World congratulates Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet for winning 2015 Nobel

The Nobel committee confounded predictions Friday by awarding the prestigious peace prize to the Tunisia National Dialogue Quartet – an alliance of civil groups relatively unknown outside the North African country.

As the only United Nations body which has a formal tripartite structure with employers, unions and governments the ILO sets global standards for our workplace economies and democracies – which provide the foundations for peace in all societies.

In January 2014 Tunisia adopted a new constitution containing important human rights guarantees, although the authorities still continue to arbitrarily restrict freedom of expression and association.

“It is a source of pride for Tunisia, which has proven that dialogue saves a country from crisis, not weapons”, he said. That is the only true path. So, congratulations to the people of Tunisia!

Peter Wallensteen, research professor of peace studies in Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for worldwide Peace Studies, part of the new Keough School, says, “It’s a surprising choice as the Nobel committee has had a tradition of highlighting work on nuclear disarmament on the decennials of the use of nuclear weapons in 1945”.

“Tunisia has no other solution than dialogue despite ideological disagreements”, he said in a video posted to his Facebook page. “We did it together, the four of us”.

“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”, when political tensions were shaking the country and “stability was threatened”, he said.

The quartet was a long shot for the prize and none were more surprised than its actual members.

Ben Ali stepped down in the midst of mass protests a few weeks later, followed by the election of government led by the Islamist Ennahda party in October. That makes it a resounding exception among the nations of the Arab Spring revolts.

It deserves encouragement. And the rest of the Arab world deserves a little cause for hope amid all the anger and bloodshed.

Committee head Kaci Kullman Five told Reuters: “I think it’s timely to put the limelight on the positive results that have been obtained in Tunisia to try to safeguard them, to try to inspire the Tunisian people to build further on this basis”.

– Ahmed Samih, general director of Cairo-based Andalus Institute for Tolerance and anti-Violence Studies, said the award is “a recognition from the world that NGOs and labour syndicates in Tunisia rescued the country from a political fighting between the civil and Islamic forces”.

Watch shop manageress Safia Shabani agreed. But the Norwegian Nobel Committee emphasised that the prize “is awarded to this quartet, not to the four individual organisations as such”. With militants infiltrating from neighboring Libya, terrorism remains a threat. “She also cited that the group established an alternative, peaceful political process at a time when the country was on the brink of civil war”.

Many Tunisians at the time blamed the new Islamist government led by the Ennahda movement, with tens of thousands of people taking to the streets. The Jasmine Revolution is how the popular uprising that broke out in the country has come to be known.