15 May 12 | Middle East and North Africa
Six months after Tunisia’s first free elections, the country’s newspapers are filled with nostalgic longing for its former dictator. Even if his rule was a “veritable one-man-show”, muses La Presse, “was his dictatorship really harmful to Tunisia?” The accompanying hagiography leaves you in little doubt that this is meant as a question to which the answer is “no”. But there is no call for the dictator himself to be reinstalled. That is because the object of their affection is not the recently ousted President Ben Ali, but his predecessor, Habib Bourguiba, and he died 12 years ago.
At a time when the fundamental basis of the Tunisian state is up for grabs, the invocation of the dead president’s spirit is telling. There is a section of society — perhaps of a certain age — that remains faithful to the memory of Bourguiba as the father of a modern, secular Tunisia. The fact that he was also an autocrat who persecuted the political Islamists now leading Tunisia’s transitional government is not without significance. The tensions between the forces of secularism and the religious right have come to define the post-revolutionary era.
It is important that Tunisians are able to have these debates in public. “Tunisia was almost destroyed by two things, and they both begin with C,” says Afef Abrougui, Index on Censorship’s Tunisian reporter, “corruption and censorship.” Decades of state censorship have left the profession of journalism in a poor state of repair. Nevertheless, the sharp and occasionally shrill criticism of the present government, in print and online, is an obvious sign of progress. Artists and musicians are able to think aloud about politics without the police politique taking front row seats. Whatever the theatrical merits of Facebook!, a sort of cyber-Brechtian dance interpretation of the 2011 protests on show at the Centre Culturel de Carthage, its singular virtue must be that it can be shown at all.
In spite of these advances, there are some worrying noises. In March of this year, some drama students chose to celebrate World Theatre Day by performing on the steps of the Theatre Municipal, the grand art nouveau building in the middle of Avenue Habib Bourguiba in Tunis. At the other end of the street, a group of over-exuberant Salafists decided to put on their own piece of street theatre. As the denouement of their demonstration in favour of a religious constitution, a few of their number decided to clamber up the 120-foot high, wrought-iron clock tower at the end of the street, planting the black flag of the Caliphate at its summit. Their mission accomplished, they made their way down the road and set upon the students, noisily denouncing their “lack of respect for religious sanctity”, and raining down bottles on their heads.
When anyone feels the need to stage a counter-demonstration against theatre, it is time to sit up and pay attention. The craven response of the Interior Ministry, however, was to prohibit demonstrations on Avenue Habib Bourguiba altogether (the ban was subsequently lifted after several violent confrontations between police and protestors). Parts of the street are now semi-militarised zones; government buildings and public spaces are wreathed in barbed-wire. Groups of bored-looking military police sit in canary-yellow buses, waiting for something to happen.
Like Avenue Habib Bourguiba, there are still some areas of free expression that are only entered at acute personal risk. This month, Nabil Karoui, the general director of Nessma TV, was prosecuted and fined for “violating sacred values”. His offence was allowing the animated film Persepolis to be shown on his station (it depicts Allah as an old man with a white beard). The two imams who called for his death are yet to be punished.
A sentence of 7 ½ years imprisonment for two young men who published a satire of the prophet Mohammed was endorsed by President Moncef Marzouki. “Attacks on the sacred symbols of Islam”, he said, “cannot be considered part of freedom of expression.” The literal-minded censorship of the sacred has been accompanied by an equally disturbing increase in private prosecutions for obscenity. Earlier this year, the publisher of the national newspaper Attounissia was charged with “disrupting public order and decency” for printing a picture of a Lena Gercke, girlfriend of Real Madrid footballer Sami Khedira, on its front page. All these prosecutions have been brought under provisions of the Ben Ali-era criminal code, which remain on the statute book.
This creeping moral and religious censorship adds to the impression of a state slouching towards authoritarianism. In the name of national unity, the transitional government has time and again shown itself quick to curtail, and be slow to defend, the right of Tunisians to free expression. In the political turf war that is taking place in the country, there is a real danger that the forces of reaction will be permitted to mark out the boundaries of free speech in a way that imperils the advances of 2011.
Michael Parker is a London-based lawyer and writer on international and legal affairs.
14 May 12 | Middle East and North Africa
Nebil Jridet, General Director of the Arabic-language weekly newspaper Al-Oula, has entered his sixth day of hunger strike in protest against the Tunisian government’s “unequal” distribution of state ads among newspapers.
Jridet told Index that the government is distributing state ads according to “newspapers’ political affiliations”.
“The government favours newspapers affiliated with certain political parties, and dedicated to defaming the opposition. Al-Fajr [a weekly newspaper affiliated to Ennahdha Movement, the largest party in Tunisia’s governing alliance], for instance, has a large share in state ads”, said Mr. Jridet.
“We ask the government to support newspapers by an equal and transparent distribution of state advertisement”, he added.
Jridet fears that his newspaper, which he describes as “independent”, may meet the same fate as many other “serious and credible newspapers which became known right after the revolution” that were eventually forced to fold and disappear from Tunisia’s media landscape.
“Economic forces which monopolise the distribution circuits of newspapers, and political forces which interfere in the equitable distribution of state advertisement” deprived these newspapers from getting their share of state ads and made them disappear, said Jridet in a statement published on 9 May.
Sofiene Chourabi, a journalist for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, Hana Trabelsi a journalist for Al-Oula, and Walid Hayouni, a professor at a Tunis journalism school have allegedly joined Jridet in his hunger strike.
Statement – Wild Hunger Srike
08 May 12 | Middle East and North Africa
In its annual report published on World Press Freedom Day (3 May), the National Syndicate for Tunisian Journalists (SNJT) announced that it had registered 60 physical assaults against journalists over the last year.
The syndicate criticised the “passivity and silence of the government” in response to the alarming increase in the number of assaults.
Multiple assaults were recorded in April alone. The most recent act of violence recorded took place on 30 April, when militants belonging to the Ennahda Movement, assaulted a journalist working for the collective blog Nawaat.
Ennahda is the largest party in Tunisia’s governing alliance and Emine M’tiraoui was attacked while he was at the headquarters of the party, after he conducted an interview with a party member.
In testimony published on Nawaat.org, M’tiraoui said:
at the lobby of the party’s headquarters there was a fight and a woman was screaming. I had my camera with me, and it seems that my assaulters thought that I was filming what was going on. Though I had my press card, with my name and the name of Nawaat on it, a young militant in the movement circulated that I was “a leftist dog, and a police officer loyal to one of Tunisia’s leftist figures.
The attack continued outside the party’s headquarters. “Outside I fell to the ground…there were police officers who witnessed the assaults but they did not interfere to stop [it]” he told Index.
In less than a month M’tiraoui has been assaulted twice. On 9 April, militants of another prominent political party in Tunisia, the Progressive Democratic Party (PDP) beat him while he was covering the party’s conference.
According to the estimates from Aymen Rezgui, member of the press syndicate’s executive board, one assault is registered every week. This increase in the number of assaults is due to “police’s laxity, and to the attempts of a number of political parties to incite public opinion against journalists,” Rezgui explains.
Leaders of Ennahda, which heads the three-party coalition government, have often expressed their dissatisfaction with the media’s coverage of the government. In an interview with Radio Express FM on 25 April, Rached Ghannouchi, Ennahda’s president, accused state television station, Wataniya 1 of having “an anti revolutionary and biased editorial line which rejoices at the defeat of the legitimate government”.
“There is a clear hostility towards the government” he added.
The SNJT, on the other hand, accuses the government of seeking to tighten control over the media sector. In its report the SNJT denounced attempts to force “the media sector to follow the political vision of the government”.
04 May 12 | Middle East and North Africa
Members of the IFEX-TMG gathered in Tunis for World Press Freedom Day to mark the launch of four new initiatives to support Tunisian rights to freedom of expression, which remains under threat despite the gains of the past year.
The new work includes a literary anthology edited by the president of PEN Tunisia Naziha Rejiba, a training manual on online advocacy, a workshop for cartoonists, and a national newspaper and billboard campaign championing free expression rights as Tunisia’ Constituent Assembly continues to negotiate a new national constitution.
With hundreds of press freedom campaigners in Tunis alongside the IFEX-TMG to attend UNESCO’s annual World Press Freedom Day conference, the timeliness of these events was underlined by the sentencing of two young Facebook users to lengthy prison sentences and the fining of the head of a TV station for broadcasting the award-winning film Persepolis.
“Things have improved since the fall of the old regime, but there’s no question that the right to freedom of expression in Tunisia is not yet secure or safe,” said Rohan Jayasekera from IFEX-TMG member Index on Censorship.
The anthology, Fleeting Words, edited by Rejiba, the veteran dissident best known as ‘Om Ziad’, is published in partnership between IFEX-TMG, PEN Tunisia and Atlas Publications. Now available in Arabic, French and English editions will be published in June.
The IFEX-TMG also launched a training manual on online free expression campaign strategy developed by the IFEX-TMG member, the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI), with local partner, the Tunisian Centre for Freedom of the Press (CTPJ). This follows a series of training workshops, with the two most recent held in Sidi Bouzid and Tunis.
This week also sees the launch of a major multi-media campaign in support of free expression rights developed in partnership with the Tunisian online media group Nawaat.org. Using 75 street billboards and adverts in national print and broadcast media, it will be seen by hundreds of thousands of Tunisians across the country.
Also this month, ANHRI and fellow IFEX-TMG member the Cartoonists Rights Network International (CRNI) organised a two-day workshop in the coastal Tunisian city of Sousse.
Sixteen digital and ink cartoonists from across Tunisia and the region, as CRNI Executive Director Dr Robert Russell put it, “all on the cutting edge of free speech,” gathered to exchange techniques and experiences.
The initiatives are part of the IFEX-TMG project Monitoring & Advocacy in Support of Independent Human Rights Defenders in Tunisia (2010-2012), managed by Index on Censorship and supported by the European Commission and Oxfam Novib.
The need for continuing work in the sector was underlined by the prosecution of Nabil Karoui, director of privately-owned Nessma TV for blasphemy and disturbing public order. The charges followed the station’s screening of the animated film Persepolis in October 2011. Karoui was fined 2,400 Tunisian dinars (961 GBP) on the charge of disturbing the public order, after protesters stormed Nessma TV.
“That Nabil Karoui avoided jail is not cause for celebration, the case should not have been brought to a court of law to begin with,” said Virginie Jouan, IFEX-TMG Chair.
The IFEX-TMG also expressed concern about the sentencing of Ghazi Ben Mohamed Beji and Jabeur Ben Abdallah Majri to over seven years in prison after Beji posted an online manuscript said to be critical of the Prophet, and Mejri reposted some of it.
