An opponent who goes to the war outside the battlefield is not always good to quote, but Moncef Marzouki was currently the only voice of reason in Tunisia which is undergoing a state of insecurity and failing Media.
While street riots have already started to give way to other mobs on other meeting and public places, Marzouki was paradoxically the only one to sound the alarm against the witch hunt. The latter has yet actually begun in a total lack of security and political concern.
Four examples have been edifying in this regard. First, the CEO of STAR, a public company partnered with a large French strategic group, who was driven out from his office in the midst of patriotic songs and Allah is Great, and publicly manhandled and hunted in the streets of Tunis while being kicked.
This first public lynching was organized by one of his former executives who did manage to find a job in another large public company, before the latter turns him down.
Then comes the case of Hedi DJilani, President of UTICA who was escorted to his office and whose presence stirred up a hundred of protesters through Facebook, on the instigation of a President of Federation who had nevertheless taken advantage of his position as President under the old regime to garner contracts for his own business. Go Out, he was told in an atmosphere of clamor, by a former business leader who has lost more money than he had had and who was among the first, during the first presidential campaign of Ben Ali, to beg, in the premises of Dar al-Ward in “Place Pasteur” in Tunis for the distribution of his small vials of “November 7 perfume” in events held as part of the campaign.
Hedi Jilani resisted by sticking to the procedures governing every act of departure. He presented, last Wednesday, his resignation as President of the employers’ organization and of its Executive Board.
The third example of public lynching reported regard the head of the Meteorological Center (an institution which is neither commercial nor political). He was driven out of his office and dragged into the crowd calling for his trial, as if he were the last of the criminals.
The last lynching in date was the CEO of the OACA, the Office of Civil Aviation, physically assaulted by a horde of dissatisfied claiming his fall with impunity and illegally. In the intoxication of the crowd movements where security forces were absent, the law, which should have been the single point of reference, has been mocked, turning everyone into an inquisitor.
All these acts of public lynching and also media lynching -because the purpose is to film and post it on Facebook, are made in complete impunity and an atmosphere where the UGTT has become a judge (in the government) and party (union worker) and has become even a revolutionary court.
Indeed, it is this same trade union, led by those professional unions, which urges denouncement inside banking and financial institutions, calling upon its members, among other things, “to look for and collect documents that could serve as evidence against all the CEOs of banks or would confirm their involvement in operations of capital flight or suspicious transactions.”
It’s this negative image, repulsive to foreign investors and friendly countries that have already started thinking of the best way to help post-Ben Ali Tunisia getting up, that is given by the Tunisian society on itself. It is in this atmosphere of witch hunt and search for heads to cut, that those who made the Revolution are letting the new profiteers of their efforts and their dead to settle their personal accounts, rebuild their virginity or simply for a “Get out of here I’ve to start!”.
In the current insecurity, this can happen in the future to any official, any CEO or any business leader whose workers are not happy with. He who wants his dog killed has only to say he’s mad, and what is remaining of the Jasmine Revolution accuses everyone and will lead to the fall of other unconscious heads, simply because they were once close to the harem or in her lap.
Instead of calling workers to resume work and redouble efforts to help Tunisia overcome the economic crisis, the trade union has thus become judge, albeit both judge and executioner while soaking everywhere in politics and making the mad rush for seats.
It is time, we believe, that voices calling for calm triumph over political, counter-political and petty political demonstrations. It is time to call for reason and give time for justice to do its job calmly and properly!
