Counter Summit (suite)

We have heard from several people now about the situation in Tunisia, which also matches everything I have heard and seen there. From what I know it is a regime about as repressive as Syria. The big difference is that everybody knows that Syria is a repressive rogue state, but few people know about Tunisia. Part of the reason for this is that the Tunisian regime is even more repressive towards foreign journalists, so little first hand news get out. The other reason is that Tunisia is doing well in neoliberalist terms and thus is praised for that by many conservative journalists.

This is precisely the reason why I think we have to at least try to have a counter summit there. I agree that counter summits somewhere else are not useless. However, if we try to have a counter summit in Tunisia and are prevented from doing it, it would be an excellent exposure of the Tunisian regime (which is why I actually assume that they won’t prevent it).

Having said this, we also need to take into account the precarious situation of Tunisian activists and to some extend also the situation of other Arab and African activists who don’t have a passport of a country that will get them out of jail in Tunis. As it has been said before we need to listen closely and yes, Sami, I think it would be great if you could get as many people as possible to join this list.

However, there is also a third possibility, which I am not proposing and I don’t like very much, but we should keep it in mind : We can also have a counter event or counter actions by only those people who will not be endangered. (e.g. the Tunisian regime is not going to crack down on a demonstration of Germans, because they will avoid anything that could cause bad press in a country where most Tourists come from to Tunisia). As I said, I don’t like it very much, but the strategy has been used before by quite successful campaigns like the International Solidarity Movement and the Human Shields in Iraq.

As to what to do from now and referring to Sasha : “First things first, who is calling for counter summit, how many are they, what are their demands, etc.”

1. We need to contact everybody who is already calling for a counter summit and get them to join this list or at least write their comments about our proposal. We could add to the proposal the different suggestions we have for a counter event (inside, outside), saying that we want to discuss this with everybody who endorses the proposal once it has gone through a second phase of discussion.
2. We need to ask groups, NGOs etc. to endorse the proposal, so we have a list of people who are behind this. This will give us a better idea how many people we are, and also give others a better idea about who is behind the counter summit.

Would it be a good idea to put the proposal on nawaat and other websites asking groups to endorse it ?