Zine El Abidine Ben Ali

Zine El Abidine Ben Ali (3 September 1936 – 19 September 2019) was a Tunisian officer and politician who served as the second president of Tunisia from 7 November 1987 to 14 January 2011, when the Tunisian revolution forced him to flee the country. ^{1 2}

He was born in Hammam Sousse in 1936 to moderate-income parents, the fourth of eleven children. He trained at the Special Military School of Saint-Cyr and the School of Applied Artillery in France, and at intelligence and anti-aircraft schools in the United States. He directed military intelligence from 1964 to 1974, served twice as director general of national security (1977–1980 and 1984–1986), and was Tunisia's ambassador to Poland from 1980 to 1984. In April 1986 he became minister of the interior, and on 2 October 1987 President Bourguiba appointed him prime minister. ¹

On 7 November 1987 Bourguiba was removed from power, and Ben Ali, his prime minister, succeeded him as president the same day; both the English and Arabic articles name Bourguiba as his direct predecessor in the office, with no interim holder between them. ^{1 2}

His party, renamed the Constitutional Democratic Rally in 1988, dominated the state. He was re-elected in several elections in which he won more than 90 per cent of the vote, his final re-election coming on 25 October 2009. The articles record both the stability and economic growth his government claimed and the repression, corruption and rights abuses of which his regime was accused; the museum attributes such judgements to their sources and does not adopt them. No source names a school or personal religious affiliation for Ben Ali: the Arabic article's infobox and Wikidata give Islam in general, and the Urdu article's categories file him among Tunisian Sunni Muslims, which is a filing and not an attestation. ^{1 2 3}

After a month of protests against his rule, he fled to Saudi Arabia on 14 January 2011 with his wife Leïla and their children. Tunisian courts sentenced him and his wife in absentia to 35 years in prison in June 2011 on charges of theft and unlawful possession of cash and jewellery, and to life imprisonment in 2012 for inciting violence and murder, with a further life sentence from a military court in 2013. He served none of those sentences. He died in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on 19 September 2019 at the age of 83, after nearly a decade in exile, and was buried in the al-Baqi cemetery in Medina. ¹

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