ZINE El-Abidine Ben Ali
TUNIS, Sept 20 (NNN-AGENCIES) – Tunisia’s ousted Pres Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali died in exile in Saudi Arabia on Thursday, days after a free presidential election in his homeland, his family lawyer said.
“Ben Ali just died in Saudi Arabia,” the lawyer, Mounir Ben Salha, said.
Ben Ali fled Tunisia in January 2011 as his compatriots rose up against his oppressive rule in a revolution that inspired other Arab Spring uprisings abroad and led to a democratic transition at home.
On Sunday, Tunisians voted in an election that featured candidates from across the political spectrum, sending two political outsiders through to a second round vote.
While almost all the candidates in Sunday’s election were vocal champions of the revolution, one of them, Abir Moussi, campaigned as a supporter of Ben Ali’s ousted government, receiving 4% of the votes.
A former security chief, Ben Ali had run Tunisia for 23 years, taking power when, as prime minister in 1987, he declared president-for-life Habib Bourguiba medically unfit to rule.
In office, he sought to stifle any form of political dissent while opening up the economy, a policy that led to rapid growth but also fuelled grotesque inequality and accusations of brazen corruption, not least among his own relatives.
On the few occasions his rule was put to the vote, he faced only nominal opposition and won re-election by more than 99%.
On Sunday, by contrast Tunisians chose between 26 candidates including both Ben Ali’s own former supporter Moussi and an ex-political prisoner running for the Islamist Ennahda party, which he banned.
Ben Ali’s rise began in the army after Bourguiba won Tunisia’s independence from France in 1956. He was head of military security from 1964, and of national security from 1977.
After a three-year stint as ambassador to Poland, he was called back to his old security job in 1984 to quell riots over bread prices. Now a general, he was made interior minister in 1986 and prime minister in 1987.
It took him less than three weeks to arrange a new promotion to the top job, bringing in a team of doctors to declare Bourguiba senile, meaning he would automatically take over as head of state.
His first decade as president involved a big economic restructuring – backed by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank – and an annual growth rate slightly over 4% a year.
Wedged between Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya and an Algeria thrust into civil war between the army-backed government and Islamist militants, Ben Ali’s Tunisia followed the post-independence path of secularism and openness to the outside.
For Ben Ali, the sudden end came when a desperate vegetable seller in the humble town of Sidi Bouzid set himself alight in December 2010 after police confiscated his barrow.
Mohammed Bouazizi’s funeral was attended by tens of thousands of furious people, sparking weeks of ever bigger protests in which scores of people were killed.
By mid January 2011, Ben Ali had had enough, and boarded a plane for Saudi Arabia, then a status quo power that had no truck with the rush towards revolution.
A Tunisian court sentenced him in absentia later that year to 35 years in prison. He never appeared in public again. — NNN-AGENCIES