Tunisian group wins 2015 Nobel Peace Prize

Mangalore Today News Network

Oct 09, 2015: The Norwegian Nobel Committee on Friday bestowed the Nobel Peace Prize on an alliance of four Tunisian civil society groups for their tireless efforts to seek harmony and foster democracy in the nation that gave birth to the Arab Spring.

 

The quartet of groups, including a worker’s union with more than 1 million members, has worked to advance democracy in Tunisia, which has made relative strides in reforms as other Arab Spring nations struggle with greater violence, instability and the re-emergence of dictatorships.

The groups, the committee said, made a “decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy in Tunisia in the wake of the Jasmine Revolution of 2011.”

“More than anything, the prize is intended as encouragement for the Tunisian people who have laid the groundwork for a national fraternity which the committee hopes will be followed by other countries,” the committee said.

The National Dialogue Quartet comprises four key organizations in Tunisian civil society, including the Tunisian General Labor Union, the Tunisian Confederation of Industry, Trade and Handicrafts, the Tunisian Human Rights League and the Tunisian Order of Lawyers. But the award also seemed to more broadly honor a nation where the Arab Spring began after street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire on Dec. 17, 2010 to protest his helplessness after his wares were confiscated by local authorities.

Houcine Abassi, secretary general of the labor union, told The Associated Press, the group was “overwhelmed” by the Nobel selection.

“It’s a prize that crowns more than two years of efforts deployed by the quartet when the country was in danger on all fronts,” he said.

“I am happy,” he said, adding that the quartet members weren’t expecting the prize.

He described how the UGTT, a human rights group, a trade group and a lawyers group joined together to try to “bring the country out of crisis.”

What followed was an difficult struggle for political openness that in Tunisia that has remained more on track than anywhere in the region despite being scared by political violence and terror attacks by religious extremists.

While the nation remains vexed by complex challenges and divisions, it nevertheless offers a far more successful outcome than the Arab Spring brought to a bevy of other nations including Libya, Egypt and Syria.