IN MOST of the Arab world the hopefulness of the Arab Spring quickly gave way to chaos, blood and democratic setbacks. But one country has fared better than the rest. Tunisia, the first of the Arab countries to oust its dictator, has managed to stay on a democratic path even as the region around it crumbles.
One of the biggest contributors to this progress was rewarded on October 9th, when the National Dialogue Quartet was given the Nobel peace prize. The work of the quartet, a coalition of civil-society organisations, in rallying the public behind the constitutional process was “an essential factor for the culmination of the revolution in Tunisia in peaceful, democratic elections last autumn”, the prize committee said. “The broad-based national dialogue that the quartet succeeded in establishing countered the spread of violence in Tunisia and its function is therefore comparable to that of the peace congresses to which Alfred Nobel refers in his will.”
But the prize is more than just an acknowledgment of the quartet’s brave...Continue reading
Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/1RxWOFh
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