Tunisians win Nobel Peace Prize

Four organizations share award for efforts after Arab Spring

Houcine Abassi, (right) leader of the Tunisian General Labor Union, is congratulated Friday in his office in Tunis. He said he was “overwhelmed.”
Houcine Abassi, (right) leader of the Tunisian General Labor Union, is congratulated Friday in his office in Tunis. He said he was “overwhelmed.”

OSLO, Norway -- A coalition of Tunisian workers, business owners, rights activists and lawyers won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for intervening at a crucial time to push the North African country that sparked the Arab Spring revolutions toward democracy and away from civil war.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee cited the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet "for its decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy" after Tunisia's 2011 revolution that overthrew its long-time dictator.

"It established an alternative, peaceful political process at a time when the country was on the brink of civil war," the committee said in its citation.

The National Dialogue Quartet is made up of four key organizations: the Tunisian General Labor Union; the Tunisian Confederation of Industry, Trade and Handicrafts; the Tunisian Human Rights League; and the Tunisian Order of Lawyers, the country's bar association.

Nobel Committee Chairman Kaci Kullmann Five said the $960,000 prize was for the quartet as a whole, not for the four individual organizations. It wasn't immediately clear who would accept the award at the Dec. 10 award ceremony.

The prize is a huge victory for small Tunisia, whose young and still shaky democracy suffered two extremist attacks this year that killed 60 people and devastated its tourism industry. Most of the dead were tourists at a top museum and at one of Tunisia's famed Mediterranean beaches.

Mohammed Fadhel Mafoudh, head of the Tunisian Order of Lawyers, called the Nobel Peace Prize a message to all parties embroiled in political conflicts.

"[It's] to tell them that everything can be settled with dialogue and all can be settled in a climate of peace. And that the language of weapons leads us nowhere," he said.

Tunisian broadcast media interrupted coverage to announce the news, and social media exploded with celebratory commentary. The parliament president announced plans for a big national rally in the coming days.

Tunisian protesters sparked uprisings across the Arab world in 2011 that overthrew dictators and upset the status quo. But it is the only country in the region to build a democracy, involving a range of political and social forces to create a constitution, a Legislature and democratic institutions.

Kullmann Five said the prize was meant to encourage the Tunisian people and to show an example for other countries in the region.

"We hope we will contribute to safeguarding democracy in Tunisia and those who seek to promote peace in the Middle East and North Africa," she said.

The Nobel Committee said the quartet played a key role as a mediator and a force for democracy, paving the way for a peaceful dialogue among citizens, political parties and authorities across political and religious divides, countering the spread of violence.

It was formed after the July 2013 assassination of left-wing politician Mohammed Brahmi plunged Tunisia into crisis, with opposition parties boycotting the parliament. A national dialogue led by the quartet helped negotiate a transition from the elected Islamist-led government to an interim government of technocrats tasked with organizing new elections for a permanent government.

Nobel officials said they didn't manage to speak to any representatives of the quartet before the announcement.

Houcine Abassi, the leader of the Tunisian General Labor Union, said he was "overwhelmed."

"It's a prize that crowns more than two years of efforts deployed by the quartet when the country was in danger on all fronts," he said.

Abassi said he hopes the award will help "unite Tunisians to face the challenges presenting themselves now -- first and foremost, the danger of terrorism."

French President Francois Hollande said he was "happy for all the Tunisians" and added that the prize marks the success of the former French colony's transition to democracy.

"That is an encouragement to support Tunisia even more through all the hard times it faces, as we've seen with terrorist acts in the last weeks and months," Hollande said in Paris.

The uprising in Tunisia, provoked by high unemployment, corruption, dashed expectations and decades of repression by brutal security services, was set off on Dec. 17, 2010, when an itinerant fruit vendor set himself on fire in a remote southern city after being manhandled by police.

The revolution electrified the Arab world, and in rapid succession pro-democracy demonstrations broke out across the region, ultimately bringing down the rulers of Egypt and Libya and pushing Syria into civil war.

The award capped a week of Nobel Prize announcements, with the winners of the medicine, physics, chemistry and literature awards presented earlier in Stockholm.

The economics award -- not an original Nobel Prize but created in 1968 -- will be announced Monday.

Information for this article was contributed by Malin Rising, Bouazza ben Bouazza, Paul Schemm, Sylvie Corbet and Angela Charlton of The Associated Press.

A Section on 10/10/2015

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