Constitution-writing pitfalls

As the political crisis is raging in Tunisia and entering its almost third week next Monday, I decided to look at some of late last year's think tank literature on the stalled constitution-writing. This Atlantic Council's paper is truly illuminating in providing some answers as to why the current crisis broke out. It is obviously not the isolated incident of Chokri Belaid's brazen murder (as horrendous as it is). Belaid was hardly THE opposition leader, as some media now rush to say. His party had only one seat in the Constituent Assembly. And there are more vocal political players denouncing Ennahda than he was. But his killing marked the culmination of the divisions deriving from the country's paralysis and flawed constitution-writing process.

What Pickard makes clear in this paper is the mistake of vesting both legislative and constitution-drafting functions in one body, whose work got obstructed by gnawing socio-economic grievances. But a more important point is that political players could have averted some of the current problems, had they followed the South African model and agreed on a Declaration of Intent, which "set forward a common set of principles", according to the writer. Had they agreed from the beginning that certain principles would remain untouchable, such as Article 1 of the Constitution and the Personal Status Code, some of the most protracted debates about the role of Sharia and women's "complementarity" to men would have been avoided. These very same questions engendered some of the most acrimonious and divisive debates of the country's transitional period. They polarized the already fragmented society even further, pitting Islamist-leaning citizens against those who support secularism. Maybe had the politicians drawn up that commonly accepted foundation from the beginning, the country would have not gotten into this bitter political wrangling that serves no one's interests.