Coalition of civil society groups wins highest-profile of the six Nobel awards
A disparate coalition of Tunisian unionists, employers, lawyers and human rights activists has won the 2015 Nobel peace prize for helping to prevent the Jasmine revolution from descending into chaos like the uprisings in other Arab spring countries.
The Tunisian national dialogue quartet was given the award by the Norwegian Nobel committee, beating an array of high-powered nominees including Angela Merkel, the pope, the US secretary of state, John Kerry, and his Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif.
Reading the citation, the new committee chair, Kaci Kullmann Five, said the Tunisian coalition had helped bring the country back from the brink of civil war in 2013, and had made a “decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy”. The prize was intended to reward and bolster such efforts in Tunisia and beyond.
The quartet was set up in the summer of 2013 at a time when the country’s Jasmine revolution, which had first sparked the Arab spring, looked like it would go the same way as Egypt’s brief democratic awakening, which had succumbed to a military coup in July of that year.
Tunisia was suffering some of the same symptoms as Egypt: a high-handed Islamist-led government that was ignoring the views of the secular opposition in writing up a new constitution, street clashes, high-profile assassinations and the appearance of Salafist extremists on the fringes.
The quartet – made up of the union federation UGTT, the employers’ institute, the Tunisian human rights league and the order of lawyers – brokered talks between the different forces and got them to agree a roadmap that included compromises on the constitution, a technocratic caretaker government and an independent election commission.
Houcine Abassi, the secretary general of one of the member organisations, the Tunisian General Labour Union, said he was overwhelmed by the prize. “It’s a message that dialogue can lead us on the right path. This prize is a message for our region to put down arms and sit and talk at the negotiation table,” he told Reuters.
The members of the quartet have gone their own way since its peak in 2013 and Tunisia still faces severe problems, including public disillusion with the government – which has been largely recaptured by pre-revolutionary elites – and terrorist attacks culminating in the massacre of 38 tourists in Sousse in June.
But, alone among Arab spring states, Tunisia has kept its democratic aspirations alive in the wake of the Egyptian coup and the conflicts that have consumed Libya, Syria and Yemen.
“Tunisia faces significant political, economic and security challenges,” the Nobel citation said, adding that the Norwegian prize committee “hopes that this year’s prize will contribute towards safeguarding democracy in Tunisia and be an inspiration to all those who seek to promote peace and democracy in the Middle East, north Africa and the rest of the world.”
Mokhtar Trifi, honorary president of one of the quartet members, the Tunisian Human Rights League, said: “This is extraordinary news. It’s a clear encouragement for the wider process in Tunisia, and for all the work and dialogue that went into the move to elections and democracy. Crucially, it shows that the world is watching us. We have much more to accomplish and are facing new challenges.”
He added: “We have to save our country from terrorism and from economic crisis. We’re counting on goodwill from the west so that we aren’t isolated on those new challenges.”
Sihem Bensedrine, head of Tunisia’s truth and dignity commission, investigating crimes of the pre-revolutionary regime, said: “All Tunisians are proud of this award. Tunisia is recognised for its revolution, and for the consensual path it has chosen for its democratic transition.” Her commission, praised by human rights groups, has been struggling against opposition from some quarters as it sifts through 16,000 allegations of abuse stretching back through 60 years of dictatorship.
The Tunisia director of Human Rights Watch, Amna Guellali, said the prize was seen in the country as a reward for sticking with democratic principles. “The quartet enabled the democratic process to go ahead, it was a political crisis that could have led to civil war,” she said. “People here will hope the award is not just a token celebration, but will bring Tunisia real help.”
Sarah Chayes, a Tunisia expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said: “The quartet was a disparate entity, made up of groups that did not necessarily see eye to eye, historically. So there had to be a kind of peacemaking within the quartet before it could perform its function. That is a first, so far as I know, in Nobel history.”
“The quartet worked very hard to achieve the result it did,” Chayes added. “This was not a matter of elegant words or a certain stance. The quartet leadership spent all-nighters end to end, cajoled, taught, helped and threatened political actors to produce a solution to the situation of political crisis in which they were mired.”
The Nobel committee said the quartet had secured the approval of the Tunisian population at large for the constitutional process that led to democratic elections.
“The quartet paved the way for a peaceful dialogue between the citizens, the political parties and the authorities and helped to find consensus-based solutions to a wide range of challenges across political and religious divides,” it said.
“The broad-based national dialogue that the quartet succeeded in establishing countered the spread of violence in Tunisia and its function is therefore comparable to that of the peace congresses to which Alfred Nobel refers in his will.”
The Swedish foreign minister, Margot Wallström, said the award to the Tunisian quartet was well deserved. “It is a long and difficult process to achieve democratic reforms in a country that has been subjected to such a difficult situation, but it has done everything right and it has been done with active support from civil society,” she told the broadcaster STV.
Wallström, who has advocated a feminist foreign policy for Sweden, particularly praised Tunisia’s establishment of a new constitution anchored among women and young people and its attempts to establish consensus between different parties.
