Alarmglocken in Tunesien

Erik Churchill, der unter dem Pseudonym Kefteji bloggt, und erst kürzlich einen lesenswerten Artikel über die wachsenden Spannungen zwischen Ennadha und Salafiten veröffentlicht hat,  fasst die Ereignisse der letzten Tage in Tunesien zusammen, wo sich der Konflikt zwischen Salafisten und ihren Gegnern immer mehr zuspitzt und fragt sich, welche Auswirkungen die Entwicklungen in Ägypten auf Tunesien haben werden:

Tunisia’s secularists (in this case I use the term to describe both secularists in the liberal sense, as well as those from the Bourguiba mold), already anxious about a country run by Islamists, may take bolder actions against the government. Already Tunisian secularists are sounding the alarm bells. At a meeting yesterday, secularists from various parties gathered to voice their extreme concern over events over the weekend which saw Salafi activists disrupt a planned event of a well-known secularist activist and a physical attack on a political figure. The events, troubling in and of themselves, caused even greater alarm by the perceived luke-warm response of the Ennahdha ministers at the justice and interior ministries. The meeting yesterday included calls for the opposition to boycott the Constituent Assembly and to change their tactics from those of opposition movements to “resistance” movements.

Tunisia’s secularist will look with anxiety to an Egypt which has turned further to the right. Coupled with Ennahdha’s moderate rhetoric, secularist alarmism has mostly fallen on deaf ears in Tunisia. Most Tunisians simply do not see their country following the path of Iran or Saudi Arabia, and the Algerian civil war – with its complex moral narrative – is already a decade in the past. An Egypt which has turned toward the extreme would provide secularists with a narrative that could be a call to action among secular sympathizers in the country.