Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali: Former president of Tunisia toppled at the start of the Arab Spring

Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali was the Tunisian despot ousted in 2011 after a public uprising exposed long-simmering public rage against corruption, economic tumult and dictatorial rule. His departure was the trigger for the Arab Spring, the revolt that ricocheted across north Africa and the Middle East and saw many longstanding autocrats pushed out of power.

Ben Ali, who has died of prostate cancer in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, aged 83, fled from the capital, Tunis, in January 2011, to Saudi Arabia, after weeks of protests over high unemployment, rising food prices, corruption and political repression. Security forces wielding machine guns and clubs were unable to crush thousands of nonviolent demonstrators who flooded the capital’s broad avenues. Ben Ali’s lack of support from the Tunisian army, which declined to fire on the citizenry, was a crucial factor in his plummet from power.

His downfall, after more than 23 years as president, was widely credited as a transformative moment in the region and sent a wave of revolutionary fervour through the streets of Egypt, Bahrain, Iran, Libya, Jordan and elsewhere. Ben Ali’s government was ranked among the most brutal in the region, according to Amnesty International and other experts.

Ben Ali, a burly, dark-haired man with a stern bearing, was Tunisia’s second leader since independence from France in 1956. He held various defence and diplomatic portfolios, but as a founder of Tunisia’s military security agency, his chief business was to spy on his countryfolk.

The industrialised west initially greeted Ben Ali as a saviour when, six weeks into his job as prime minister, he led a bloodless coup that toppled president Habib Bourguiba in November 1987. Bourguiba, a lawyer and anti-colonial resistance hero, had aligned his country with the west, but his erratic behaviour undermined his political support. Ben Ali essentially declared Bourguiba senile and ushered the former “president for life” into retirement.

Although Ben Ali was widely known for his violent crackdowns and mass arrests of perceived threats to Bourguiba’s rule, he oversaw a brief liberalisation of his country’s repressive laws and tore down the personality cult that Bourguiba had encouraged.

Tunisia, a small Mediterranean country squeezed between oil-rich neighbours Algeria and Libya, remained a favourite winter destination for wealthy Europeans and sided with the west in the fight against Islamist terrorism. Yet the veneer of a republic – on what was, in reality, an authoritarian state with a secular gloss and a rare degree of freedom for women – continued to be stripped away under Ben Ali.

He maintained a tight grip on the intelligence services and took a huge slice of the economy for personal gain. He altered the constitution to circumvent the three-term limit on the presidency and remain in office for life. He was elected to a fifth term in 2009, receiving just under 90 per cent of the vote.

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Although he presented himself as a champion of foreign investment and the tourism trade, economic growth in Tunisia was uneven. Poverty and despair were particularly rampant in the country’s interior. His reputation was further tarnished by the personal excesses of his family. The president’s second wife, Leila Trabelsi, was 20 years his junior, and her unremitting embrace of a lavish lifestyle earned her the epithet “the Imelda Marcos of the Arab world”.

Ben Ali’s son-in-law, businessman Mohamed Sakhr El Materi, came under public scrutiny after WikiLeaks published diplomatic cables that described a dinner at his beachfront compound that included ice cream flown in from France and a chicken-devouring pet tiger named Pasha that he kept in a cage.

Increasingly, conspicuous consumption of the Ben Ali and Trabelsi families threw into sharp relief the privilege enjoyed by the few in power and the privation of the vast majority of Tunisians. The surging violence in late 2010 quickly grew from a movement of poor and working-class communities to include a professional class that had tired of one-man rule.

Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali was born in 1936, in Hammam Sousse, a town on the coast of northern Tunisia, which was then a French protectorate. His first wife, Naima Kefi, was the daughter of a Tunisian army general who held a high position in the post-independence government. Ben Ali studied at the prestigious Saint-Cyr Military Academy in France and underwent further training in security and intelligence in the United States.

He headed Tunisian military security from 1964 to 1974, then was sent to Morocco as military attache and Poland as ambassador before rising to national security jobs of increasing power. He helped to lead crackdowns in 1978 on labour groups and in 1984 on riots over increases in food prices and other austerity measures.

In December 2010, protests over lack of jobs soon gave way to full-scale rioting in Tunis and other cities that authorities tried to repress with increasing violence. More than 200 people died in clashes, which Ben Ali attributed to radicals and Islamist extremists seeking to spread chaos.

Although internal security forces shot at demonstrators, the military chief of staff refused, sending a clear signal that Ben Ali’s days were numbered. The European Union said it was freezing assets controlled by the former leader and his family. The Tunisian government also issued an international arrest warrant for Ben Ali and members of his family on corruption charges.

Ben Ali is survived by his second wife and six children.

Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, former president of Tunisia, born 3 September 1936, died 19 September 2019

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