Danish police today arrested three people allegedly plotting to murder cartoonist Kurt Westergaard.
Jailed Tunisian dissident, writer and lawyer Mohamed Abbou was released from prison in Le Kef, where he had been held since his arrest in March 2005. He was sentenced to prison for three-and-a-half years for exposing torture in Tunisian prisons on the Internet. His release and that of more than 20 other political prisoners came on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the Proclamation of the Republic of Tunisia, marked on 25 July.
It led to speculation that the release of the country’s highest profile domestic critic was timed simply to prevent the case from spoiling the international response to the independence celebrations.
Index on Censorship and other members of the International Freedom of Expression eXchange (IFEX) Tunisian Monitoring Group (TMG) have long campaigned for his release – including trying to visit him in prison in March.
Index chief executive Henderson Mullin urged the Tunisian authorities to cease the kind of aggressive and intimidating surveillance that Abbou’s wife Samia has endured since he was jailed in 2005.
‘Policemen have been climbing over the Abbou family balconies in the middle of the night, repeatedly, purely to terrorise them,’ said Mullin. ‘Police officers often harassed Mrs Abbou and the friends who accompany her for weekly visits with her husband at Kef prison, and they only let up when representatives of Index and other TMG members were watching in person.
‘It would be a disgrace if this kind of aggressive harassment is allowed to continue now Mr Abbou is free. He must be allowed to express his opinions freely.’
TMG Chair Carl Morten Iversen of Norwegian PEN assured Abbou that the TMG and other human rights groups will keep a close eye on the way Tunisian authorities will treat him and his family in the future. Tunisia’s repression of free expression is seen by many as the sole stain on the country’s otherwise tolerant and peaceful system. Increasingly its poor free speech record has become an issue that obstructs Tunisia’s routine relations with the EU and France.
Significantly, new French president Nicolas Sarkozy had raised Abbou’s case in meetings with Tunisian head of state Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali the week before.
Abbou told al Jazeera TV on the day of his release: ‘As a former prisoner of conscience, I would like to thank all those in Tunisia and the rest of the world who stood by my side during the ordeal I have been through. My release is the result of actions of resistance to oppression undertaken by Tunisians capable of saying no to a regime in violation of basic human rights. The Tunisian Constitution and international human rights law guarantee the right to criticise the government, as long as there are human rights abuses and corruption.’
But he added: ‘The lack of freedom led some young people to use violence which I strongly denounce.’
Abbou was jailed for three-and-a-half-years for posting an article on the Tunisnews website in August 2004 comparing the torture of political prisoners in Tunisia to that perpetrated by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. But observers at his trial suspected the sentence was imposed in response to a different article he had posted online a few days before his arrest, in which he criticised an invitation to Israeli leader Ariel Sharon to attend a UN summit in Tunis.
The IFEX-TMG continues to call on the Tunisian authorities to allow writers, journalists, web loggers and publishers to express themselves freely without fear of persecution or imprisonment in accordance with Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to which Tunisia is a signatory.
Fifty years after the establishment of the Tunisian Republic on 25 July 1957, the country is still ruled by the same party, the Neo-Destour, nowadays renamed the Rassemblement Constitutionnel Democratique (RCD).
Habib Bourguiba, the historic leader of this party which fought against the French rule in Tunisia, was the first president of Tunisia. He was a charismatic, authoritarian leader who tolerated neither critics nor dissent. Bourguiba, a former lawyer, had no other ambition than power itself. When he died in 2000, he left no secret Swiss bank accounts, no castles in Europe.
When he became president, he thought the country should have but one goal: economic and social development. Hence, there was no place for opposition parties or independent NGOs. Unlike many other African countries, Tunisia kept its military expenditures at a minimum and focused on human development.
In 1964 the regime adopted a soft form of socialism, called ‘co-operativism’, which tolerated free enterprise and private ownership of the means of production. The Neo-Destour became the ‘Destourian Socialist Party’.
For three decades the Tunisian state spent about one-third of its budget on education. It was at this time that the University of Tunis was established. But education is dangerous for authoritarian regimes. When you educate people, you lose control over their minds. Marxism was fashionable at the time and many university students, who considered ‘Destourian Socialism’ fake, dreamt of proletarian revolution. The clash was inevitable.
The students belonging to Perspectives Tunisiennes, an underground communist movement paid a dear price for their dissent. They were arrested, tortured and sentenced to heavy prison terms. But political repression reached sometimes even prominent members of the regime itself. Former economics minister Ahmed Ben Salah, the regime’s ‘strong man’ in the 1960s, was dismissed in 1969 and sentenced to 10 years imprisonment after a parody of a trial.
Hedi Nouira, Bourguiba’s prime minister from 1970 to 1980, believed in economic liberalism, but strongly defended Tunisia’s one-party regime. However, in 1977 his government did recognise the Tunisian Human Rights League, the first genuine NGO in the country.
During the same period, Errai, an independent weekly newspaper created by advocates of political pluralism, appeared. But political liberalisation stopped after the general strike of January 1978, which ended in bloodshed that claimed the lives of dozens of citizens.
In the early 1980s the newly appointed prime minister, Mohamed Mzali, promised political pluralism, and indeed his government recognised several opposition parties. But these political overtures also coincided with a crackdown on the Islamist movement.
The leaders of the Islamic Tendency movement were tried during the summer of 1981 and sent to prison. They would be released a couple of years later. In spite of this unfair trial, Tunisia witnessed in its first pluralistic elections in November 1981.
But under the instructions of the president himself, the Ministry of the Interior manipulated the final results to prevent the opposition from entering parliament. Tunisia had failed its first exam in democracy.
After the bread riots of January 1984, General Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was appointed director of security at the Ministry of the Interior. The promotion of this ‘security expert’ would not end there. The declining health of Bourguiba intensified the struggle for power among his aides.
But General Ben Ali concealed his ambition and showed absolute loyalty to Bourguiba. He presided over the ruthless repression of campus demonstrations and all kinds of protests. Political repression reached its climax with the death sentences pronounced by the State Security Court against three Islamist activists in 1987.
Ben Ali became prime minister in October 1987. On 7 November 1987 he announced the impeachment of Bourguiba on the grounds that he was medically unfit for office. He promised a ‘new era’ where human rights would be respected, democracy strengthened and press freedom protected.
On the same day, dozens of army and security officers were arrested and tortured. The regime accused them of having planned a military coup against Bourguiba. Mohamed Mansouri, an army officer, was tortured to death in December 1987. His death was a foretaste of the new era. But the worst was to come.
In 1988 Om Zied, a freelance journalist, wrote an article for Errai in which she warned her readers against the exaggerated enthusiasm for Ben Ali. Its title was ‘Wrong Note’. She wrote: ‘Don’t forget his military and security background. What if he would lead us down a path worse than that of Bourguiba? Don’t give him a free hand!’
The police immediately confiscated all the copies of the newspaper. Errai was banned forever. But in spite of this drastic measure Tunisia was not a police state yet. In 1989 the regime organised pluralistic legislative elections but the results, once again, were manipulated to keep a one-colour parliament.
The Islamists, whose newspaper Al Fajr was tolerated for a couple of years, asked the regime for legal recognition. Meanwhile they renamed their party the Ennahda Movement.
The government denied them any legal recognition and accused them of preparing an insurgency to overthrow the regime. Ben Ali declared total war against them. After the crackdown on the Islamist Ennahda movement in 1991 the already authoritarian regime became a totalitarian one.
Thousands of Ennahda sympathisers were arrested, some 40 were said to have died under torture, and military courts sent hundreds to prison. The regime profited from its war on Islamism to create a climate of terror that paralysed Tunisians and silenced their intelligentsia.
The circle of repression kept widening during the 1990s. It was now the turn of secular opponents and human rights activists to be tried and put in prison. At the end of the last century, the human rights violations by the Tunisian regime started to have some international media coverage.
Notre Ami Ben Ali, a book written by two French journalists in 1999, shook the image of the Tunisian dictator in some European capitals. The fake multi-candidate presidential election of October 1999, instead of improving the image of the regime, became a source of humour and satire.
The funeral of Bourguiba in April 2000, attended by about 30,000 policemen in a city under siege, gave a rare opportunity to western media to see a police state in action. Some western capitals started putting pressure on Ben Ali in order to convince him to step down after the end of his last legal term in 2004.
But the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 gave Ben Ali a second political life. Considered now as an ally in ‘the war on terror’, especially by Washington and Paris, Ben Ali was able to easily amend the constitution in May 2002 in order to remain in power at least until 2014.
Since 2000, the Internet has became more and more popular in Tunisia. In spite of the tight control and the censorship of the Internet by the cyber-police, the web offered many Tunisian human rights activists the possibility to communicate with the outside world and make their voices heard.
But it brought a new kind of political prisoner too – the cyber-dissident. Zouhayr Yahyaoui was the first to pay for his cyber-dissent. His only ‘crime’ was the creation, in 2001, of TUNeZINE, a satirical website, and the publication of articles critical of the government.
Arrested on 4 June, 2002, he spent 18 months in prison and died about 14 months after his release. During the last few years, many young Internet users have been arrested, tortured and put in prison only because they had allegedly visited ‘prohibited websites’.
A group of Tunisian militants who went on hunger strike on 18 October 2005 profited from the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS), held in Tunisia in November 2005, to draw the attention of the international community to the lack of civil liberties in Tunisia.
But during that summit the authorities even censored foreign guests. Tunisian TV cut the coverage of the Swiss president’s speech when he made a clear criticism of Tunisia’s censorship of the Internet. Tunisian hunger strikers were visited by hundreds of people from different regions of the country to show them support.
After the end of their hunger strike they decided to create a group called the 18 October Movement. But the movement lost its thrust shortly after the WSIS. Was it the lack of long-term strategy that made this movement lose its initial thrust? Or was it the lack of a common platform for all the dissident forces of the Tunisian society?
Whatever the explanation, something is sure: as long as western capitals, particularly Paris and Washington, consider the Tunisian dictator as a reliable ally in the ‘war on terror’, the Tunisian dissidents will continue to pay a heavy price for their struggle for the establishment of a true republic where basic rights and civil liberties would be respected.
These days no freedom of expression group operates on its own in the way that Nick Fillmore alleges (Have the world’s free press campaigners got their priorities wrong? 3 May) – or indeed would even want to.
There are many ways to approach organising human rights advocacy, but Nick seems unwilling to recognise this.
The international effort to free Gaza hostage journalist Alan Johnston has no core organiser, but is driven by the shared concerns of disparate groups that otherwise have little in common. He chides International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX) network members for not all being as ‘activist’ as their fellow member Reporters sans Frontières (RSF), but the “e-mail and the occasional mission to countries” he derides are tools they all use.
Sometimes the subtle intervention works best– asking a military contact in Iraq to put a call in for a colleague held in Abu Ghraib; a promise to a dying hunger striker; a briefing to a well-placed civil servant.
As he correctly says, ‘depending on the circumstances’ a free speech group can make the case for civil disobedience, economic sanctions, aggressive litigation – and if you take Nick’s argument to its natural conclusion – armed resistance.
And ‘depending on the circumstances’ – the case can be made against. Whatever, these are cases that must be made to help those “living with the fear and repression generated by killings, intimidation, censorship and other threats to press freedom”.
But the cases need to be made in London and Washington as well as Khartoum and Baghdad. This is why it is important to maintain the diversity of campaigns for free expression worldwide. There never is just one single message to express.
It is also why Nick is wrong to suggest that free expression groups resist alliances. He cites only one significant partnership between free speech advocates, the IFEX Tunisia Monitoring Group (TMG), of which Index on Censorship is a member. The TMG links free speech NGOs from around the western world and Africa in partnership with official and unofficial Tunisian rights groups.
Yet there have been many more programmes around the world like it in the last 12 month alone. In Colombia, a partnership between a coalition of six local organisations and seven global and regional IFEX members – including RSF – identified key obstacles and set priorities for a strategy to support press freedom and free expression last September.
No fewer than 14 press freedom groups joined forces to support free speech advocates in Sri Lanka in March. There have been a score of similar joint missions to countries from Pakistan to Mexico in the last 12 months. Each one is based around cooperation, partnership and shared resources.
The absolute start point for all free expression work today is with the local partner groups – the human rights campaigners, women’s NGOs, independent media and civil society already active on the ground.
Nick is wrong to suggest that this is unusual, especially by harking back to days when under funded groups were thrown into competition by donors whose priorities were the best deal for their nations’ taxpayers or their minister’s political objectives, not necessarily global free speech rights.
He has a rosy-tinted view of the motives of the funding ‘community’. For some time the funders’ fashion was to press for mergers – not partnerships – between free expression groups, to reduce donor administration (and their staff) and reduce the funds given overall. There are some 40 key donors who are de facto clients in a small, competitive and unregulated market and a shrinking pool of funds.
Many donors exploit this relationship. Up to 40% of the costs of a project can be withheld until after the projects are completed, forcing small groups to cannibalise scarce resources to complete them – effectively funding the funders – before the balance is paid. Some expect lead partners to impose management standards on partners working in war zones and cash dollar only ‘economies’ they would not dare try to apply directly themselves. Many donors have thinly disguised political objectives that reflect their government’s own – especially in the Middle East and Latin America.
The donors – and Nick – also fail to credit the view that just as plurality is a good thing for independent media, it is a good thing for independent media rights groups too. Each of the free expression groups – north and south – that Nick is so keen to rope together in the name of ‘efficiency’, already work together to that end in flexible and mutually beneficial relationships.
Depending on their respective specialities, strengths, agendas and mandates, even their country base, they are free to build large or small coalitions to suit the needs of the people they are trying to reach, not the needs of the donors.
They all have specific methodologies developed over years. Most would be reluctant to subsume their skills into a single melting pot of consensus activities, mixed at best to cut western taxpayers’ burdens, at worst to suit a political agenda that is either confused, ill-defined or politically suspect.
This is why this organisational diversity should be preserved. The many groups on the ground – all of whom work together in the same way as their northern partners – need just the same freedom to pick and choose between different partners north and south.
Links are made through a dozen international conferences convened each year, specifically to facilitate cooperation and if all else fails there’s the catch-up meeting between colleagues of different organisations over coffee.
Index on Censorship alone is in contact with 27 different international and local groups, publications and universities as it puts together its own relatively small portfolio of free expression support projects from Iraq and Iran to Colombia via Albania in 2008.
There will always be the need for more cooperation and all the northern free expression groups need to work harder to reinforce the technical capacity and build the resources of the groups on the ground they work with.
But there is no one-size-fits-all solution to the problem. Naturally evolving partnerships are the fairest and most practical way to find the right one.
And possibly the most efficient too, judging by the sheer number of joint campaigns and shared alerts logged daily by IFEX’s website. If all that work is being done for $15 million a year by some 100 groups worldwide, as Nick claims, at an average UK £75,000 per group the free expression world is really getting its money’s worth.