Zine El Abidine Ben Ali
Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, commonly known as Ben Ali or Ezzine, was a Tunisian politician, military officer and dictator who served as the second President of Tunisia from 1987 to 2011. In that year, during the Tunisian revolution, he was overthrown and fled to Saudi Arabia.
Ben Ali was appointed Prime Minister in October 1987. He assumed the Presidency on 7 November 1987 in a bloodless coup d'état that ousted President Habib Bourguiba by declaring him incompetent. Ben Ali led an authoritarian regime. He was reelected in several non-democratic elections where he won with enormous majorities, each time exceeding 90% of the vote, his final re-election coming on 25 October 2009. Ben Ali was the penultimate surviving leader deposed in the Arab Spring; he was survived by Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, the latter dying in February 2020.
On 14 January 2011, following a month of protests against his rule, he fled to Saudi Arabia along with his wife Leïla Ben Ali and their three children. The interim Tunisian government asked Interpol to issue an international arrest warrant, charging him with money laundering and drug trafficking. A Tunisian court sentenced Ben Ali and his wife in absentia to 35 years in prison on 20 June 2011 on charges of theft and unlawful possession of cash and jewelry, which was put up for auction. In June 2012, a Tunisian court sentenced him in absentia to life imprisonment for inciting violence and murder and another life sentence by a military court in April 2013 for violent repression of protests in Sfax. He served none of those sentences, subsequently dying in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on 19 September 2019 at the age of 83 after nearly a decade in exile.
Early life, education and military career
Ben Ali was born in 1936 to moderate-income parents as the fourth of eleven children in the family. His father, originally from Arram, Gabes worked as a guard at the port city of Sousse.Ben Ali joined the local resistance against French colonial forces and was imprisoned. His expulsion from secondary school was the reason why he never completed his secondary education. He studied at the Sousse Technical Institute but failed to earn a professional certificate and joined the newly formed Tunisian Army in 1958. Nevertheless, after being chosen as one among a group of young officers, he was awarded training in France at the École Spéciale Militaire de Saint-Cyr in Coëtquidan and the School of Applied Artillery in Châlons-sur-Marne, and also in the United States at the Senior Intelligence School in Maryland and the School for Anti-Aircraft Field Artillery in Texas. He also held a diploma in electronics engineering from a local university. Returning to Tunisia in 1964, he began his professional military career the same year as a Tunisian staff officer. During his time in military service, he established the Military Security Department and directed its operations for 10 years. He briefly served as military attaché in the Tunisian embassy of Morocco and Spain before being appointed General Director of National Security in 1977.
In April 1980, Ben Ali was appointed ambassador to Poland, and served in that position for four years. He also served as the military intelligence chief from 1964 to 1974 and later Director General of national security between December 1977 and 1980 until he was appointed as Minister of Defense. Soon after the Tunisian bread riots in January 1984, he was reappointed director-general of national security.
Ben Ali subsequently served as Minister of State in charge of the interior before being appointed Interior Minister on 28 April 1986 then Prime Minister by President Habib Bourguiba in October 1987.
Rise to presidency
On the morning of 7 November 1987, doctors attending to President Bourguiba filed an official medical report declaring him medically incapacitated and unable to fulfill the duties of the presidency. Ben Ali, next in line to the presidency, removed Bourguiba from office and assumed the presidency himself. The day of his accession to power was celebrated annually in Tunisia as New Era Day. Two of the names given to Ben Ali's rise to the presidency include "the medical coup d'état" and the "Tunisian revolution". Ben Ali favoured the latter. Ben Ali’s assumption of the presidency was in conformity with Article 57 of the Tunisian Constitution. The country had faced 10% inflation, external debt accounting for 46% of GDP and a debt service ratio of 21% of GDP.In 1999, Fulvio Martini, former head of Italian military secret service SISMI, declared to a parliamentary committee that "from 1985 to 1987, we organized a coup of sorts in Tunisia, putting President Ben Ali as head of state, replacing Bourguiba who wanted to flee". Bourguiba, although a symbol of anti-colonial resistance, was considered incapable of leading his country any longer, and his reaction to the rising Islamic integrism was deemed "a bit too energetic" by Martini; Bourguiba's threat to execute the suspects might have generated strong negative responses in neighbouring countries. Acting under directives from Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi and Foreign Minister Giulio Andreotti, Martini claims to have brokered the accord that led to the peaceful transition of powers.
According to Martini, the SISMI did not have an operational role in Ben Ali's rise to power, but organised a move to support his new government politically and economically, preventing Tunisia from falling into an open confrontation with fundamentalists, as happened in Algeria in the following years.
Presidency (1987–2011)
Politics
Alan Cowell, a prominent New York Times journalist, believed Ben Ali's initial promises of a more democratic way of ruling the country than had prevailed under Bourguiba. One of his first acts upon taking office was to loosen restrictions on the press; for the first time state-controlled newspapers published statements from the opposition. Ben Ali also released some political prisoners and granted them with pardons. In 1988, he changed the name of the ruling Destourian Socialist Party to the Democratic Constitutional Rally, and pushed through constitutional amendments that limited the president to three five-year terms, with no more than two in a row.However, the conduct of the 1989 elections was little different from past elections. The RCD swept every seat in the legislature, and Ben Ali appeared alone on the ballot in Tunisia's first presidential election since 1974. Although opposition parties had been legal since 1981, presidential candidates were required to get endorsements from 30 political figures. Given the RCD's near-absolute dominance of the political scene, prospective opposition candidates discovered they could not get their nomination papers signed. The subsequent years saw the return of several Bourguiba-era restrictions. For many years, the press had been expected to practice self-censorship, but this increasingly gave way to official censorship. Amendments to the press code allowed the Interior Ministry to review all newspaper and magazine articles before publication. In 1992, the president's younger brother Habib Ben Ali was tried in absentia in France for laundering the proceeds of drug trafficking, in a case known as the "couscous connection". French television news was blocked in Tunisia during the trial.
At the 1994 elections, opposition parties polled 2.25% and gained 19 of 163 seats in Parliament—the first-time opposition parties had actually managed to get into the chamber. Ben Ali was unopposed for a second full term, again after being the only candidate to get enough endorsements to qualify. Turnout was officially reported at 95%. However, at this and subsequent elections, opposition parties never accounted for more than 24 percent of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies. All legislation continued to originate with the president, and there was little meaningful opposition to executive decisions.
In 1999, Ben Ali became the first Tunisian president to actually face an opponent after the 30-signature requirement was lifted a few months earlier. However, he won a third full term with an implausible 99.4 percent of the vote.
A constitutional referendum in 2002—the first ever held in Tunisia—established a two-chambered parliament, creating the Chamber of Advisers. It also allowed the president to run for an unlimited number of five-year terms and amended the upper age limit for a presidential candidate to 75 years old. The latter measures were clearly aimed at keeping Ben Ali in office; he faced having to give up the presidency in 2004. He was duly reelected in 2004, again by an implausibly high margin—this time 94 percent of the vote.
Tunisia under Ben Ali was known for its human rights violations such as lack of freedom of the press, highlighted by the official treatment of the journalist Taoufik Ben Brik, who was harassed and imprisoned for his criticism of Ben Ali. By the dawn of the new millennium, Ben Ali was reckoned as leading one of the most repressive regimes in the world. Under his rule, Tunisia consistently ranked near the bottom of most international rankings for human rights and press freedom.
On 25 October 2009, Ben Ali was re-elected for a fifth term with 89% of the vote. The African Union sent a team of observers to cover the election. The delegation was led by Benjamin Bounkoulou, who described the election as "free and fair". However, a spokesperson from the US State Department indicated that Tunisia had not permitted monitoring of the election by international observers, but that the U.S. was still committed to working with the Ben Ali and the Tunisian government. There also were reports of mistreatment of an opposition candidate.
In December 2010 and January 2011, riots over unemployment escalated into a widespread popular protest movement against Ben Ali's government. On 13 January 2011, he announced he would not run for another term in 2014, and pledged steps to improve the economy and loosen restrictions on the press. The following day, however, thousands demonstrated in the center of Tunis, demanding Ben Ali's immediate resignation. On 14 January 2011, Ben Ali, his wife and children fled to Saudi Arabia, and a caretaker ruling committee headed by Prime Minister Mohamed Ghannouchi was announced.