America's Elite Are Too Close to China's Government

By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

Many writers across the ideological spectrum have contended that the American people’s trust in government lessened in recent years as they realized that a rising political establishment had become culturally united in disdain for them, leaving them impoverished and disempowered.

Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory drew upon these feelings, but it created ferocious opposition because the ruling elites recognized he was mobilizing millions of Americans against the arrangements by which they lived.

These were summed up in the word globalism, the freedom to structure commercial relationships and social enterprises without reference to the well-being of their own country.

The determination to feel superior to the people whom Hillary Clinton had called the “deplorables” was what bound together Wall Street movers and shakers, the media, officials of public service unions, all manner of administrators, race and ethnic activists, and so on. The so-called “Resistance” grew by further awakening these groups to the powers and privileges to which they imagine their superior worth entitles them.

Trump’s incessant attacks on that elite, in particular the way they benefited and grew incredibly wealthy by offloading American jobs to cheap-labour countries like China, gave them a collective as well as a powerful motive for solidarity.

Why did they deal with an authoritarian regime by sending millions of American manufacturing jobs off offshore and thereby impoverishing working Americans? Because it made them rich.

Together, they saw that they represented a coming together of public and private sector interests that shared the same prejudices and hatreds, cultural tastes and consumer habits. Connections that might have once seemed tenuous or nonexistent became lucid under Trump’s scorn, and the reciprocal contempt of the elite that loathed him.

Meanwhile, think tanks and research institutions like the Atlantic Council, Brookings Institution, Center for American Progress, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and others became recipients of Chinese money.

Nearly every major American industry now has a stake in China, from Wall Street to hospitality. Example? A Marriott Hotel employee was fired in 2018 when Chinese officials objected to his “liking” a tweet about Tibet. They have all learned to play by the Chinese Communist Party’s rules.

On Trump’s final days in office, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the United States has “determined that the People’s Republic of China is committing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, China, targeting Uyghur Muslims.”

Yet last year Apple, Nike, Coca Cola, Adidas, Gap, Tommy Hilfiger, Google, Microsoft, and General Motors lobbied against the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act being considered by Congress.

Trump’s trade war with Beijing showed that he was serious about forcing American companies to move their supply chains. But under Joe Biden, they no longer need worry. The new administration is loaded with lobbyists for the American tech industry, who are determined to get the U.S.-China relationship back on track.

Biden’s Chief of Staff Ron Klain was formerly on the executive council of TechNet, the trade group that lobbies on behalf of Silicon Valley in Washington. Incoming Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines and Secretary of State Antony Blinken worked at a Beltway firm called WestExec, which had lobbied on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party.

Biden security aide Colin Kahl was with the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, which oversees the university’s links to Peking University. The latter is run by a former Beijing spy chief, Qiu Shuiping.

Biden’s special assistant for presidential personnel, Thomas Zimmerman, was a fellow at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, flagged by Western intelligence agencies for its ties to China’s Ministry of State Security.

U.N. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield gave a 2019 speech at a Chinese-government-funded Confucius Institute in Savannah, Georgia, where she praised China’s role in promoting good governance, gender equity, and the rule of law in Africa.

“I see no reason why China cannot share in those values,” she maintained. “In fact, China is in a unique position to spread these ideals given its strong footprint on the continent.”

Winning the 2020 election was the objective behind which the oligarchy had coalesced during the Trump years. For them, the point of having Biden elected was to protect themselves.

 

Alexei Navalny Continues to Defy Putin

By Henry Srebrnik. [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

A nationwide referendum held last summer on amendments to Russia’s constitution allows President Vladimir Putin another 12 years in power after his current term ends in 2024, should he win two more presidential elections.

His main political opponent is not some ordinary politician, but opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who has been gaining momentum despite efforts by the government to stop him – including, perhaps, even trying to murder him.

The 44-year-old anti-corruption activist has been waging the battle against Putin for more than a decade, as a lawyer and a blogger, through his organization, the Anti-Corruption Foundation, during his run for mayor of Moscow in 2013, and in his abortive 2018 run for president.

Navalny was prevented from becoming a candidate in the election because of an embezzlement conviction that he says was politically motivated. He has continued to take his battle to the streets, saying protests are justified to encourage political change.

Navalny doesn’t mince words. He calls Putin’s United Russia party full of “crooks and thieves” and accuses the president of “sucking the blood out of Russia” through a “feudal state” concentrating power in the Kremlin. But he is no western puppet – for instance, he has also said the Crimea, which was wrested from Ukraine by Putin in 2014, should remain part of Russia.

Navalny was poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent in Siberia in August in what has been described as an assassination attempt by the Russian state.

He was administered Novichok, a potent neurotoxin, and fell ill on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow. The pilot made an emergency landing and Navalny was flown to Berlin where he spent weeks in a coma.

He was airlifted to Germany and recovered. After flying home to Moscow from Berlin Jan. 17, he was arrested at passport control, ostensibly for violating the parole terms from a suspended sentence he received six years ago.

On Jan. 23, tens of thousands of people across Russia called for his release. Videos showed protesters scuffling with police officers who were swinging batons and kicking them. More than 4,000 people were detained in more than 100 cities.

More protests Jan. 30 saw police arrest more than 4,000 people across the country, including 1,167 in Moscow and 862 in St Petersburg. There were further arrests Feb. 2 when a Moscow court on Feb. 2 ordered Navalny to prison for two years and eight months on parole violation charge. In a message from jail, Navalny urged Russians to stage new rallies.

“I think it's only the beginning of problems for the regime,” argues Andrei Kolesnikov of the Moscow Carnegie Centre. “It's not just the political opposition, but civil society that’s irritated by the cruelty.”

Navalny knows how to get under Putin’s skin. He has exposed the corruption of officials and tapped into growing discontent. In the days before the protests, his Anti-Corruption Foundation published an investigation describing a lavish secret palace built for Putin on the Black Sea that cost the equivalent of more than $1 billion.

Putin denied the charges; it was built by billionaire Arkady Rotenberg. But the video has been viewed more than 100 million times on YouTube, a record number for the platform in Russia.

“We will live normally only when we stop tolerating officials who steal and re-electing them,” contends Navalny. “And if they refuse to hold fair elections, then we’ll take to the streets and remove them from power in this way.”

The next likely flash point will come with parliamentary elections in autumn, when Navalny had plans to “decimate” the pro-Kremlin United Russia party at the polls. But now he’ll be in prison.

The Kremlin has long painted Navalny as an “agent” of the West bent on undermining Russia. A news anchor on Russia’s state-controlled Channel One suggested that the United States, with a Democratic president now in the White House, had in fact organized the protests.

Navalny had spent a student year in the U.S. as part of the Yale University World Fellows program in 2010.  “As they say, draw your own conclusions,” he told viewers. But perhaps Russians are drawing different conclusions.

 

Yemen’s Ruinous Civil War May Soon Take a Turn

By Henry Srebrnik. [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

U.S. President Joe Biden on Feb. 4 announced an end to support for Saudi-led military offensive operations in Yemen. A day later, the State Department said it would lift the terrorist designation against the Houthis in Yemen. Both moves will be welcomed in Tehran and the tide may turn in favour of the rebels.

The Houthis of north Yemen have been engaged in a long-standing and intermittent insurgency against the government of the country.

The conflict has its roots in the failure of a political transition supposed to bring stability to Yemen following an uprising that forced its authoritarian president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, after 33 years of rule, to hand over power to his vice-president, Abd Rabbo Mansur Hadi, in 2011.

As president, Hadi had to deal with a variety of problems, including a separatist movement in the south, the continuing loyalty of security personnel to Saleh, as well as corruption, unemployment and food insecurity.

The Houthi movement, known formally as Ansar Allah, which champions Yemen’s Zaidi Shia Muslim minority and had already fought a series of rebellions against Saleh during the previous decade, took advantage of the new president’s weakness.

Disillusioned with the transition, many ordinary Yemenis, including Sunnis, supported the Houthis. The insurgency escalated sharply in 2014, when their movement seized the capital, Sanaa, and the surrounding areas.

This was facilitated by a newly forged alliance of convenience with former President Saleh -- whom they killed in 2017. The Houthis continue to hold Sanaa, and a large part of the country’s territory. 

Beginning in March 2015, a coalition of Gulf states led by Saudi Arabia launched a campaign of economic isolation and air strikes against the Houthi insurgents. 

Yemen abuts a strategic choke point of global importance, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which connects the Gulf of Aden to the Red Sea.  It is a vital route for oil and natural gas shipments passing from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea and on to the Suez Canal.  Around nine per cent of total global petroleum products pass through the strait. 

The Saudis and their allies failed to reconquer the entirety of Yemen but they did protect the Bab el-Mandeb.  Similarly, the intervention prevented the main port of Yemen, al-Hudayda, from falling under the complete control of the Houthis. 

The result is that Yemen, like some other Arab countries, is now subject to de facto division and ongoing conflict. The Houthis control the capital and a large part of the populated center of the country. Hadi’s internationally recognized government controls much of the east and the strategically important south and western coastal areas. 

To further complicate matters, the separatist Southern Transitional Council, supported by the United Arab Emirates, controls the port of Aden and a section of the southern coast. Finally, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and the Islamic State group are active on the ground. 

The Houthis follow the Zaidiya branch of Shia Islam, whereas the Iranians are Twelver Shia. Nonetheless, the Houthis have had support from Iran.  Also, some 60 per cent of the former Yemeni army having allied with them.

Iran uses the territory in Yemen controlled by the Houthis for the launching of missiles on Saudi Arabia. For example, the Houthis claimed responsibility for the sophisticated attack on Saudi oil facilities at Abqaiq and Khurais in September 2019, but the weapons came from Iran. 

Yemen’s economy, already fragile prior to the conflict, has been gravely affected. The war has wrecked the country's roads, hospitals, water and electricity networks, as well as other infrastructure.

Hundreds of thousands of families no longer have a steady source of income, and many public servants have not received a regular salary in years. The country’s civil war has worsened the humanitarian crisis. 

All parties to the conflict have committed human rights violations. Almost a quarter of a million people have died in Yemen’s war, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in December.

As well, 3.6 million people have been internally displaced and some 20 million are experiencing food insecurity. And public health experts warn that the COVID-19 pandemic may have further significant negative effects on Yemen’s vulnerable population.

 

Putin's Policies Aimed at Re-establishing Russian Conservatism

By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton,NB] Times & Transcript

Russian politics has been characterised by increasing cultural and political conservatism since Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012. This “cultural turn” has seen the promotion of social, political and cultural conservative themes in official political discourse.

The notion that Russian traditional values should be the source of regime legitimacy and a guide to public policy was not particularly strongly developed by Putin during his first period as president between 2000 and 2008.

But it became more prominent in recent years, particularly as the country has grappled with ongoing economic problems, exacerbated by sanctions imposed by other countries since the takeover of Crimea in 2014.

Action against oligarchs and regional leaders, and Putin’s efforts to strengthen the capacity of the Russian state through the reassertion of its monopoly rights over violence, has enhanced his personal powers.

Putin has promoted the concept of “sovereign democracy,” a term first coined by the ideologue Vladislav Surkov in 2006, to argue that Russia’s democratic standards were not comparable to those proposed by Western conceptions of democracy.

Russia, he contends, is different to other places because of the character of its civilisation and the extent to which it has retained it. It is, for Putin, a “state-civilisation.” There is, he stated in 2013, a close alignment between Russia’s ability to exist as a state and as a civilisation; each depends on the other.

The character of this civilisation is essentially a religious one, namely Russian Orthodoxy. This identity needs to be protected so that the state can survive.

 “Today, many nations are revising their moral values and ethical norms, eroding ethnic traditions and differences between peoples and cultures,” Putin declared in his address to the Russian Federal Assembly in 2013. And this, he claimed, is antithetical to true democracy, “since it is carried out on the basis of abstract, speculative ideas, contrary to the will of the majority.”

Putin is part of a long Russian tradition that predates the Soviet Union and goes back as far as the Orthodox Christian idea of Russia as the “third Rome,” first put forward in the early 16^th century.

Rome itself was the first, but it was succeeded by Constantinople after the Christian Church split into Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox faiths in the 11^th century. When the Muslim Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453, Moscow inherited the mantle of Orthodoxy, as the third Rome, making Russia a “world-historical” country.

In the 19^th century, intellectuals who became known as Slavophiles began to oppose the westernization of tsarist Russia. They declared that Russia was unlike Europe and that its type of civilization was higher than the European.

They denounced the ongoing Europeanization of Russia as a fatal deviation from the genuine course of Russian history and wanted Russia to come back to the principles of the Orthodox Church and state -- in other words, to autocracy.

Their opponents, the westernizers, believed that Russia’s development depended on the adoption of western technology and liberal government. They were rationalistic rather than emotional and mystical. Some remained moderate liberals, while others became socialists and political radicals.

The Bolsheviks who took control of the Russian Empire after 1917 were adherents of western ideas; after all, they were followers of the German political theorist Karl Marx. The dissolution of the Soviet Union also temporarily led to westernization.

Russia tried to become part of the “common European home,” as the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, put it. In a July 6, 1989 speech before the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, Gorbachev declared that the concept “rules out the probability of an armed clash and the very possibility of the use of force.” Westernizers sought reforms under Russian President Boris Yeltsin, but his decade in office was a shambles.

So the westernizers have, for now, lost the battle for Russia’s future. Putin’s “cultural turn” is in fact a “re-turn” to Slavophilism, and he has put these ideas into practice, especially since his 2018 presidential election victory. It accounts for the extreme measures taken against westernizers such as the activist Alexei Navalny.

A referendum held last summer on Russia’s constitution allows Putin another 12 years in power after his current term ends in 2024, should he win two more presidential elections.

 

Myanmar Coup Imperils its Quasi-Democracy

By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, NB] Telegraph-Journal

The military in Myanmar overthrew the government of Aung San Suu Kyi on Feb. 1. They claimed they mounted the coup d'état because her political party committed massive fraud in last year's election. She has been detained and a one-year state of emergency declared.

UN special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar Tom Andrews has called for sanctions and an arms embargo.

The National League for Democracy (NLD) won more than 80 per cent of the vote last Nov. 8, remaining hugely popular among the majority Buddhist electorate even in the face of allegations of genocide against the country’s Rohingya Muslims. It captured 396 out of 476 seats in the combined lower and upper houses of Parliament.

The Myanmar constitution forbade Suu Kyi from becoming president because she has children who are foreign nationals. Though her official title is state counsellor, Suu Kyi, now 75, has been the country’s de facto leader.

For the past five years, her once-banned party led the country after being elected in November 2015. The NLD was about to begin its second term in office.

But behind the scenes, the military has kept a relatively tight grip on Myanmar thanks to a 2008 constitution drawn up during the junta’s rule which guarantees it a quarter of all seats in parliament and control of the country’s most powerful ministries, including home affairs, defence and border affairs.

Could the NLD, with its majority, have amended the constitution? Unlikely, as that requires the support of 75 per cent of parliament, an almost impossible task when the military controls at least one quarter of the seats.

Following November’s election, the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) opposition immediately began making accusations of fraud after the vote. The allegation has now been repeated by the military, and General Min Aung Hlaing has taken control of the country.

Aung San Suu Kyi has herself had a checkered career. The daughter of the country’s founding leader, in 1991 she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and hailed as “an outstanding example of the power of the powerless.”

The army had placed her under house arrest in 1989. Altogether, she was held captive for a total of 15 years over a 21-year period, until finally released in November 2010.

The military government had held national elections in May 1990, which Suu Kyi's NLD won, but the junta refused to hand over control. However, a slow transition to civilian control began, culminating in the 2015 election and her assumption of power.

But her image has suffered internationally due to her response to the crisis that befell Myanmar’s Muslim Rohingya minority.

In 2017 hundreds of thousands of Rohingya fled to neighbouring Bangladesh due to an army crackdown sparked by deadly attacks on police stations in Rakhine state.

Following independence from British rule in 1948, the Bamar majority in Myanmar built a nationalism that was based on the Burmese language and Buddhism, combined with an authoritarian state apparatus. Since 1962, it has been ruled most of the time by the military and has little experience with democracy.

Myanmar now faces a lawsuit accusing it of genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), while the International Criminal Court is investigating the country for crimes against humanity.

Suu Kyi’s international supporters accused her of doing nothing to stop rape, murder and possible genocide by refusing to condemn the military or acknowledge accounts of atrocities.

Her defence of the army’s actions at the ICJ hearing in the Hague in December 2019 tarnished her reputation. In a 17-0 decision, the ICJ on Jan. 21 of this year rejected Myanmar’s argument that the deaths of the Rohingya were part of an “armed military conflict.”

The military removal of a regime is, by definition, non-democratic and speaks to something very wrong in the political life of a country. Most of us instinctively recoil from the idea.

But are all coups by definition bad? Actually, some have occurred, oftentimes as a last resort, against despots, tyrants and kleptocrats engaging in human rights violations or ethnic cleansing.

However, the new military regime in Myanmar will be no improvement over Suu Kyi’s and therefore has no redeeming features. 

 

Kazakhstan's Economy is Finally Rebounding

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

At 2.7 million square kilometres in area, Kazakhstan, one of the former central Asian republics of the Soviet Union, is the ninth-largest country in the world. It encompasses an area roughly as big as Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic and Austria combined.

Until two years ago, everyone in Kazakhstan born after 1990 had known only one leader for their entire life -- Nursultan Nazarbayev. He had been largely unchallenged as leader of the nation since 1989, when it was still part of the Soviet Union.

Many regarded him as a president for life, a common practice for authoritarian states in central Asia. After independence, he was returned to office against largely token opponents in 1999, 2005, 2011 and 2015. He enjoyed great popularity, although it was never possible to independently measure it because these were not free and fair elections.

But in a move that caught Kazakhs by surprise, he resigned in March 2019, and Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, regarded as a hand-picked successor, became the new president, after snap elections were announced to complete the process.

In the weeks leading up to the June vote, police raided the homes of opposition figures and courts sentenced anti-government protesters to short prison stays.

Tokayev’s first decision as president was to rename the then capital, Astana, as Nur-Sultan, in honour of the departing Kazakh president.

Because Kazakhstan’s economy was closely linked to Russia’s in the centrally planned system of the Soviet Union, the breakup of the union in 1991 and the removal of Soviet economic infrastructure caused a severe economic downturn in the years that followed.

By 1995, GDP in Kazakhstan had fallen by 36 per cent. Unemployment rose and the proportion of people living below the poverty line grew from 25 per cent in 1992 to 43.4 per cent in 1999.

During the Soviet period, collectivised farms overtook nomadic shepherding in the steppes, though they were not as successful as the Soviets had hoped.

Unprofitable farms relied on money from the Soviet regime to survive. When the funds dried up, many people were forced to look elsewhere for work, and hundreds of thousands of people vacated the grasslands.

Since then, many farms have morphed back into grassy patches, dozens of ruined buildings lie crumbling, and equipment such as water pumps, formerly used by farmers to source water for their livestock, stand unused.

Livestock in the region plummeted. Data from the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization reveals that the number of sheep on the Kazakh steppe fell from 33 million in 1992 to 8.7 million in 1999. Cattle numbers dropped from 9.5 million to 4 million.

The new country engaged in widespread privatization, although many profitable enterprises went to members of the government-connected elite.

But new oil extraction operations after 2002 restored the GDP share of industry to about 30 per cent, and overall economic indicators rose substantially. Development of petroleum, natural gas, and mineral extractions has attracted most of the over $40 billion in foreign investment in Kazakhstan since 1993 and now accounts for some 57 per cent of the nation’s industrial output.

The country’s population, having declined by nearly 1.5 million post-1991, is now growing again, and stands at 18.7 million – of which almost 20 per cent are ethnic Russians. So too has its economic output -- per capita income now stands at $9,686.

Atyrau, the oil capital of Kazakhstan, is situated on the Caspian Sea near the new Tengiz oil field, and already provides nearly a quarter of Kazakhstan’s national revenue.

Until the arrival of the Russians in the eighteenth century, the history of Kazakhstan was determined by the movements, conflicts, and alliances of Turkic and Mongol peoples. The Kazakhs’ nomadic society suffered increasingly frequent incursions by the Russian Empire, ultimately being included in the Soviet Union that followed it.

After the Bolshevik takeover of the tsarist state, at first the Kazakh Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was part of the larger Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.

It became the separate Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic in 1936. The second-largest republic in the USSR, its capital was Alma-Ata, today known as Almaty.

Over time, as in many Soviet entities, dissatisfaction with authorities grew, reaching a peak during the 1980s, with political turmoil and rioting. In the end, Kazakhstan became the last republic to secede from the Soviet Union, on Dec.16, 1991, and was soon recognised as an independent state. Today, it seems to be an economically secure country.

 

The Arab Spring's Promise Has Failed Most Tunisians

By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

Tunisia has been seen as the country that benefited more than any other from the Arab Spring that swept the Middle East starting in 2011. Unlike Libya, Syria, and Yemen, it did not descend into civil war, nor did it oscillate between rule by the military or the Muslim Brotherhood, as was the case in Egypt.

After decades of contempt, brutality and arbitrary treatment from the police, along with corrupt government and the conspicuous enrichment of families close to Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, Tunisia’s kleptocratic ruler, the small towns of Tunisia’s rural interior and then the coastal cities, including the suburbs of Tunis, rose up to demand social justice and reclaim their dignity.

The catalyst for mass demonstrations was the death of a 26-year-old street vendor, who set himself on fire in December 2010 in protest at the confiscation of his wares and the humiliation inflicted on him by a municipal official in the poor town of town of Sidi Bouzid. Mohammed Bouazizi sold fruit and vegetables illegally because he could not find a job.

Anger and violence intensified following his death Jan. 4, 2011, and within 10 days Ben Ali was forced to resign and flee the country, after 23 years in power. He died two years ago in exile in Saudi Arabia. His ruling Constitutional Democratic Rally was banned and its resources confiscated.

At first, it seemed as if democracy had triumphed. Politicians went on to write a progressive constitution in 2014 and to build an inclusive political system that gave space to both Islamists and their former adversaries from Ben Ali’s ousted regime.

In fact, the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet, a coalition of civil society organizations, for “its decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy in Tunisia.”

It hasn’t turned out that way. Ben Ali’s successors have betrayed the revolution’s promise of dignity. Ten years on, the revolution has lost some of its momentum. The poverty is even more shocking, corruption still plagues daily life, and the political class is discredited.

Thanks to deadlock in its post-revolutionary parliamentary system, Tunisia has seen new governments at a rate of one per year, and three in just the last 12 months.

Despite expectations that the revolution would replace the elites in power, members of the former regime have resurfaced. The police were among the first vestiges of the old regime to return to the post-revolutionary landscape. Political parties are dominated by wealthy businessmen.

As faith in politics has dwindled, so has voter turnout. Over the course of Tunisia’s seven free elections, participation has fallen from a high of 68 per cent in the 2014 parliamentary elections to 42 per cent in 2019.

Tunisians have been expressing their anger publicly for many months now, but since November, just before the 10th anniversary of the revolution that brought down Ben Ali, that anger has grown louder. Hundreds of young people have been detained during ongoing nights of unrest since January 14.

Protestors have demonstrated and blocked roads, demanding jobs, local development, and meetings with representatives of the government to present their grievances and proposals.

Wrangles over wages have led to strikes and protests in vital sectors, including health, transport, and natural resources.

The victories won a decade ago are now under threat. A Truth and Dignity Commission, formally launched in June 2014 to investigate gross human rights violations, was undermined when a law was passed by parliament in September 2017 that undermined its work by offering an amnesty to public officials accused of corruption.

There have been demonstrations in many cities by people hard hit by the recession caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. It continues to suffocate efforts toward reforms and investments, particularly in the southern half of the country, where levels of unemployment hover around 60 per cent.

Opportunities for most people have become so scant, especially in Tunisia’s impoverished interior, that at least 13,000 Tunisian migrants crossed to Italy by boat just in 2020.

Tunisians remain trapped by the same forces their protests sought to dispel a decade ago. Deposing a dictator is by itself not enough to create a new political culture and a viable economy.