By Koh Choon Hwee 30 May 2011

As a historian, Professor Richard Pennell approached the recent events in North Africa by taking a long, historical view of the region. In his talk, Professor Pennell focussed mainly on Tunisia and Libya because of the stark contrast they afforded both historically and in their present political developments.

Tunisia was a French protectorate – not a colony – and operated under a semi-monarchical ruler who wielded effective autonomy, although nominally he was an official of the Ottoman Empire. In other words, Tunisia had a history of indigenous political rule and possessed administrative structures. Libya, on the other hand, was ruled by the Italians in a manner comparable to the Belgian Congo. Under Italian rule, many Libyans lost their lives, their land and economic activity, and the productive forces of the country. When Libya finally gained independence, it was one of the poorest countries in the world with an economy consisting of the export of scrap metal and high quality grass. This changed, of course, upon the discovery of oil.

In contrast with Tunisia, Libya was thoroughly disrupted by its colonial experience as it lost much of its productive capabilities and any form of political structure. Professor Pennell argues that Tunisia is a society with a long-term state presence whereas Libya is a society without a long-term state presence, and this historical contrast does help to explain the greatly different developments we observe now in both countries, especially with regards to fallout from the uprisings.

Moving now to the recent protest movements, Professor Pennell noted that the initial disturbances in each country were regional and spread from the periphery towards the centre in Tunis and Tripoli. This was rather counter-intuitive as most would have expected the disturbances to have begun in the capital. Professor Pennell accounts for this by saying that economic conditions were worse in the periphery.

Professor Pennell also argued that the ruling regimes in Tunisia and Libya were disconnected from their people, which prompted them to behave in absurd ways. For example, the catalyst for the Tunisian uprisings was the self-immolation of Mohammad Bouazizi on 17 December 2010. Professor Pennell critiqued Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali’s decision for an official photo-op with a hospitalized Bouazizi:

Considering that Bouazizi’s actions were precipitated by the very unjust system that Ben Ali had propagated and presided over, Professor Pennell found this move by Ben Ali baffling. He then recounted another instance of baffling behaviour in the Libyan case. Saadi, Qadhafi’s son, had decided to hold a BBC interview in the lion enclosure of the Tripoli zoo for reasons only known to him. In this interview he denied having given orders to the army to shoot unarmed protestors despite evidence to the contrary. Professor Pennell then gave a brief political and economic history of both Tunisia and Libya, focussing on the members of the ruling political family in each case.

In the case of Tunisia, Professor Pennell noted that Ben Ali had divorced his wife in order to marry Leila Trabelsi, a hairdresser, in 1992. Leila Trabelsi was a powerful and intelligent woman who presented herself as the voice of Tunisian and Arab women, projecting herself as a modern, forward-thinking face of Tunisia. Pennell noted the preponderance of members of the Ben Ali-Trabelsi family who occupied not political, but economic posts – within the family many were heading banks and in control of Carrefour, Renault-Peugeot dealerships etc.

In the case of Libya, Qadhafi, his ideas, and his family were paramount to understanding the dysfunction of its political system. Pennell described the Libyan political system of committees which are elected at a base level; Qadhafi felt that representation went against the spirit of democracy and thus introduced a unique Libyan solution in the form of committees. Nevertheless, Professor Pennell admitted that “how this [Qadhafi’s system of committees] differs from representative democracy, nobody quite knows”.

We were then treated to a rather intriguing account of Qadhafi’s children. Most interesting were Hannibal Qadhafi, who was rather irrelevant to the Libyan political picture and spent much of his time getting drunk in Europe and having public fist fights with his wife, Alin Skaf. Saif-al Islam Qadhafi poses as the intellectual and moderniser of Libya. Nevertheless he has proven himself a stalwart defender of the regime since the uprisings began. Saadi Qadhafi, whom we had seen earlier in the Tripoli Zoo, was a footballer, but was also a member of the FIFA governing council and the Libyan Olympic Committee. Ayesha, Qadhafi’s only daughter, was a lawyer and part of Saddam Hussein’s defence team.

Professor Pennell summed up his introduction to the Tunisian and Libyan political elite by pointing out that in Tunisia, the ruling family held mainly financial and economic power, whilst in Libya, they held military power.

By way of conclusion, Professor Pennell said that it is not so much that what happened in Tunisia “caused” what happened in Egypt which “caused” what happened in Libya. Rather, the events in one country “chimed in” with already existing demonstrations in other countries. For example, the rise in food prices this year affected countries all over the world, but manifested in different ways locally. In India this sparked an anti-corruption campaign; in South Korea it sparked protests; in Tunisia and Libya it was one of the contributing factors to the uprisings. His argument thus, is to look at the way these events lock together and parallel each other. There is no “Arab Spring” as such, and he remains a skeptic of the term as there is no single movement, whether pan-Arab or Islamist or something else.

In response to a question about a growing pan-Arab identity, Professor Pennell pointed out that there were people in Bolivia and South Korea who shared some of the revolutionary sentiments and consciousness as people in the Middle East; in other words, while there appears to be a sense of solidarity amongst the Arab peoples, one ought to keep in mind that such a solidarity is also felt across ethnicities and cultures. The picture below shows Korean protestors supporting the movements in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya.

In sum, Professor Pennell feels one ought to be cautious in understanding the uprisings in the region as a contiguous, pan-Arab movement and drawing, too liberally, causal links across the myriad protest movements. Rather, these broad, metanarratival approaches to understanding the events ought to be subordinated to the particular political, economic and historical contexts of each region: the people involved should also be understood more in social, economic and political terms rather than ethnic or religious terms.