Essebsi death: Supporting Tunisia and opposing Muslim Brotherhood
Friday 26/July/2019 - 03:30 PM
Mahmoud Mohamadi
Tunisian President Béji Caid Essebsi, one of the oldest leaders of the world and one of the oldest political leaders in Tunisia passed away after a long career in which he held several posts with Tunisian independence leader Habib Bourguiba, through the regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.
In turn, the Tunisian presidency announced in a statement on its Facebook social networking site, the death of the 92-year-old Essebsi, Thursday morning, in the military hospital in the capital, saying: "The death of the deceased Béji Caid Essebsi on Thursday morning July 25, 2019, at 10:25 am.”
Curriculum Vitae
Born in 1926 in the suburb of Sidi Bouous, Tunisia, he worked as a lawyer before becoming involved in politics. He held several positions in the foreign ministry during the reign of Tunisia's first president Habib Bourguiba and the speaker of the parliament under the reign of ousted President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.
He studied at the secondary school of the Sadakia Institute, the stronghold of Tunisian elites, and then joined the Sorbonne University in Paris to study law.
After that, he returned to his country to practice law, where he pledged the issues of resistance referred by the French protection authorities to the military court, and defended a number of militants sentenced to death by the French colonizer.
Between 1956 and 1986, he held important responsibilities in the State, most notably the post of Minister of the Interior, Minister of State for Defense, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Ambassador of Tunisia to Paris and Bonn.
Three years later, Essebsi assumed the presidency of the House of Representatives for one year, and then left the political life at the end of the parliamentary term in 1994, and devoted to practice the profession of law again for two decades.
In 2011, he was appointed a prime minister a few weeks after the revolution; he led a government that organized Tunisia's first free elections in a ballot won by the Ennahda movement, the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in Tunisia, and won a relative majority in the National Constituent Assembly.
Anti-Islamist
In June 2012, he established the Tunis Appeal and after 2013, which was marked by political crises and violence attributed to the country's extremist movement, Tunisia's political class agreed to hold legislative and presidential elections before the end of 2014.
Since 2012, Essebsi has become the most prominent figure in the political arena when the country was on the brink of civil war between the Islamic and secular camps. However, Essebsi reached an agreement with Nahdha leader Rashid al-Ghannouchi to form a government capable of reaching the elections and drafting a modern constitution.
The agreement, which led Tunisia to a civil war, also led the country to the Nobel Peace Prize in 2015 after organizations such as the Labor Union, the Federation of Industry and Commerce, the Bar Association and the Human Rights League ran a national dialogue among the parties.
In the 2014 elections, Essebsi led his party to win the parliamentary elections. On December 21, 2014, Essebsi won the presidency of Tunis with a vote of 55.68%.
