TUNISIA
Muzzling the muzzled
The six-month jail sentence handed to Tunisian journalist
Taoufik Ben Brik by a Tunis court on 26 November
was an attempt to settle scores against one of the most
defiant critics of a regime that has been unrelenting in
its determination to eradicate independent journalism.
President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s war on the
independent press began only a few weeks after his
November 1987 bloodless coup. The country’s top
independent newspaper, Arrai, was forced to close
down after publishing an article calling on Tunisians
not to blindly back Ben Ali’s ouster of the country’s first
president, Habib Bourguiba. “Don’t forget his military
past or his security background. And what if he leads
us down a much worse road than Bourguiba? Don’t
give him a blank cheque,” Om Ziad, a pen name for
the prominent writer Naziha Rejiba, cautioned at the
time.
The past two decades have witnessed the closure
of other independent and opposition newspapers, such
as Le Maghreb, Le Phare, al-Fajr and al-Badeel, and the
imprisonment and exile of dozens of journalists.
Although fully aware of the potential cost, Ben Brik
and a few other courageous journalists kept crossing red
lines. In 2000, the authorities reluctantly yielded to international
pressure, particularly from France, to renew his
passport and drop politically motivated charges after
the dissenting journalist went on a 43-day hunger strike.
Ben Brik’s latest arrest occurred a few days after
Ben Ali had threatened on 24 October (the eve of
his re-election to a fifth five-year term in office) to
prosecute a “tiny minority” of Tunisians for cooperating
with foreign journalists to cast “accusations or
doubts on the integrity of the electoral process without
solid evidence.” According to Ben Brik’s lawyers, he
was stripped of his clothes and insulted by the police
before being brought before a prosecutor who charged
him with defamation, assaulting a woman, damaging
other people’s property and harming public decency.
Ben Brik is not the first journalist to be charged with
sexual assault or attempted rape; or to be moved to a
prison far from his home. Despite his frail health, he went
on hunger strike again at the end of November to protest
his arbitrary transfer from Mornaguia Prison in the Tunis
suburbs to a squalid jail in Siliana some 120 kilometres
away. “There is a deliberate and vengeful will to punish
Ben Brik and his family,” said lawyer Ayachi Hammam.
There is no doubt that the interviews Ben Brik conducted
in the run-up to the October elections with some of Ben
Ali’s leading critics – including a fictitious one for the
website of the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, in
which he poked fun at the de facto ‘president for life’ –
were behind Ben Brik’s current ordeal.
Over the past few months, state-run media outlets
have intensified their attacks against Ben Ali’s critics,
including Ben Brik, denouncing them as traitors,
perverts, and paid agents of Western and Israeli intelligence.
The Al Jazeera satellite TV channel, which is
widely viewed in Tunisia and gives voice to Tunisian
dissidents, and the emir of Qatar who funds it, have also
been targets. In 2006, Tunisia closed its Doha Embassy
for several months in protest at an Al Jazeera interview
with prominent Tunisian dissident Moncef Marzouki.
Another victim of the crackdown on independent
reporting was Zouhair Makhlouf, a political activist
and contributor to the news website Assabilonline.
He was arrested on 20 October after posting a video
report on the Internet about pollution in the industrial
suburbs of Nabeul, nearly 60 kilometres south of Tunis.
Ben Ali’s thin-skinned advisers have also been riled
by French comments on recent developments. Even a
restrained statement from the Quai D’Orsay deeming
the arrest of Ben Brik “unnecessary” provoked angry
reactions in the presidential palace and official media.
So did similar comments from political figures traditionally
on friendly terms with the regime, like Bertrand
Delanoë, the mayor of Paris, who was born in Tunisia
before the end of the French Protectorate.
Ben Ali called on the African Union and the Maghreb
Arab Union, currently chaired by Col Muammar
al-Qadhafi, to take a stand against this “external interference
in Tunisian affairs”. The ‘Brother and Guide
of the Revolution’ swiftly expressed his solidarity.
And in a staged move to embarrass Paris – which had
earlier earned a reputation for praising the Tunisian
leader’s skills and turning a blind eye to his human
rights violations – the head of a minor political group
supportive of Ben Ali called on France to apologise for
having colonised Tunisia.
“But unfortunately for Ben Ali, the last mock elections
showed how he lost his war against the media and could
no longer prevent journalists from breaking taboos,
despite his desperate attempts to control the flow of
information through the Internet and Facebook,” said
Naziha Rejiba, who made it to New York in November to
receive the Committee to Protect Journalists’ International
Press Freedom Award for 2009.
Kamel Labidi
Middle East International Vol. II, Issue 3: 4 December 2009
