The Unsung Heroes of the Tunisian Revolution

A year ago last Saturday marks one year from the day Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in Tunisia to express his desperate frustration with the arbitrary nature of daily live in Tunisia.

But that anniversary was not on the minds of Tunisians I met with last week, who were far more absorbed by the formation of a new government on Friday. One young lawyer even told me that a joke has spread attributing the fruit-seller’s self-immolation to an accident with a cigarette.

Behind the snarky, dark humor is a widespread conviction among Tunisians that the ouster of the hated autocratic president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, was not the result of an individual act or the voice of a particular leader; it was a spontaneous and broadly based movement running deeply in Tunisian society.

As I go around Tunis meeting human rights activists, lawyers, and others intensely engaged in rebuilding the civil fabric of their country, a new-found energy and a passionate commitment to confronting problems of governance are immediately apparent.

You see it in the quiet determination of Neila Chaabane, a diminutive, bookish law professor specializing in fiscal law and public finance, who serves on the National Commission on Investigating Corruption and Embezzlement, which was set up immediately following the Tunisian revolution.

Initially, Chaabane remained behind the scenes, fearing potential retaliation against her family. She is now one of two women serving among 27 members, all unpaid volunteers. And she has become inured to the telephone threats and other acts of intimidation that her work provokes.

The commission’s work is slow and determined, with tangible successes inevitably slow in coming. Last week however, Swiss authorities returned the private jet of Ben Ali’s son-in-law. Earlier, tens of millions of dollars in cash and gold were seized from the presidential palace, a discovery that sent shock waves through the country.

But these developments are isolated, and the lack of headline-grabbing results has made many Tunisians impatient with the commission, obscuring its incredibly rigorous work. Her desk stacked high with files, Chaabane relates how she and her colleagues have received 10,000 complaints of corruption and have doggedly investigated 5,000 of them so far. Among those complaints, 350 files have been referred to the prosecutor’s offices and investigations have been initiated in 90 percent of these cases.

Chaabane can provide detailed descriptions of high level corruption, illuminated by a paper trail left by bureaucrats with no sense of accountability. Blatant patterns emerge: instructions from President Ben Ali’s office to change the zoning of agricultural land within a month of its acquisition by closely connected development companies; a pattern of deciding against the recommendations of a commission charged with reviewing competitive bids for government tenders; notes to the file to “slow things down,” presumably to put upward pressure on the price of a payoff; banks forgiving loans to businesses in trouble, only to make further loans to the same businesses.

There is no guarantee that Tunisia’s fragile institutions of justice will do what they should with her carefully crafted files, but Chaabane passionately believes it is her duty to put pressure on the system so that the institutions will develop in the right direction.

She is far from alone. As dean of the Higher Institute for Training of Lawyers, Samir El Annabi is responsible for post-graduate training of law students. An amiable, avuncular man close to retirement age, El Anabi took on this responsibility after the revolution and refused a salary, considering it a moral duty to help produce a legal profession fitting of the new democratic order. The school had been set up three years ago during the Ben Ali regime. As El Annabi tells it, the institution had been designed to tame lawyers, turning them into docile servants of state interests. Now, he says, what the legal profession needs most is to train lawyers to think critically and independently. And he aims to do that.

Time magazine just named “The Protestor” as the 2011 Person of the Year. That’s a choice that the people of Tunisia would most likely ratify. Nearly everyone—from taxi drivers and hotel staff to judges and public intellectuals—say that the single most important difference between Tunisia a year ago and Tunisia today is that ordinary people are not afraid to say what they think.

To be sure, there is lurking uncertainty about the direction of the new government just named following October’s elections. But Tunisians across the board remain hopeful about the future.

Longer-term institutional reform won’t come easy. Indeed, the strain is visible in the almost disabling back pain that requires Chaabane to walk with a crutch. But with committed individuals like Chaabane and El Annabi in positions of influence, it is hard not to share in the hope that, at least in Tunisia, 2012 could mark the beginning of a time of sustainable, democratic change.