22 May 12 | Middle East and North Africa
On 28 May Monatir Appeal Court is expected to issue a verdict in the case of two atheist friends Jabeur Mejri and Ghazi Beji. In March a primary court sentenced the two to a seven-and-a-half year jail term over the publishing of prophet Mohammedd cartoons.
Defense lawyers chose only to appeal on behalf of Jabeur Mejri, since Ghazi Beji has fled the country. “We would lose appeal if we defend him [Ghazi Beji] in absentia”, said Bochra Bel Haj Hmida, a defense lawyer, and a human rights activist.
To convict the two friends, Mahdia Primary Court employed Article 121 (3) of the Tunisian Penal Code, which states the following:
“The distribution, putting up for sale, public display, or possession, with the intent to distribute, sell, display for the purpose of propaganda, tracts, bulletins, and fliers, whether of foreign origin or not, that are liable to cause harm to the public order or public morals is prohibited.”
Anyone who violates this law risks a fine of 120 TND (76USD) to 1200 TND (760 USD), and a jail term of six months to five years.
Article 121 (3), adopted on 3 May 2001 as a way to tighten control over press freedom, was repeatedly used during the post Ben Ali era.
The controversial law earned Jabeur Mejri and Ghazi Beji a five-year jail term, and a 1200TND (760USD) fine for publishing content liable to “disturb public order”, and six months for “moral transgression”. The court also sentenced them to two more years in prison for “insulting others via public communication networks”.
The Court of First Instance of Tunis also used this law to fine both Nessma TV boss Nabil Karoui over the broadcast of French-Iranian film Persepolis, and Nasreddine Ben Saida, the general director of the Arabic-language daily newspaper Attounissia over the publishing of a front page photo of a Real Madrid footballer with his naked girlfriend.
“As lawyers and activists we are volunteering to defend Mejri, and Beji. This is our tool to combat abusive laws adopted during the Ben Ali regime. But it is the job of the legislative branch, that is the national constituent assembly, to amend such laws,” explained Mrs Bel Haj Hmida.
21 May 12 | Middle East and North Africa
Dictators do not like to be ridiculed. They fear bold political cartoonists. Ousted Tunisian President Zeine el-Abidin Ben Ali made sure that the few artworks of political cartoonists who dared to criticise his regime would not reach the masses. He did what any tyrant would do: he censored them.
For more than four years Seif Eddin Nechi, a young Tunisian cartoonist, has been using social media as a platform to mock and criticise various aspects of the Tunisian society and political landscape. It did not take long before the regime’s net censorship machine blocked access to his cartoons.
Nechi said: “During the Ben Ali era I used to criticise everything, but in a roundabout way to get around censorship. Once I started talking about internet censorship through my cartoons, I was censored”.
He added: “After 14 January 2011 [when the Tunisian revolution began], criticising national and political affairs has become a central theme in my cartoons, with a more direct tone”.
With the uprising and the fall of the Ben Ali regime, many of the red lines which once prohibited artists from revealing their talents were scrapped.
“When I was very young, I used to draw everything and anything (especially my professors), and this earned me several punishments! Due to the system, my interest in caricature art had gradually faded away, and I could only share my drawings with my closest friends,” says Adnen Akremi (alias Adenov).
But now, Adenov can make use of his sense of humour, his pencils and his character Le Rasta, who is always smoking a joint, to ridicule and criticise.
Adenov explained: “It is through him [Le Rasta] that I express myself. He is Zen-like and out of touch and this somehow helps him to hit where it hurts. Through him I try to criticise the Tunisian’s situation in a funny way (well not always funny). When my messages are similar to the majority’s, it is good, but I’m not seeking to be the spokesperson of a particular group or a political party”.
In one drawing, Mustapha Ben Jaafar, Tunisia’s constituent assembly President, is depicted as extremely angry, asking Le Rasta about the efficiency of joints: “Is your thing efficient?” he asks. Le Rasta answers:” I can guarantee that it is 100 per cent efficient. Take one before each assembly session”.
In another cartoon, Le Rasta sarcastically comments on the increase in gas prices and the trend of self-immolations: “Is this within the framework of fighting self immolation suicides?”
Like Adenov, Nechi also created his own character, Bakounawar. “Bakounawar almost always ridicules reality, laughs at everything, he rarely gets angry,” Nechi told Index. “I created him to express myself and to try to say what is on my mind in a quasi-ludic manner, while remaining serious at the same time. Bakounawar has adopted a more popular discourse (and not a populist one) to be more than ever by the side of average and poor Tunisians. Bakounawar chose Tunisian dialect as language, and popular humour. I’m aware that my caricatures are still far from those I want to reach because the platform that I chose (the web) is not accessible to everyone,” he explained.
Via Bakounawar, Nechi has expressed his support to Al-Oula, a weekly newspaper whose director spent seven days on hunger strike protesting at government policies of state advertisements distribution among newspaper. “It [Al-Oula] is not a newspaper worth five cents”, says Bakounawar in one caricature.
But why did these two young artists chose the art of caricature? An art which cost Naji al-Ali’s life, and almost cost Syrian political cartoonist and Index Award winner Ali Fezrat his fingers.
“The message of a caricature is more direct than any other drawing genres”, answered Adenov.
“It is the most ludicrous tool capable of popularising complex situations. Caricatures allow us to laugh at our own flaws…” replied Nechi.
“This art has a primordial role in the construction of the future of a freer Tunisia”, said Amine Lamine, founder of Graphik Island, a platform which seeks to promote the artworks of Tunisian artists at both national and international levels. “Popularising art and culture to make them more accessible, so as many people as possible have interest in them and take part in the building of a better Tunisia”, he added.
The booming of caricature art was crowned by the publishing of Koumik (Tunisian for “Cartoon”), a collective book of comics which brought together 14 rising Tunisian caricaturists. The first issue was published in October 2011, and other issues are expected and anticipated.
17 May 12 | Middle East and North Africa
Nebil Jridet, General Director of the Arabic-language weekly newspaper Al-Oula has ended his hunger strike.
Jridet spent seven days on hunger strike in protest at Tunisian government’s “unequal” distribution of state advertisements among newspapers. He accuses the government of allocating adverts according to “newspapers’ political affiliations”.
The director’s decision came after talks with Samir Dilou, Minister of Human Rights and Transitional Justice on 15 May. Dilou said: “the state advertisement issue is a just cause and requires all concerned parties’ efforts in order to come up with the solutions which would make the distribution of state ads among newspapers a transparent process”.
In exchange, a national conference addressing state advertisement matters will be held at the end of the month. The National Syndicate for Tunisia Journalists and the National Syndicate for Independent and Party Newspapers will head the conference.
“It will take much time and we are going through serious financial problems which might come in the way of issuing the newspaper in the upcoming weeks” Nebil Jridet told Index.
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.
