Tunisian national dialogue quartet wins 2015 Nobel peace prize
 The Tunisian national dialogue quartet, a coalition of civil society organisations, has won the 2015 Nobel peace prize. Kaci Kullmann Five, the newly appointed chairman of the Norwegian Nobel committee, said the quartet had formed an alternative peaceful political process in 2013 when the country was on the brink of civil war and subsequently guaranteed fundamental rights for the entire population. Live Nobel peace prize 2015 goes to Tunisian civil society groups – live updates Houcine Abassi, the secretary general of one of the member organisations, the Tunisian General Labour Union, said he was “overwhelmed” by the prize. “It’s a message that dialogue can lead us on the right path. This prize is a message for our region to put down arms and sit and talk at the negotiation table,” he told Reuters. The prize is a huge victory for Tunisia, whose young and still shaky democracy suffered two extremist attacks this year that killed 60 people and devastated the tourism industry. Anouar Moalla, spokesman for Tunisia’s pioneering truth and dignity commission, now investigating the former dictatorship of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, said: “It [the Nobel announcement] gives us a lot of hope, this is something unbelievable.” The Arab spring began in Tunisia with protests that brought down the government of Ben Ali in January 2011, but the country fell into crisis in the following years. The Nobel committee said the quartet had made a “decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy in Tunisia” at time of political assassinations and widespread social unrest. “An essential factor for the culmination of the revolution in Tunisia in peaceful, democratic elections last autumn was the effort made by the quartet to support the work of the constituent assembly and to secure approval of the constitutional process among the Tunisian population at large,” the committee said. |
