Tunisia Nobel Peace Prize resonates across Middle East
After the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet won the Nobel Peace Prize, democracy activists drew solace as regional leaders remained silent.
Democracy activists across the Middle East are taking solace in the Nobel recognition for Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution while their own Arab Spring dreams remain unfulfilled.
Political reformers from Morocco to Egypt to Syria say the Tunisian quartet’s peace prize win is a small but symbolic victory for a protest movement that has either fizzled out or exploded into chaos everywhere else. They hope it will recharge activists while showing Arab leaders the virtues of peaceful democratic change.
“Tunisia was the only Arab Spring country that carried out the revolution correctly, thus it deserves to reap the benefits,” Tamer el-Kady, spokesman for Egypt’s Revolution Youth Union, told Al-Monitor. In Egypt, he said, “We have now been deceived, [we have] returned to something worse than the [Hosni] Mubarak regime, violating all principles of the constitution.”
More than 330 Tunisians were killed during the December 2010 uprising that led to the fall of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. The Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet of unionists, lawyers and human rights activists was formed in 2013 to save a democratic transition that threatened to go off the rails amid institutional gridlock and political assassinations.
