Recently I mentioned in a round up post that Tunisia had been strengthening its commitment to women’s rights. Yesterday the Times featured a rather heartening account (£) of the careful preparations being made in the run up to tomorrow’s elections. It opens with a description of a young student pretending to be blind – this is part of his training to help visually impaired voters cast their ballot. Another voter describes how she, her husband, and her three children have all independently chosen to support quite different parties. 530 foreign observers, including 180 from the European Union, will oversee the voting process, and poll workers are being trained how to check polling cards to prevent fraud – 27,000 bottles of indelible ink have been bought (from Britain) in order to help identify those who have already cast their vote.
In today’s Guardian there was another moderately encouraging piece – Amal El Mekki’s ‘The veil does not stop the truth from entering my head’. Here she explains why she is going to vote for a secular party even though she is a devout Muslim.
Being an educated Tunisian woman, I believe that Allah is with me wherever I go, at home, at college, in the street, at the mosque, in my heart. And that is why I can’t accept the use of my religion as a trump card in the elections.
By giving my vote to a secular party I can make sure that my country is going in the right path of freedom, human rights, democracy – and true faith.
The secular party she has chosen is CPR, led by Moncef Marzouki, exiled by the previous regime, and usually described as a moderate, leftist figure, although he has expressed a willingness to work with the Islamist party Ennahda, also banned until recently, but now likely to emerge as the largest single party. The party does not find favour with Tunisia’s many bloggers. In the Times piece, Karim Ben Abdullah explains:
“All the bloggers share the same idea for some reason. If you think like a blogger in Tunisia, and have analysed and have seen what has happened, you would do the same. Blogging is about free expression. It’s about freedom, about being oneself,” he said. “There are no Islamist bloggers at all.”