Tunisians to fix their country after feared dictator's fall

TUNIS (Reuters) - In a looted and burned-out villa of an affluent suburb of the Tunisian capital, vandals have scrawled insults against the former first couple on the soot-engrained walls.

Visitors wander through the debris downstairs, inspect the swimming pool at the back and take pictures as a souvenir. "It's a tourist site!" one jokes with his friend.

This is the home of Imed Trabelsi, a nephew of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali's wife Leila -- one of the more detested members of the wider family of the Tunisian ruler of 23 years whose oligarchical grip on the country was suffocating.

The northern suburbs are littered with the vandalized homes and businesses of members of the former ruling dynasty who maintained the strict secularism of Tunisia's post-independence leader Habib Bourguiba but entrenched themselves in political and economic life with all the trappings of the police state.

It's hard to believe that one month ago Tunisia's was one of the most feared in the Arab world. Today it cradles the hopes for a democratic renaissance in a region where repressive regimes have long had the backing of Western powers.

"We freed Tunisia from Ben Ali and the thieves," said Firas Hermassi, a 19-year-old student.

With a GDP per capita of $3,800 in 2009 and free health services for lower-income citizens, Tunisia was rather better off than most Arab countries. But its highly educated population was acutely aware that there was no level playing field.

"We are a laborious people, we like to work," said Firas. "Please help us now and keep investing in Tunisia."

Ben Ali fled the country on January 14 after an uprising over poverty, corruption and political repression that took him and his allies around the world by surprise. It was also remarkably peaceful by comparison to others -- around 100 people are thought to have died over the month and order has been restored after disturbances from Ben Ali supporters once he left.

The North African state of 10 million people has been in tumult ever since as ordinary people, labor unions and even a convoy of Tunisians from the poor, marginalized center of the country take to the streets in daily protest against the continuing presence of Ben Ali loyalists in an interim cabinet.

HYDE PARK CORNER

Central Tunis has been transformed into a kind of open-air Hyde Park corner where diverse groups of society pop up on any street corner to publicise long lists of grievances concerning salaries, nepotism and other conditions in professions whose integrity and independence was slowly whittled down during the years of authoritarian rule centered on Ben Ali and his family.

In past days rubbish collectors appeared outside the municipality building, transport company employees demanded the removal of managers linked to Ben Ali's rapacious family, and teachers marched down the central Habib Bourguiba Avenue -- named after the leader-for-life who Ben Ali succeeded in 1987.

But it was the prime minister's compound on the edge of the old city, or casbah, that became the focus of the protests.

"We need people with a new mentality. People with dirty hands cannot implement a clean program," said Habib Dridi, a legal officer, decrying a cabinet led by the premier in Ben Ali's government and containing other Ben Ali-era functionaries.

Tunisians feared that if such "ancient regime" figures remained, then their "revolution for freedom and dignity," as state television took to calling it, would be stunted and remembered as perhaps no more than a palace coup after the army told Ben Ali it would not longer back him and he must leave.

"There can be no place for men of tyranny in a government of salvation," one of the banners said.

As crowds broke through barriers to stream right up to the doors of the premier's office on Saturday, it was clear that the sympathies of police were with the street.

On Sunday police staged their own protest, demanding that a union be set up to protect them. "I ask the people's forgiveness, we know so many things, secret things," said one emotional officer who was held aloft by the crowds.

The uprising has been remarkable for its grassroots nature, lacking manipulation by leftists, Islamists or other political groups when it began in December after a young man in Sidi Bouzeid set himself alight after officialdom continually slammed doors in his face as he searched for a job.

The slogans this week have been highly egalitarian. The wall of one Ottoman-era building in the government compound by the casbah was transformed into a grafitti board. "Vive le peuple," "enfin libres" and "mort a la dictature," read the slogans.

Moncef Marzouqi, a leftist opposition party leader who returned from his Paris exile, talked last week of his party's "legitimacy springing from the revolutionary movement" as if this was Russia in 1917.

PAPER TIGER

Tunisians seem mesmerised by their own stunning success in removing a leader whose security apparatus -- bigger than that of France with only one sixth the population -- inspired such fear, but who turned out in the end to be a "paper tiger," in the words of prominent rights activist Sihem Bensedrine.

"He made a mistake with his last speech," she mused in her cramped office in Tunis, with files stacked up the walls cataloguing political prisoners and trials.

"I said to myself, this man doesn't realize he has been rejected by the street. He has only one option, he has to go."

In that speech on January 13, Ben Ali talked to Tunisians using a lot more local Tunisian dialect rather than classical Arabic, which can seem cold and distant.

It was a desperate gamble. He came across as a marked man fearing for his life, stretching his arm toward the camera as he beseeched the people: "I get you, I get you," then explained he would not try to run for office again in 2014.

"I arrived the next day, I felt it was over," says Bensedrine, who was in Spain after the regime harrassed her over internet and satellite media outlets she set up.

That night Ben Ali's prime minister announced he had left the country and after France -- whose Interior Ministry had days before talked of offering support to put down the revolt -- refused to receive him he headed to Saudi Arabia.

CLEANING OUT THE CLOSET

Now a grand clearing-out is underway as Tunisians consider fixing social, political and economic institutions seen as ruined by the ruling family's excesses. Commissions have been set up to compensate victims of human rights abuse and trace the theft of state money by the family and their ruling party.

"I think even the closest allies of Ben Ali did not know the scale of the corruption, said Tunisian politics professor Larbi Sadiki. "It outweighs the Marcos family in the Philippinnes. These people were really pillaging the state."

Thirty-three members of Ben Ali's clan and that of his wife Leila -- a hate figure for Tunisians because of her lavish lifestyle and extensive influence -- are under arrest.

Newspapers have used their new-found freedom to take potshots at Leila. One altered a photo of the couple voting in an election to show them stuffing a ballot box with dollars.

Other figures with key functions in the architecture of Ben Ali's system have been detained in recent days. They include Abdelwahhab Abdalla, Ben Ali's media czar who ran a network of control through positioning the heads of state media outlets.

Abdalla went into hiding and his house in a north Tunis suburb was looted by mobs. His editors and TV and radio managers kept to their rooms as staff took over editorial control, says Saleh Attia, a columnist at Assabah daily.

"We had a 'general supervisor', a censor appointed by Sakher al-Materi," he says, referring to a son-in-law of Ben Ali who owned the paper.

"Three days after Ben Ali left we sacked him. Now we are forming a new board ourselves which will decide on a new editorial line."

(Editing by Samia Nakhoul)