight of these developments, as well as from the fall of the Albanian dictatorship. These events aggravated an internal crisis provoked above all by the party's ambiguous positions in relation to the government and the opportunist practices of the leadership. The POCT was also hit by repression; several dozen of its activists are in prison or facing trial and its principal leaders have had to flee. It still exists, nevertheless, in its trade union strongholds and the UGET.
As with the UGTT, should the crisis of the democratic opposition and left movements not be linked to the overall crisis of the system which produced them?
It is easy to agree with respect to the different forms of the bourgeois opposition. Originating in the Destour party itself, these currents wanted only to reform the Bourguibist system from within. For some, the idea was to democratise Bourguibism a little and liberalise it a lot; for others, it was to revive its populist inspiration. These currents developed only at the margins of the Destour bureaucracy, taking advantage of certain clientelist and regionalist net-
To varying degrees, the left clearly demarcated itself from Bourguiba, but it also defended a statist, technocratic, modernist and populist model rather than a genuinely anti-capitalist alternative. Their model was that of the petty-bourgeois (the urban population, intellectuals, students), layers whose social mobility, although achieved thanks to the Destour regime, was now threatened
This generation of activists also lived through the rise of struggles in the 6. Habib Achour was the first General Secretary of the UGTT and has lent his name to the federation's "Achourist" tendency. 7. The UGET, in contrast to the pro-Islamic UGTE, is traditionally the leftist student union.
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International Viewpoint #253 February 1994
1960s and 1970s on both the Arab and international level. As it matured it was characterised by optimism in the selfliberating potential of humankind and the emancipatory character of technology, and by ideas of progress and rationalism — all heavily influenced by the Stalinist model.
It is not possible to link this generation and the youth of the 1980s and 1990s. There are considerable differences in terms of political culture, their models and values. The 1960s and 1970s generation was that of a society which was rebuilding and restructuring itself after years of colonialism - not a left of a society decomposing under the effects of economic liberalism. It was the generation of May '68, Vietnam, and the Palestinian resistance - not that of Yeltsin, the Gulf War and the Gaza-Jericho Peace Accord.
The education system is an example. The slogans "democratise, modernise" were the pride and joy of the Bourguiba regime. It was a central institution for national mobilisation and unification - to spread ideological influence, for the mobility of the middle classes, to reproduce the Destour bureaucracy, and so forth. It was also where the left and, more generally, the opposition, emerged But today it is going through a crisis from which it will not recover. The system is rotten, and is no longer a vehicle for any kind of project for society. It creates only semi-literates and graduates with no future.
In such conditions, the traditional left is outdated; its schemas are obsolete. The necessary thorough-going reform of concepts and methods did not take place, or did so only partially and in the wrong direction. The new left which emerged in the 1980s was the result of the decomposition of both the education system and the political climate generally. It had no ideals, was cynical, clientelist and sometimes corrupt.
The new left has developed within the fabric of a system which — in spite of its failures, incongruities and crises — was generally able to consolidate 26 itself. It emerged as a symptom of the system's failures and as an omen of its decline. Fundamentalism is above all the product of the crisis of the regime, its periods of growth corresponding to the breakdown of the major components of the regime's stability.
On the one hand there was the retreat of the trade union movement and, on the other, the loss of the government's legitimacy in the eyes of its main constituency, the middle classes.
Fundamentalism resembles fascism, but it is not fascism. True, there is a popular base - petty-bourgeois, but leading the poorest, most desperate youth. It has a reactionary ideology, which is anti-worker, anti-democratic, and has a pronounced tendency towards violent methods and the cult of the personality. We can also add the relationships between fundamentalist currents and the most reactionary regimes in the region, and with imperialism (above all Ameri-
But there is a major difference to fascism. One cannot compare the historic role of the petty-bourgeoisie in imperialist States in crisis with petty-bourgeois and popular layers in capitalist countries dominated by imperialism.
In the context of the retreat of the world socialist revolution, the failure of
Arab nationalism and the defeats of the working-class movement, the fundamentalist movement has emerged as an expression of revolt by the middle classes and informal sectors which are growing on the capitalist periphery (with a spill-over effect on the working class). It is a revolt against the dependent bourgeois regimes whose plans have led to a tragic impasse. The return to Islam and anti-Western feeling are but a desperate rejection of imperialist oppression.
The nature of the social forces which make up the base of the fundamentalist movement and its ideology tends, however, to affect popular mobilisation in such a way that the bourgeoisie can turn it to its own ends. For certain currents, there is a tendency towards seeking alliances with imperialist States. And the establishment of a government under fundamentalist hegemony could only lead to the smashing of the mass movement.?
Tunisia provides an example of the shifting and contra-
! dictory reali-
ty of the fundamentalist current. Its social roots are much more shallow than in Algeria; its ability to mobilise people is far less; it has a stronger presence among educated youth, midlevel administrative employees and the "informal" • pettybourgeoisie, and not among the unemployed and marginalised sectors. This is perhaps why it is more politically uniform than elsewhere, and also relatively moderate.
8. The expression "informal sectors" does not only describe those who work in and/or profit from the black market but also all those who are forced to work without any form of social protection.
9. One cannot help but agree with the exiled Moroccan revolutionary Abraham Serfaty when he writes, , "There will be no revolution in the Arab world without some sort of convergence between a progressive Muslim current and a secular current." He calls for the emergence within Islam of an equivalent to the "liberation theology" current in Catholicism. In Tunisia, the situation seems to be more favourable for such a development in that the Islamic movement "is more open-minded, accepts debate and reflects upon questions of democracy." (The North, the South', in Politis La Revue, Summer 1993). The problem remains that in Tunisia, and probably elsewhere, the Islamic tendencies which are the most open-minded around questions of democracy, rationalism and so forth also have the most accommodating attitude in relation to imperialism, and are the most conciliatory towards the government.
International Viewpoint #253 February 1994
Since it emerged as a political force, the Tunisian fundamentalist current has suffered repression three times: in 1981, in 1987 and from 1990 until now. Following the fall of Bourguiba, the new government pursued a policy of flattering the fundamentalists, asserting through different symbolic measures Tunisia's Arab and Islamic character.
After the legislative elections of April 1989, when the results reflected the fundamentalists' growing support, the government took a two-track approach. On the one hand, they evoked the threat of fundamentalism to rally a section of the middle classes and the democratic movement to their side. On the other, they began repression.
This repression was largely small-scale until 2 August 1990 (the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, after which time it was hugely increased. The Gulf crisis led to significant conflicts within Nahda. 1° The divisions and paralysis of the leadership and the fact that it did not mobilise against the imperialist aggression led to a loss of credibility.
### Distance
The pro-Irag positions formulated late in the game by the majority current around Rached Ghanouchi did not make them the leadership of the mass mobilisation, unlike the Algerian Islamic Salvation Front (FIS). The government was able to formally distance itself from the United States of America (USA)-led coalition (although it applied the embargo) and come to a consensus with the opposition based around Ben Ali.
This significant gain gave the government a free hand for its police attacks on Nahda. There have been tens of thousands of arrests - with many still languishing in gaol; the systematic use of torture; an as yet unknown number of deaths; army occupation of certain neighbourhoods, and so forth.
Nahda has no public profile save through the activities of exiled leaders, allies of the 1980s-era Prime Minister, Mohamed Mzali. While virulently denouncing the government, Ghanouchi (who remains the main leader) tries to secure the favours of France and the USA, by asserting his stance in favour of economic liberalism and political democracy.
In his last communiqué, which appeared on 29 November 1993, Ghanouchi called for a boycott of the forthcoming elections and compares the situation in Tunisia with that in Bosnia. But the central purpose of the communiqué — released just after the arrests and raids carried out against Islamic milieux by the French government - can be found in the long paragraph reminding all Islamic exiles of their absolute duty to respect the laws of their host country.
It is difficult to evaluate the impact of the fundamentalists on the population or the results of their attempts at clandestine re-organisation. Nor is it possible to know the real content of their internal debates and conflicts. Opinions pronounced abroad by their leaders do not necessarily reflect the positions of currents in the country.
That said, the dominant approach seems to be that of counting on the progressive deterioration of the situation, to wait and see what the repercussions of the Algerian crisis will be in Tunisia and to convince the imperialist world that stability in the region depends on the integration of fundamentalists into official political life.
Whatever the case may be, in a crisis situation Nahda remains the only political force which can intervene on the ground and enjoy popular support. And the possibility of such a crisis is not just some remote fundamentalist pipedream.
In spite of the current order, the absence of struggles, the calm reassurance of successive governments, good growth rates and the satisfaction of the International Monetary Fund, the government is more vulnerable than it has been for thirty years.
Indeed, the sole objective of the authors of the November 1987 coup was to rescue the government, which had fallen prey to the dangerous whims and fancies of a "supreme fighter". Imperialism, particularly American imperialism, probably saw the coup as a way of avoiding the implosion of a disintegrating regime which had no direction.
Ben Ali had neither the ambition nor the means to effect a thoroughgoing transformation of the system, nor to inject a new dynamism which could have restored some of its lost popular credibility. Winning time to consolidate his hold over the State apparatus, guaranteeing international support, reassuring propertied elements worried by the mad schemes of Bourguiba - these were his first and only goals. In relation to the people, he knows only one ve the series min concessions, manoeuvres, manipulation, demagogy and corruption which have characterised his rule. For recalcitrant sectors, the approach is very simple: repression.
Unlike the Bourguiba regime, which had historic legitimacy, the post-coup government has no roots in the masses. Nobody is a "Ben-Alist", as one may have been "Bourguibist". Ben-Alism is an empty shell, despite attempts by the official propaganda agency to fashion a philosophy around human rights and democracy rooted in the Arab and Muslim heritage. This is an ideological cover for bureaucratic and bourgeois interests - particularly the consumerism of some privileged layers of the middle
A series of favourable circumstances have, however, allowed the government to take the initiative. For example, successful harvests have cushioned the effects of economic liberalisation, the Gulf War and the putsch in Algeria.
"Taking the initiative" can only mean one thing for such a government: unleashing the floodgates of police repression, to repress not only the fundamentalists but all forms of opposition and all divergent opinions. The defence of civil society against the obscurantist threat has become the major theme of government propaganda — while at the same time, the police goons of the Ministry of the Interior have busied themselves with the smashing up of all the networks and structures of civil society which have retained some degree of autonomy. There is no relationship between the government and the people, save when the policeman's truncheon strikes.
The Bourguiba regime completed the colonialists' work of destroying traditional forms of community in the country. But it largely replaced them with other forms of solidarity, other allegiances, from which it was able to draw support, so long as it sustained a certain
The post-1987 coup government is based on the shifting sands of a society which economic liberalisation is decomposing, destructuring and desocialising.
This process of liberalisation is an obstacle to the re-organisation of the working class and democratic movement along traditional lines, while favouring clientelist arrangements and the search for individual solutions. It also generates attitudes and a potential for violence which could lead to social explosions — or serve as a basis for the implementation of solutions even more authoritarian than experienced up to this point. *
10. Nahda, or "Renaissance movement", is the principal fundamentalist organisation in Tunisia.
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