Archive: tunisia
Next Sunday, October 23, will deliver the first tangible fruits of the uprising that toppled President Ben Ali in Tunisia when voters elect a 218-member National Constituent Assembly.
The assembly will not be a parliament as such: its main task is to draft a new constitution and prepare for… Read more
Following the revolution in Tunisia, I have begun updating theTunisia section here on al-bab. Links to several historically interesting documents had stopped working because of the deletion of websites belonging to the old regime. I have retrieved some of them through the Wayback archive… Read more
In an article for The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal, formerly of Wired magazine, takes a detailed look at the recent battle between the Tunisian authorities and Facebook – and how Facebook responded to it. He writes:
After more than ten days of intensive investigation and study, Facebook's… Read more
Having got rid of Ben Ali and his family, the question now for Tunisians is how to dismantle the system of control that he established over the last 23 years – and it's looking far from easy. Without continuous pressure from the public, the Ben Ali loyalists are likely to retrench and continue… Read more
Just in case you are wondering about the pet tiger belonging to Ben Ali's 30-year-old son-in-law, Mohamed Sakhr el Materi – it has been killed. There's an unpleasant video here if you want to see. Materi himself fled Tunisia last week, reportedly to Paris.
Rumours of the tiger's… Read more
IMPORTANT: See update
After fleeing Tunisia yesterday, Zine el Abidine Ben Ali made a circuitous journey around the Mediterranean. His plane first headed south to Libya, then north towards Paris where he was apparently told he would not be welcome. After a reported refuelling… Read more
An update to my post earlier today. Tunisia's constitutional council
has now decided that the chairman of parliament, Fouad Mebazaa, should be acting president – and not prime minister Mohamed Ghannouchi.
The council says that Article 57 of the constitution, rather than Article… Read more
In due course, every city of consequence in Tunisia will have a street or square named after Mohamed Bouazizi, the unemployed fruit-seller whose humiliation at the hands of the authorities led to a revolution. It's sad that he didn't live to see it but today's events are a fitting tribute.
It is… Read more
A Tunisian officer salutes the funeral of one of the protests' victims. Bizerte, Thursday. Source: nawaat.
In his speech to Tunisians last night, President Ben Ali went for double or quits. Either he has done enough to quell the protests with his offers to stand down in three… Read more
Today is exactly four weeks since the start of the Tunisian uprising and I was planning to write another summary of the day's main events. But, honestly, I can't. There's so much going on, so much chaos.
Let me just point to two things which, basically, say it all.
One was the demonstration today… Read more