His friends describe him as Tunisia’s political fox; his enemies say he is lucky. Former foreign minister under ousted President Ben Ali, Kamal Morgan has been able to transform his persona from despised politician to praised presidential hopeful.
Last month Ennahda head Rached Ghannouchi said he would not rule out the possibility of choosing Morgan, leader of the Initiative Party, as a consensus candidate for the next presidential elections. This was received well by neither the opposition nor the supporters and followers of the Ennahda Movement itself.
His friends describe him as Tunisia’s political fox; his enemies say he is lucky. Former foreign minister under ousted President Ben Ali, Kamal Morgan has been able to transform his persona from despised politician to praised presidential hopeful.
Last month Ennahda head Rached Ghannouchi said he would not rule out the possibility of choosing Morgan, leader of the Initiative Party, as a consensus candidate for the next presidential elections. This was received well by neither the opposition nor the supporters and followers of the Ennahda Movement itself.
I am the best and most worthy
Some party leaders accused Ghannouchi and Ennahda of deception by “selling what it does not own.”
Morgan seized the opportunity to step into the limelight, having the support of the largest political party in the country: “I do not deny that I am thinking of nominating myself in the forthcoming presidential elections and I believe that the role of the next Tunisian president will essentially be consensual in nature.”
“I currently see myself the best and most worthy personality for the position of the President of the Republic on the grounds that I was in the past the head of two sovereign ministries— defense and foreign.”
In one full sweep, Morgan’s statement essentially dismissed 86-year-old Beji Caid Essebsi, leader of the Nidaa Tounes Party who is favored in opinion polls as the next president. Morgan believes that Essebsi’s age makes Morgan a more realistic winner.
Born into leadership
Morgan was born on May 9, 1948 in the Hammam-Sousse coastal area in east-central Tunisia, home of the deposed President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Morgan, son of Sousse’s governor during the Bourguiba era, inherited the “genes” of the constitutionalists (in reference to the Constitutional Rally Party during Bourguiba’s era) from his father.
In 1977, he joined the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and he held several high-ranking positions at the UN headquarters in Geneva and in Djibouti and Egypt.
In 1996, Morgan became Tunisia’s ambassador and its permanent representative to the United Nations Office in Geneva and relevant organizations. He then became the special representative of the UN Secretary-General in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In 2001 he was the second highest ranking person in the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
Through his network of international relations, which he established during his tenure at the UN, Morgan was able to utilize his past in planning for his political future.
Leila Trabelsi reveals the secret
In her controversial book This Is My Truth, Leila Trabelsi (wife of former President Ben Ali) revealed that her husband once believed Morgan would be his successor.
“He couldn’t think of anybody who is better than a son from his hometown and his brother- in-law (Kamal Morgan’s wife is the daughter of Bouraoui Ben Ali—cousin of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali) and his Foreign Minister Kamal Morgan, who also enjoys the respect of influential international powers.”
In her controversial book, Leila Trabelsi confirms that the appointment of Morgan by Ben Ali to high ranking and sovereign ministerial positions was not by mere coincidence. “He wanted him to become proficient in all fields and to gain extensive experience in order to take over the administration of the country’s affairs after his training period.”
On 17 August, 2005, Morgan became Minister of Defense and on January 14, 2010, the Minister of Foreign Affairs. On January 26, 2010, he became a member of the Political Bureau of the ruling Democratic Constitutional Rally at the time.
Morgan has not denied any aspects of the book. “I was on the top of the list of Ben Ali’s regime statesmen. It seemed that there was a kind of confidence in me because they knew me better than they knew other Tunisian politicians,” Morgan said.
The revolution put a dent in his presidential plans
Ironically, the revolution, which aborted Ben Ali’s plans to make Morgan his successor in 2014, when the term of the former as president would have ended, has re-awakened Morgan’s presidential dreams and made Morgan again a potential candidate for the presidency in a democratic elections that have nothing to do with Ben Ali or his era.
Since the revolution, Morgan was a vague and incomprehensible number in the Tunisian political equation. Morgan, who spoke with Ben Ali on the phone on January 14, 2011, when the country was on the brink of a volcano, to ask him about his opinion on the fast-moving and serious events, admitted that he was in supportive of implementing a change in the style of governance during Ben Ali’s era from within, yet he was not in support of getting rid of the entire political system.
Morgan has described the revolution as “a major earthquake which has struck the country without any prior warning. Most of the political class in Tunisia was not expecting a revolution that would remove the entire ruling system,” he said.
After the fall of Ben Ali’s regime, Morgan continued to exercise his duties as a foreign minister until January 28, 2011. He was accused of “betraying the revolution” because he delivered passports to the family of the ousted Ben Ali.
Morgan admitted that he did so but claimed that on January 15, 2011, the first minister – meaning Mohamed Ghannouchi, called him and asked him to deliver these passports to Ben Ali’s family after getting the approval of Fouad Mebazaa, the president at that time. However, this slip forced Morgan to leave the Ghannouchi government two weeks after the escape of Ben Ali under pressure from the angry street, which categorized him as a symbol of the former regime.
“I have a share in the revolution“
Morgan sought to form the Constitutional Initiative Party on March 17, 2011, taking advantage, like other members of the Constitutional Rally Party, of the political legacy of the constitutionalists, in search of reconciliation with the people fuming with anger from the dissolved Constitutional Rally Party yet still sympathetic to Bourguiba and his party.
Morgan was supposed to be banned from participation in the political life and in the elections of the Constituent Assembly in 2011, by virtue of Chapter 15 of the electoral law, which provided for the exclusion of all constitutional rally party members. However, his party participated in the elections and was able to win five seats in the Constituent Assembly and to stand up to the political exclusion law.
The party leaders were very courageous in declaring the Constitutional Initiative Party as an extension of the dissolved Constitutional Rally Party. Their boldness reached an unprecedented level when one of the party members in the Constituent Assembly publicly described Ben Ali as “the master of all those in the assembly who could not be compared with the current semi-politicians.”
Morgan does not deny the constitutional nature of his party and he insists on confirming, at each and every occasion, that “everyone knows that I belong to a well-established constitutional family. My father has taught me to be like this.”
Eat with the wolf and cry with the shepherd
Morgan knows that if he wants to reach Carthage Palace he must “eat with the wolf and cry with the shepherd”. In other words, he should not lose the hidden support of the Ennahda movement while at the same time he should not antagonize Nidaa Tounes Party. Perhaps this was the reason that made him announce, unlike other parties close to Nidaa Tounes, that he does not rule out the possibility that his party might nominate its members in a number of the latter’s lists.
Morgan, who sometimes boasts about the support provided to him by the US – which has been confirmed by Naziha Rajiba, a journalist, in one of her articles, and who has promised to reveal more information on this topic in a book which she is intending to publish before the election – is today required to secure the internal front and to mobilize support for his candidacy before he starts his burdensome climb to the post of the president, which he has been pursuing since 2009.
