Tunisia one year after the revolution – wave of strikes and uprisings

It
is true that the dictator has gone, but the system which condemns the
best of the Tunisian youth to a future of unemployment or emigration
still remains. As a matter of fact, for many, the economic situation has
only gotten worse.

Formal democratic freedoms, important as they are, have not given the
Tunisian poor neither jobs nor bread. Since the beginning of the
Tunisian revolution, unemployment has jumped from 600,000 to 850,000 in a
country of 11 million inhabitants. In percentage it has gone up from
14% to nearly 20%. In the impoverished regions where the revolution
started it is as high as 40 or 50%.

Unemployment is just the tip of the iceberg of a mass of social
problems. A trade union activist from Gafsa explains the reasons for the
growing feeling of frustration: “Since the fall of Ben Ali, not a
single step has been taken to stem the sharp rise in prices,
particularly of bread and medicine, nor to reduce regional inequalities
and promote jobs.”

In Redeyef, a revolutionary stronghold in the Gafsa mining basin, 62%
of graduates are unemployed. Here the masses gathered to celebrate
January 5, the anniversary of the beginning of the 2008 (http://www.marxist.com/revolt-mining-area-gafsa-tunisia.htm)
uprising which preceded the revolution. They are still in struggle, as
they are in all the towns of the Gafsa phosphates mining area, where all
economic life centres around the Gafsa Phosphates Company (CPG) and the
Tunisian Chemical Group (GCT).

The commemoration took place in the headquarters of the UGTT trade
union. One of its leaders, jailed in 2008, Adnen Hajji, delivered a
fiery speech: “There is no question of abandoning a single one of our
legitimate demands! The new government has no other choice, it must
listen to us! People of Redeyef! You took the first step in this
Tunisian revolution! It is time you reaped the fruits of those dry,
harsh and sad years of suffering and poverty!” Those gathered answered
his words with the rallying cry of “loyal, loyal to the blood of the
martyrs!”

In Redeyef there are still remnants of the situation of dual power
which arose during the revolution, when the local mayor fled the city
and the workers themselves took over the running of all affairs. There
is still no local mayor, but the people themselves organise all
necessary public tasks.

In an attempt to try to appease the thousands of unemployed youth in
the region, the two state enterprises in the region, CPG and GCT, have
announced the creation of 3,000 new jobs. Over 17,000 applications were
received. As the first results of the selection process were published,
at the end of November, riots started in most of the towns in the mining
basin. Nobody was pleased with the selection methods used. Applicants
that should have been given preference (those with families, sons of
retired miners, those with the required university qualifications) had
not been admitted. For many, this was the same as under the old regime.

Hundreds of youth came out onto the streets in protest in Mdhilla and
Moularès. They set up burning barricades, burnt down buses and cars and
attacked the offices of the phosphates company as well as the police
headquarters. The authorities declared a curfew between 7pm and 6am in
all of the localities in the governorate of Gafsa.

The government was forced to suspend any further announcements of the
recruitment process and promised to listen to the demands of the
unemployed. A number of them started a sit-in protest.

Finally, on January 5^th, three government ministers
visited the region. However, they refused to meet the sit-in protestors.
One of them, a 40 year old unemployed father of three, Ammar
Gharsallah, who had been part of the sit-in for weeks, in desperation,
doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire. A few days later
he died. Another three people, one woman and two men committed suicide
in the same way the following week, in Djerba and Sfax. It is a clear
indication of the desperation facing thousands in Tunisia, when one year
after a revolution which was sparked off by an act of self-immolation,
more are forced to take the same desperate action to draw attention to
their plight.

The protest movement spread to agricultural workers who also joined
the hunger strikers in Redeyef on January 9th. This is a significant
development as it shows how other sections of society are instinctively
attracted and come under the leadership of the organised labour
movement, in this case the local UGTT branch which has a long standing
revolutionary tradition. In an ever growing movement, miners joined the
protest movement on the 12^th with some of them also joining
the ranks of the hunger strikers. Following the UGTT appeal for a
general strike, the whole of Redeyef came to a standstill on January 17
in support of the demands of the movement. Primary and secondary school
teachers and high school students joined this mass movement. (SEE
PICTURE http://www.magharebia.com/cocoon/awi/images/2012/01/23/120123Feature4Photo1.jpg)

“Workers from all sectors in Redeyef have the same basic demands for
reforms and government intervention,” said local trade union leader
Adnen Hajji, adding that the protest was “the product of widespread
frustration with the government’s neglect of the community’s pressing
needs.” He threatened that if the demands of the Redeyef workers were
not met they would “close down Gafsa Phosphate Company and may escalate
the protest.”

These were not empty words. After a short truce in which they gave
the government a chance to answer them, the strike movement resumed,
affecting Redeyef, Om Larayes, Mdhilla and Kaff Eddour in the delegation
of Metlaoui. The unemployed youth were at the forefront of this
movement blocking trains carrying phosphate products and clashing with
the police in Mdhilla. The Gafsa governorate building has been taken
over by protestors and the governor has had to seek refuge in a nearby
hotel.

Meanwhile, on January 13 another social explosion erupted in the
mountain village of Makhtar, with a population of 12,000, in the
governorate of Siliana. Faced with a desperate economic situation, with
no jobs, no running water, no gas, no healthcare facilities, the people
of Makhtar declared a general strike, which took on insurrectionary
dimensions. With chopped down trees and tyres they blocked all access
roads. “We are rebelling because it is, quite simply, intolerable,” said
Ouided Slama, a young English teacher. The protest, which lasted for 6
days, before a truce was agreed with the national government, also
spread to other villages in the region, such as Kesra and Sidi Bourouis,
as well as Bouarada, where the local unemployed blocked the roads. In
Makhtar, the Islamist Ennahda got about 40% of the vote in the
Constituent Assembly elections. Their offices in Makhtar are shut, and
nobody knows where their local representative is and nobody cares much
either.

A similar uprising started in Sidi Makhlouf, with a population of
24,000, in the Medenine governorate in the South East, on January 23,
when a general strike was declared. Once again, they demand economic
development, jobs, healthcare facilities, etc. Negotiations with the
regional governor were not successful and the people decided to take him
hostage in the offices of the local delegation. In Jendouba, in the
North West, unemployed youth also blocked the roads, as they did in
Nezfa, in the neighbouring governorate of Beja. The British Gas
installations in the Sfax governorate have also been blocked by local
unemployed youth demanding jobs.

As well as these local and regional protest movements, which have in
some cases acquired insurrectionary characteristics, the wave of strikes
that has shaken the country ever since the overthrow of Ben Ali has
continued and even intensified.

Refuse collectors in La Marsa, a coastal city near Tunis, a popular
resort with the middle class, have entered the third week of their
strike. The workers of the National Sanitation Office have also gone on
strike in the regions of Tunis, Manouba, Ben Arous and Ariana. Workers
at the National Civil Aviation and Airports Authority have started a
48-hour strike affecting the airports of Tunis-Carthage, Djerba-Zarzis
and Tozeur-Nafta, protesting at the refusal of the company to hire
subcontracted workers into the main workforce. Workers at the SITEP El
Borma oil field also resumed their strike movement on January 23.

These are just some of the strikes which have taken place since the
beginning of the year. This formidable wave of strikes which has lasted
for a year reflects the newly found confidence of the workers after the
revolutionary movement which led to the overthrow of the hated dictator.
The workers feel strong and are on the offensive demanding the removal
of the old managers, better wages and working conditions, the end to
subcontracting, etc. This mood was partially reflected in the UGTT
congress in December which elected a new leadership more in tune with
the pressure from below, including a number of militants from the trade
union left.

In 2011 there were 567 strike movements, involving over 140,000
workers in 340 different companies. The number of strikes was up by 122%
in relation to 2010 and the number of days lost is up by 314%.

The elections to the Constituent Assembly and the installation of the
new tripartite coalition government has done nothing to stop the
strikes. As we explained in an earlier article (http://www.marxist.com/tunisian-constituent-assembly-elections.htm),
the victory of right-wing Islamist Ennahda in those elections did not
represent a shift to the right on the part of the masses which had
carried out the revolution. It was more a case of a lack of a serious
alternative to address the social and economic problems which affect the
majority of Tunisians.

On December 23, the new president Monceuf Marzouki made a public
appeal for the government to be granted a 6-month social truce. The
speech was delivered at a meeting of the UTICA employers’ organisation
and was aimed at reassuring them and foreign investors. But the workers
are in no mood to wait. The Minister of Social Affairs warned that
strikes and protests would only further worsen the economic situation
and threatened to use “the full force of the law” against protestors.
Already the police have been used to remove the sit-in at the British
Gas installations in Sfax.

The government and the bourgeois media have started a propaganda
campaign against strikes and protests, blaming strikers for all the
problems of the economy and arguing that already 170 foreign companies
have decided to close down their operations as a direct result of these
movements. However, the same workers and youth who risked their lives
and sacrificed dozens of martyrs in the struggle against the seemingly
powerful regime of Ben Ali, are not going to be cowed by the threats of
this weak government.

A trade union militant in Gafsa, Ammar Amrousia sums up the situation
in this way: “Ben Ali might have fallen, but his system is still in
place; and if things carry on in this way, there will be a second
revolution.”

The whole situation which has developed in the last year in Tunisia
is a confirmation of the position defended by the Marxists when the
revolution erupted: the social and economic demands of the people cannot
be separated from their democratic aspirations, and neither can they be
met within the limits of capitalism.

Unfortunately, there was no-one at the time defending this
perspective. It is time for the most advanced worker and youth
revolutionary activists to draw the necessary conclusion. The only way
to solve the pressing needs of the Tunisian masses is through the
complete overthrow of the remains of the Ben Ali system, that is, the
overthrow of capitalism itself.