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Since he took office, President Biden has repeatedly signaled that his administration would stand up for democracy and human rights. He cast the United States as a warrior in the global trenches, battling against the advance of authoritarian powers such as China and Russia. He insisted his administration would prioritize human rights after four years of transactional opportunism from his predecessor.
Almost immediately, though, there were reasons to be skeptical about Biden’s stated “values” agenda, especially when it comes to U.S. policy in the Middle East. The new administration could muster only a slap on the wrist for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, who Biden had vowed on the campaign trail to make into a “pariah” for his alleged role in the assassination of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Human rights advocates were also irked by the administration’s role in preserving support for Egypt’s dictatorship and Israel’s military occupation of the Palestinian territories, as well as its inability to swiftly draw down the war in Yemen.
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Now, there’s the crisis in Tunisia, where President Kais Saied invoked emergency protocols to sack the prime minister and suspend parliament. He also imposed a month-long curfew. Saied’s supporters welcomed his intervention amid mounting public frustrations over the government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Many critics, though, see the move as the biggest test yet for Tunisia’s democratic institutions and fear Saied could be presiding over a coup akin to Abdel Fatah al-Sissi’s military takeover in Egypt in 2013.
It’s a well-worn cliche that Tunisia is the only democratic success story of the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings. Its fledgling democracy persevered even as a ruthless counterrevolution took hold in Egypt, civil war hollowed out Syria, and Libya and Yemen both collapsed into a morass of warlordism. But the cliche obscures the constant struggle to build and maintain that democratic rule. In the past decade, Tunisia has endured waves of political turmoil, yet its factions overcame them through dialogue, compromise and fresh elections.
Saied’s gambit may bring that process to a shuddering halt. A retired law professor, Saied says he is acting constitutionally, though analysts pointed to an apparent overinterpretation of the article that justifies the emergency measures and the country has yet to form a constitutional court to adjudicate over such decisions. In Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — home to governments that constitute a kind of anti-Arab Spring axis — commentators and social media users celebrated what they called the downfall of Ennahda, the moderate Islamist party that held sway in the now-suspended parliament and that opponents accuse of having ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
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In Tunisia, Saied’s supporters cheered a shaking up of the status quo, no matter its political risks. “Those celebrating in the streets are less worried about a concentration of power than they are about a government that has seemingly abandoned its people,” wrote Fadil Aliriza, a nonresident scholar at the Middle East Institute. “This is evident in the current health crisis, the continuing economic crisis, and the long-festering crises” in various sectors, from education to transportation.
Ennahda officials have decried Saied’s move as a coup and urged supporters to take to the streets. The specter of police crackdowns loom; authorities also raided the news office of Al Jazeera. “It’s ominous for human rights when a president claims constitutional backing for seizing enormous powers and the next thing you know police start going after journalists,” Eric Goldstein, acting Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. “Whatever the government’s record in responding to the Covid-19 crisis, concentrating powers that could be used against basic rights should always set off alarm bells.”
The question now is what the rest of the world will do. The Biden administration released only anodyne statements of concern and said it had not yet determined whether the events in Tunisia constituted a coup. Experts fear a repeat of the Obama administration’s failure to arrest Sissi’s dismantling of Egyptian democracy, which was backed by Persian Gulf monarchies eager to snuff out political Islam. “If the world’s democracies do not come out strongly against the coup attempt, it leaves an opportunity for counterrevolutionary powers like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to influence the crisis in support of Saied, much like they did for … Sissi,” wrote Sharan Grewal of the Brookings Institution. “With Tunisia’s economy in the doldrums, foreign support — and aid — may well shape the outcome of this crisis, for good or for ill.”
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American lawmakers argue that the United States it has the capacity to exert pressure on Saied and ensure the interruption of the country’s democratic order does not last beyond a month. The United States has committed over $1 billion in aid to Tunisia since pro-democracy protests toppled the country’s long-ruling dictatorship in 2011. On Tuesday, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) introduced legislation that would tether U.S. security assistance to whether a government is upholding human rights, humanitarian law and democracy.
“I think Tunisia is a perfect example of the importance of this bill,” she told Today’s WorldView, adding that her proposed act — which has limited hopes for passage — “would make clear that if Tunisian leadership did not comply with international law, then that funding would be suspended.”
Lawmakers across the political spectrum, including Sen. Lindsay O. Graham (R-S.C.), have urged the Biden administration to do more to buttress Tunisia’s faltering democracy. But Omar and other influential voices on the left want the aspirational rhetoric of the Biden administration around human rights to come with a fuller and sharper set of teeth, according universal rather than ad hoc standards.
For example, Omar’s Stop Arming Human Rights Abusers Act would establish an independent, bipartisan commission that would make recommendations about whether to list or delist a country based on its human rights record. “We can’t force the State Department or the White House to say that a coup is a coup, or a genocide is a genocide, or a war crime is a war crime,” Omar said. “There will always be politics involved. But we can add a lever of pressure that comes from an independent body of experts looking at the facts and saying, ‘This should trigger a suspension of aid, according to the law.’”
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Skeptics of such an approach may argue that it would compromise U.S. strategic interests in places such as the Middle East in favor of an agenda that may just push away certain governments toward U.S. rivals. Omar rebuffed such thinking. Tying U.S. security aid to human rights “doesn’t mean we don’t continue to cooperate with our partners in the region,” she said, “but by putting in place clear red lines for human rights abuses, the [United States] would leave no doubt as to what activities will trigger U.S. accountability.”
Saied has given himself a month to steer his country back toward democratic order. Civil society groups are calling for the president to announce a clear timeline to relinquish his extraordinary powers. It’s unclear, for now, to what extent Biden is willing to hold him to account.