Tunisia celebrate a month of freedom with red roses (News Feature)

By Clare Byrne Feb 14, 2011, 15:38 GMT

Paris - Love was in the air in Tunisia Monday.

With St Valentine's Day falling on the one-month anniversary of the country's liberation from a 23-year dictatorship, Tunisians were feeling doubly romantic.

'We're celebrating our love for our country today. Everyone's buying each other roses,' Arbi Chouikha, professor at the Institute of Press and News Sciences in Tunis said.

A month ago, North Africa's smallest country fired up the Arab world by spectacularly ousting long-time leader Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali by dint of a campaign of street protests.

The revolution, which ignited the uprising that toppled Egypt's president Hosny Mubarak last week, shot to pieces a belief in the West that Arabs have little appetite for democracy.

Four weeks later the posters of a stern-looking Ben Ali that once hung in every public building and town square in Tunisia have been ripped down and the process of building a democracy is moving ahead full steam.

Members of Ben Ali's corrupt old clique have been purged from the unity government set up to manage the transition.

His old RCD party, which controlled the economy, has been suspended and a law entrenching the independence of the government from political parties has been passed.

Political prisoners have been granted amnesty, all bans on political parties are being reviewed and restrictions on media freedoms have been lifted, encouraging the type of debate that was stifled for two decades.

'The Tunisian people have found their voice again and everyone wants everything straight away,' a slightly bemused Moncef Marzouki, head of a small opposition party and candidate in the upcoming presidential election, told a press conference in Paris last week.

Top of the wishlist for many Tunisians is employment, one of the key triggers of the December/January revolt.

Official unemployment is listed at 13 per cent, but the real figure is believed to be as high as 40 per cent.

A month of clashes between police and protesters aggravated the situation, by causing tourists, the mainstay of the economy, to beat a hasty retreat back to Europe.

With better prospects still way off, thousands of young Tunisians have taken advantage of lax coastal patrols during the current period of transition to sneak away to Europe.

'I have no work and no chance to survive,' one of thousands of young men who have turned up by boat on the Italian island of Lampedusa in the past week told Italian media.

The situation in Lampedusa has shone a light on the difficult road ahead in Tunisia, which has North Africa's most educated youth but little by way of natural resources bar a 1,300-kilometre coastline.

In an attempt to attract more aid and investment, the transitional government of Prime Minister Mohammed Ghannouchi is planning an international conference on Tunisia's economic and political future in the coming weeks.

The United States, Germany and France have already given the idea the thumbs up.

In another encouraging sign British and French travel agencies have announced the resumption of their trips to Tunisia by the end of February or early March.

'We can't do everything in a day,' Chouikha reasoned.

'But everything is possible. We must hold on, we must succeed, if only to show the world that democracy can come out of an Arab country.'

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