Chapter 12
Tunisia’s “Sweet Little Rogue”
Regime
Clement Henry
When asked to write about Tunisia for a volume originally
designed to be about “rogue” regimes I hesitated, because Tunisia is neither
aggressive nor is it up to North Korean standards of internal repression. Yet in thinking about internally repressive
regimes the term “rogue,” reserved in this volume for externally aggressive
regimes, seemed useful because it connotes a regime that has run amok like a male
rogue elephant (See chapter 1, p. 9). The principal characteristic of such a
regime is that it deviates from the values and beliefs of the community that it
purports to rule. So much so, indeed, that some may perceive its leader to be
irrational or mentally ill. But unlike the elephant “of a savage destructive
disposition” that is “driven away from the herd,” the regime stays on to
control and possibly to corrupt the state.
Such, at least, is the sad political situation of Tunisia
today under the rule of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. It is not so much
the quantity of repression per se that would define a rogue regime in this
sense, substantial as the repression may be, as the extent to which its
practices deviate from the expectations of the community.
From this perspective—viewing the political leadership of
such regimes as deviating from social norms—it follows that regimes like those
of Ben Ali are vulnerable from within. It is not so much the quantity as the
irrational nature of the repression that delegitimates them. Unable to control
their public opinion and retain a semblance of legitimacy, they may become
vulnerable to combinations of internal and international pressures for change.
While the present volume reserves “rogue” in this sense to
connote the external rather than internal behavior of a regime, there is
another sense of “rogue” related to a regime’s external behavior that indeed
does fit Tunisia
and usefully highlights the Bush Administration’s double standards on democracy
in the Middle East.
The Bush administration selected Tunisia
in 2002 as one of two regional centers for its Middle East Partnership
Initiative to foster economic development and democracy in the region. In
official American eyes, the Ben Ali regime may thus be viewed as “rogue” in a
very special Oxford English usage, Shakespeare’s “sweet little rogue” or, as
someone wrote in 1672, "it's a pretty little rogue; she is my
mistress." An ally
in the “war on terror,” Tunisia
has used its international credit to adopt further repressive measures against
vaguely defined “terrorists.” Substantial sectors of Arab public opinion may
also view the Ben Ali regime as a “sweet little rogue” in the sense of being
one of the Bush administration’s Arab mistresses.
The Ben
Ali regime is one of a number of dictatorships in the Arab region coddled by
the United
States. It is at least as repressive as the others --
Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and the little principalities of the
Gulf Cooperation Council -- and it certainly deviates the most from its
society’s legitimate expectations. Ben Ali was initially welcomed as Tunisia’s
savior when, as prime minister, he had President Habib Bourguiba
constitutionally removed from office by getting physicians to certify that he
was no longer physically fit to serve. The “Historic Change” of November
7, 1987 promised
steady progress toward democracy, and the new regime efficiently carried out
the structural adjustment program initiated in 1986 to meet a foreign exchange
crisis. The troubles began in 1991, after the regime, having liberated Islamist
opponents of the Bourguiba regime, not only refused to recognize their Nahda
party but also determined to eliminate them and intimidate anybody else who
might defend them. At the height of the repression in 1991–1992, the Ben Ali regime
was probably as tough as most of the others included in this volume, if
repression is to be measured by the number of political prisoners per capita,
quantitative or qualitative indices of torture, deaths in jail, or other
measures of individual suffering. This chapter presents the body counts and
other measures of political repression and tries to compare them with those of
other regimes, but such measures require further interpretation.
It is argued here that substantive deviation from social
expectations may leverage up the body counts in any fair reckoning of the
extent of repression that we are asked to evaluate. Crudely speaking, one
tortured Tunisian may count for more on a relative or “normalized” scale of
repression than several victims of another country in which torture is more
habitual and the regime has less of a political community of values to violate
and less of a state tradition or rule of law to undermine. The idea of
“deviating” from political traditions, however, also has its pitfalls because
the values and beliefs of a political community are always in flux.
International fashions also change: Bourguiba’s despotic developmentalism
looked good to academics, foundations, and NGOs in the 1960s, but similar Ben
Ali rhetoric no longer works the same magic in the twenty-first century.
Pinning down the latter’s “deviation” from Tunisia’s political traditions will
require considerable elaboration and, unfortunately, runs against the grain of
the best recent political study of the country, that of Camau and Geisser in
2003.
Tunisia,
however, became a police state in the 1990s, with big and visible increases in
the police force as well in arbitrary practices of neighborhood sweeps,
arrests, torture, and detention. Estimates of the number of police vary from
80,000 to 150,000, from double to almost four times the forces of the
mid–1980s. Even the lower number that circulates among foreign observers in
Tunisia suggests that, with one agent for every 110–115 Tunisians, the country
has more than twice as many as France, Germany, or Britain.
The former head of Tunisian security recalls having about twenty wire taps at
his disposal for Tunisian suspects in 1983 (after the dozens reserved for
foreign embassies) compared to about 5,000 in 2004.
Body
Counts
The State Department’s 2005 Report
on Tunisia’s
Human Rights Practices, released in March 2006, stated “The government's human rights record remained poor, and the
government persisted in committing serious abuses,” such as:
• torture and abuse of prisoners and
detainees
• arbitrary arrest and detention
• police impunity
• lengthy pretrial and incommunicado detention
• infringement of citizens' privacy rights
• restrictions on freedom of speech and press
• restrictions of freedom of assembly and association
The report describes in some detail the torture techniques
of Ben Ali’s police:
The forms of torture and other abuse included:
electric shock; submersion of the head in water; beatings with hands, sticks,
and police batons; suspension, sometimes manacled, from cell doors and rods
resulting in loss of consciousness; and cigarette burns. According to AI
[Amnesty International], police and prison officials used sexual assault and
threats of sexual assault against the wives of Islamist prisoners to extract
information, to intimidate, and to punish.
While noting that there had been some improvement in prison
conditions in the late 1990s, the report also discussed prison conditions:
Prison conditions ranged from spartan to poor, and
generally did not meet international standards. Foreign diplomatic observers
who visited prisons described the conditions as "horrible."
Overcrowding and limited medical care posed a significant threat to prisoners'
health. Sources reported that 40 to 50 prisoners were typically confined to a
single 194 square foot cell, and up to 140 prisoners shared a 323 square foot
cell. Current and former prisoners reported that inmates were forced to share a
single water and toilet facility with more than 100 cellmates, creating serious
sanitation problems.
Political prisoners were often singled out for specially
harsh treatment. Some leaders of Nahda, the banned Islamist party, have been in
jail since 1991, and in solitary confinement for protracted periods. There was
also strong circumstantial evidence that some were being killed in prison. The State Department report noted the most
recent death: “on June 17 [2005], Moncef Ben Ahmed Ouahichi, a Jendouba
resident, died of a cerebral hemorrhage at La Rabta Hospital in Tunis.
This followed his arrest June 10 and his release the next day, at which time he
was unconscious and bearing bruises…” Torture and/or inadequate medical care also
resulted in three reports of deaths in prison in 2002 and of early releases of
prisoners on death’s door.
Little reliable quantitative
information about political prisoners is available. A credible article on
prison conditions claims that Tunisia
had 253 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants in 2002—which would make a total of
roughly 25,000 prisoners for this country of 10 million.
But how many of them were political prisoners? In Report 2001, covering
the events of 2000, Amnesty International claimed “up to 1000,” but
subsequently reformulated it to “hundreds,” including “many…held for more than
a decade,” even after “scores” were released on November 3, 2004.
Human Rights Watch put the number at 500 in 2004 and then raised it to “more
than 500” in a detailed exposé of the abysmal situation of ten of some 40 or
more political leaders of the Nahda party and others who had been held in
virtual isolation since 1992. The International Association for the
Support of Political Prisoners (AISPP) counted 542 political prisoners by name
in 2004 and indicated that there were probably many more, but President Ben Ali
subsequently released substantial numbers of them in 2005, and at least 75 of
the 1600 he pardoned in February 2006 were also recognized to be political
prisoners. Human Rights Watch estimated, however, that
over three hundred of them remained in jail in 2006 after these releases. No independent body, not even the
International Red Cross, has had the opportunity to visit Tunisia’s
prisons since 1991, much less to perform a census.
If three hundred is roughly the
correct number of political prisoners, they account for only 1 percent of the
country’s prison population, or 3 per 100,000 Tunisian inhabitants. By this
conservative measure Tunisia was still more or less holding its own with Egypt,
Kuwait, and Morocco,
and seemed slightly more repressive than Syria, estimated in 2004 to be holding
only two hundred Syrian political prisoners out of a population almost twice as
large. Once they are released, moreover, former
political prisoners remain in virtual exile under strict administrative control
and with little chance of being gainfully employed.
The quality of the treatment of
prisoners has perhaps improved since 1991–1992, when the big crackdown on the
Nahda party occurred and thousands were arrested. At that time many prisoners,
on their eventual release,
described
treatment that clearly amounted to torture, including routine beatings by
prison guards and even by senior staff and prison wardens, and the shackling of
some prisoners hand and foot much of the day. Prisoners with health problems
were often denied medication or proper care, and infestations and skin diseases
were rampant due to poor hygienic conditions. Inmates were subject to extremes
of weather without adequate clothing and bedding. Hygiene was substandard and
overcrowding so severe that cellmates had no choice but to sleep in shifts. On
family-visit days, guards routinely humiliated and mistreated the inmates’
relatives.
In response to bad publicity in 2002 about prison conditions
deteriorating again after some improvement in the late 1990s, Ben Ali delegated
the head of his hand-picked “Higher Committee for Human Rights and Basic
Liberties” (Comité Supérieur des Droit de l’Homme et des libertés
fondamentales) to investigate the situation.
Although the resulting report was not published, Ben Ali promised to carry out
some of its recommendations, including better sanitation and “extending
breakfast to the entirety of the prison population.”
Of course he did not address the issue of political prisoners, especially
leaders arbitrarily sentenced by military courts in 1992. Close to one hundred
of the 265 Nahda activists sentenced in mid–1992 for attempting to overthrow
the government remained in custody in 2006, although the alleged “plot” was
seen at the time as just another excuse to lock up Ben Ali’s political
opponents. Apparently, many of the leaders were kept for years under solitary
confinement. As Human Rights Watch had concluded earlier, “Tunisia’s
policy of targeting specific prisoners for long-term segregation from the rest
of the prison population, whether in solitary or in small-group confinement,
stands in stark contrast to the claim that its prisons comply with
international standards.”
Other Indicators of Political Repression
As the State Department had already
noted in 2004,
“Security forces physically abused, intimidated, and harassed citizens who
voiced public criticism of the Government.” One of them was Abderrahmane Tlili,
head of one of Tunisia’s
six officially recognized opposition parties represented in parliament and the
son of a distinguished Tunisian trade unionist. Plainclothes hooligans from the
police beat him up very badly in the street outside his mother’s home after he
threatened to expose the Ben Ali family with compromising documents. Then, after
the official police rescued him and took him to the hospital, others ransacked
his home for the documents.
Another victim is Mokhtar Yahyaoui,
a leading Tunisian judge dismissed from his post for criticizing the
manipulation of Tunisian justice by the Ben Ali regime. Tunisia’s
version of Haiti’s
Tontons-Macoutes assaulted him for organizing defense lawyers on behalf of
political prisoners. His nephew, who had produced an online political
opposition magazine, Tunezzine,
died at the age of 30 of a heart attack shortly after being released from a
couple of years in prison. Women were
not exempt from attacks by plainclothed hooligans. Sihem Bensedrine, a
journalist and political activist who resigned from the leadership of one of
Ben Ali’s make-believe opposition parties, suffered various police attacks and
smears on her reputation, including fake pornographic videos. Human rights
lawyer Radhia Nasraoui, who went on a hunger strike to get her (secular
leftist) husband released from jail, also suffered numerous indignities, and
her children were deprived of passports. Journalists and lawyers were special
targets, and their children, like Judge Yahyaoui’s daughter, might be slapped
around as a further warning to unrepentant opponents. Hooligans from the police even grabbed the
mobile telephone of Helene Flautre, the EU Parliament’s president of the Human
Rights Commission, and prevented her from having a private dinner conversation
with Radhia Nasraoui in May 2006 by sitting down at their table in the hotel
dining room.
Moncef Marzouki, who tried in 1994
to run against Ben Ali for the presidency and was jailed two days after the
elections, continued to teach and practice medicine in Tunisia but sent his
family to safety in France while he spent time in and out of jail working for
various human rights causes. Deprived of his livelihood in Tunisia,
he, too, finally moved to France
in 2001 to work and teach in a Paris
hospital. Many independent journalists, beginning with Kamel Labidi, have also
been obliged to leave the country in order to pursue their profession. More
recently Taoufik Brik gained further time in Tunisia
by going on a hunger strike that gained him international attention and
protection.
The state of the public media is deplorable. "If in
certain countries like Algeria, Bosnia, or even Turkey, one kills journalists
standing up, in others, like Tunisia, one participates in a slow death of the
profession, by asphyxiation," a group of Tunisian journalists wrote to the
International Federation of Journalists in 1995. The press became so
"asphyxiated," in fact, that in 1997 the World Association of
Newspapers (WAN) expelled the Tunisian Association of Newspaper Directors—a
tool of the Ben Ali regime—for its inattention to the deterioration of press
freedom in the country.
Although some magazines and
newspapers are ostensibly privately owned, they operate under stringent
legislation and self-censorship. Es-Sabah lost any remaining shreds of
autonomy in 2000 when its owner-publisher left the country, ostensibly for
family reasons, and its leading journalist, Abdellatif Fourati, was dismissed. La
Presse, which is also privately owned but which had never displayed the
independence of Es-Sabah, was indistinguishable from the official
government press. Haqa’iq/Réalités,
a bilingual weekly, after publishing a controversial investigative report on
prison conditions (see endnote 8), briefly lost its publicity revenues from
government ads but then published the government’s version of what happened to
Hédi Yahmed, the unfortunate young author of the report who departed shortly
thereafter to France to pursue his professional career.
The government also refused permission for Al-Jazeera to set up an office in Tunis,
despite a request by the president of the Tunisian Union of Journalists. In
fact the syndicate, after expressing concerns about freedom of the press, was
denied permission to hold its congress in 2006.
Tunisia’s
low newspaper circulation may be seen as another indicator of the regime’s
repressiveness because people are free not to buy papers, which suffer from a
lack of real news content. Figure 1 shows that interest peaked in the 1980s and
early 1990s, when there was some give in the political system, but then it
declined, reaching levels in 2000 and 2001 that were back to those of 1970,
when Tunisia was a much poorer and less literate society. Figure 1 also compares Tunisia
with America’s
other important allies in the Arab region, and with Syria
and Iran for
good measure. Tunisia
and Syria run
neck-and-neck for the lowest circulations.
In other words their monolithic newspeak bores readers the most.
Figure 1: Newspaper Circulation
(about here)
Source: World Bank, World
Development Indicators CD ROM 2004
Tunisia’s
handling of the Internet is another sad story. One of the first southern Mediterranean
states to gain full connectivity to the Internet, in 1991, it was among the
last to extend it to the public. When, in 1997, President Ben Ali finally
decided that Tunisia
needed to catch up, he still managed to keep control of the public’s access to
news and even to personal correspondence. The law defining the service
providers required them "to assure continual surveillance of the content
of servers exploited by the service provider so as not to permit dissemination
of information which is contrary to public order and morality," as if they
running a cinema or theater.
Consequently few dared to respond to official tenders. Ben Ali’s daughter and a
close friend of the family run the only two service providers that offer
connections to the public. People are encouraged to set up their e-mail
accounts with the service providers rather than with Hotmail or Yahoo because
the latter are periodically shut down, although it is common knowledge that the
service providers also offer full access to Tunisia’s Internet police, which
has been strengthened in recent years. Telephone and Internet charges have been
reduced to encourage people to use their home connections, where they can be
easily monitored. As the Tunisian League of Human Rights reported in May 2004,
“the e-mail, particularly of political or human rights activists can be
intercepted and mailboxes shut down by pirating passwords.” One journalist was
thrown into prison for four months for sending an e-mail from an Internet café.
Tunisian opposition sites and
newspapers are blocked, as are many foreign journals and newspapers like Le
Monde and other potentially subversive resources. Tunisia’s
“publinets” (Internet cafés) are so restricted by spy software in the computers
and so infested with plainclothes police that demand for their services may be
decreasing rather than increasing, although most of Tunisia’s
700,000 users depend on them rather than on more expensive connections at home.
In any event, the number of these publicly sponsored enterprises dropped from
340 to 260 in 2002, mainly as a result of police sweeps in June and July
directed against publinets that did not fully comply with regulations.
There were 305 of them in 2005, serving as a “low-tec point of control” because
the café owners were “required by the
state to monitor customer access to prevent access to “banned” content.” At
least three groups of young Internet surfers were caught, imprisoned, and in
some cases tortured in 2002 before being subjected to trials and long prison
sentences. Released in 2005, the Zarzis group remains
deprived of educational opportunities and under virtual house arrest.
The development of the police state
in Tunisia,
moreover, has not just been confined to niche specializations like Internet
surveillance. With their four-fold increase since Bourguiba forced retirement
in 1987 they are more visible on the streets and specialize, too, in repressing
non-government organizations (NGOs) as well as political dissidents. A final indicator of repressiveness, much
more difficult to quantify, concerns the degree of political pluralism that a
regime tolerates. How autonomous are the NGOs and in what domains are they
allowed to operate? Tunisia
has thousands of them, but only a dozen or so are truly independent, not
government satellites encouraged by the regime as a “civil society”
counterweight to opposition Islamists.
The Islamists are either in exile, jail, or, in the cases of those released in
2005 and 2006 under virtual house arrest. The regime has, however, encouraged a
semblance of political pluralism by legalizing a few “opposition” parties and
even allocating to them a small percentage of seats in parliament that they
could not otherwise win against the state party juggernaut, the Democratic
Constitutional Rally (RCD). Although handpicked for their loyalty, opposition
leaders have sometimes been in trouble for trying to do their job. Abderrahmane
Tlili, already mentioned, is one example. Another was Mohamed Mouada, the head
of the largest opposition party. He was arrested in 1996 and again in 2001,
after criticizing the president. Each time he was released after a few months,
but he had been sentenced in 1996 to eleven years on charges of providing
intelligence to a foreign power and remained under constant surveillance.
The regime has not succeeded,
however, in totally abolishing politics. Human rights organizations exist,
though they operate under great difficulty. One tactic used to neutralize the
Tunisian League of Human Rights was to submerge its meetings with an influx of
RCD activists. Another was to encourage “moderates” to desert the “extremists,”
whom the regime could not control. The LTDH was virtually paralyzed in 1993,
then recovered briefly before again falling victim to internal power struggles
that removed activists like Moncef Marzouki from office. Other organizations
operate illegally and are consequently always vulnerable. The Tunisian human
rights activists enjoy significant support from international NGOs and
occasional backing from France
and even the United States.
The regime must weigh its sense of security against the political costs of
incremental losses of international support. In May 2006 it seemed to be
panicking. First the police broke into the office of head of the Tunisian Bar
Association and attacked lawyers protesting a new law that threatened the
profession’s independence. Then, on May
11, security forces detained the head of the newly formed Syndicate of
Journalists for holding a secret meeting.
A week later the police even prevented members of the family of a
deceased human rights activist from entering the headquarters of the Tunisian
League for Human Rights to attend a memorial ceremony in his honor. Then they detained Swiss representative of
Amnesty International, who was attending a meeting of the Tunisian section, and
asked him to leave the country on May 21. A week later, in the presence of
foreign guest observers, including Hélène Flautre, Chair of the European
Parliament’s Human Rights Committee, police physically blocked LTDH delegates
from holding their congress.
Fortunately for the opposition, Tunisia
is too close to France
for its suffering to be totally ignored. Online and in France,
various opposition groups publicly engage in exile politics and support
Tunisian human rights. The ruling party insulates the masses from the small
elite of human rights activists at home, however, and the only serious threat
to the regime would be if internal dissidents within the ruling apparatus were
to join forces with those activists.
Deviating
from Tunisian Traditions?
In terms of our indicators, the Ben Ali regime holds its
own across a universe of regimes in the Arab region that routinely tortures
political suspects and keep some of their oppositions under lock and key. As
noted above, its political prisoners per 100,000 people roughly matched the
incarceration ratios of Egypt,
Kuwait, and Morocco,
and even exceeded Syria’s. Its press is among the dullest and most
conformist in the region, and its dismal human rights is further darkened by
the degree that the Ben Ali regime has deviated from the country’s established
norms.
Serious observers argue, however, that the Ben Ali regime
did not significantly deviate from Bourguiba’s norms. Habib Bourguiba, after
all, was no democrat. In 1956, he became prime minister of independent Tunisia
and proceeded with the full support of his Neo-Destour Party, which in turn
controlled an elected National Assembly, to establish a presidential regime. He
then reorganized the party to insure his personal authority. In 1974 he had the
Tunisian constitution amended to award him a life-long presidency.
Like Ben Ali, Bourguiba had murdered or physically
intimidated his opponents, even as far back as 1937 when his Neo-Destour party
battled and outflanked the old Destour forces of Abdelaziz Thaalbi. When a
split occurred in 1955 between Bourguiba, who favored independence in
cooperation with France, and his erstwhile collaborator and party organizer, Salah
Ben Youssef, who preferred a more radical pan-Arab approach, the result was
virtual civil war. The new Tunisian government, with French military
assistance, cracked down on the Youssefists in the early months of
independence, and captured Youssefists suffered miserable fates in Tunisian
jails unless they were shot on the spot or hanged in a public square. The
estimated 900 deaths in 1955–1956 were double those of Tunisians killed or
executed in their independence struggle against France
(1934–1954). One of Bourguiba’s “enforcers” supervised the execution of Salah
Ben Youssef in a Frankfurt hotel room in 1961.
Apparently, too, trade union leader Ahmed Tlili and former Planning Minister
Ahmed Ben Salah were subsequently targeted.
Bourguiba’s regime was torturing students returning from
the Near East as early as 1963 to preserve Tunisians
from infectious Arab ideologies such as Baathism. Then in 1968 it was the turn
of home grown leftists. The State Security Court
convicted 130 students and young graduates, although many had apparently
already suffered “torture with unheard of cruelty,” so as “to terrorize them
out of any desire for contestation.”
The treatment may have been extended to hundreds of students arrested in the
early 1970s. Then in the 1980s it was the turn of the Islamists. Ever more
senile, Bourguiba called back his “enforcer” to be assistant director of the
ruling party and demanded capital punishment for Rashid Ghannouchi, their
leader, and others among the scores of Islamists on trial.
Instead of deviating from Bourguiba’s legacy, then, Ben
Ali could be viewed as rectifying it and preventing the excessive punishments
Bourguiba sought when, as prime minister in 1987, Ben Ali conspired with party
director Hedi Baccouche and others to retire the old man from office. As
president in 1988, he released the hundred or so Islamists whom Bourguiba had
jailed. He also intended to curb some of Bourguiba’s other excesses. Close
associates of Ben Ali insisted at the time, for instance, that the president
had no desire to emulate Bourguiba’s personality cult. Rather, he advocated
freedom of the press and other measures of political liberalization in 1988.
The public media were deplorable in Bourguiba’s final years: the daily TV news
opened with archives of Bourguiba delivering speeches in the 1950s and 1960s
before showing a few current scenes of a doddering old man being adulated by
his courtiers.
By the early 1990s, however, Ben Ali was practicing the
full Bourguiba, cult and all. The presidency grew at the expense of the
ministries, the council of ministers, and the prime minister, for the
youthful-looking president, computer at hand, took active control of the
administration. Instead of breaking with the one-party system, he encouraged
the ruling party to grow even more, from roughly 1 million members in 1986 to 2
million in 1997, flushing some of the older leadership with new cadres. The party continued as it had during much of
Bourguiba’s reign to be an appendage of government administration, with hierarchical
controls extending in parallel with the ministry of the interior down to the
local level. It did not serve as a recruitment channel for political
leadership, since ministers tended to be recruited for their technocratic
organizational abilities and then parachuted into party command posts rather
than the reverse. In Bourguiba’s time ministers tended to have had more of a
political background in the party, trade union, or student union than those
recruited after 1987.
But Bourguiba’s party, too, had been largely transformed into an administrative
apparatus by 1958, two years after independence.
The exercise of personal power, moreover, tended to transform the political
elite into insecure individual courtiers seeking the presidential monarch’s favor.
In this sense little changed between the Bourguiba and the Ben Ali periods.
By engineering constitutional change in 2002 to permit him
to keep running for office, Ben Ali even seemed to be competing with
Bourguiba’s legacy of a life-long presidency. Indeed,
if it is true that he has cancer and is grooming his wife to succeed him, he
may meanwhile outdo Bourguiba’s excesses.
Ben Ali’s cult of personality is an even greater deviation from Tunisian
traditions because he is no Bourguiba; when history repeats, the second time
has to be a farce. What most Tunisians could accept of their founding father,
they can hardly accept of an upstart ex military intelligence officer with
limited political experience. Ben Ali lacks Bourguiba’s historical legitimacy.
The Ben Ali regime’s economic corruption, moreover, has
exceeded all Bourguibian boundaries. True, Bourguiba built palaces—although not
removing all his neighbors for security reasons as Ben Ali did in extending the
perimeters of his Carthage palace.
True, some of Bourguiba’s wife’s family and friends may have made commercial
mistakes. One of them, for instance, was chairman of the Union of International
Banks, which had become an insolvent state enterprise by 1986 when he was fired
and imprisoned—at about the time Bourguiba divorced his wife.
These stories pale, however, against the lurid tales of corruption of the
“Seven Families” surrounding Ben Ali.
Some reports even suggested that Ben Ali has lost control of the battle
among these family clans.
Undermining
the State
The question of how deviant the Tunisian regime may be is
not in the last analysis to be decided by comparisons between Ben Ali and
Bourguiba in his later years but rather by how much each deviated from Tunisian
political traditions. Both leaders insisted on a state of law but proceeded to
undermine it.
The “state-building” of the pre-colonial and colonial
periods may have been incomplete but Tunisia’s state tradition is certainly at
least as strong as Morocco’s or Egypt’s and arguably stronger, given the degree
to which a protracted nationalist struggle steeped Tunisia’s elites in the
colonizer’s political culture. Bourguiba
built upon this legacy in his golden years of political pedagogy (1955–1965).
After his first heart attack in 1965, however, there ensued a politically
debilitating succession crisis lasting over two decades. In my opinion, the
critical turning point came in 1971–1972, when Bourguiba—had he not been a
megalomaniac—might have accepted reforms within the ruling party that would
have institutionalized pluralistic competition within the party. Instead, he
purged the liberals with the help of organized labor, got himself elected
president for life (boasting in the process about himself being a miracle that
happens only once in a millennium), and then suppressed the major trade union.
Ben Ali’s autocracy is a logical continuation of
Bourguiba’s. But the deviations from the
rule of law are becoming excessive for several reasons. Times have changed and
international public opinion is no longer as tolerant of developmental despots
as in the 1960s. Echoes of disapproval in turn influence elite public opinion
inside Tunisia, leading to greater disaffection, just as opposition from within
receives more support abroad than in Bourguiba’s day. The Tunisian middle
classes have vastly expanded from a core of under 5,000 university-educated
professionals counted in 1965, and they are in constant contact with Europe,
as are the lower classes as well. Tunisia
also enjoys a rich legacy of nongovernmental organizations and political
infrastructure, social capital that is currently wasting away under centralized
party command.
The costs to the state budget of developmental
dictatorship are greater than they used to be. On the positive side, prudent
economic policies has kept inflation in check while spurring growth and
substantially reducing although not eliminating poverty. The state banks,
however, have huge portfolios of non-performing loans that stubbornly persist
despite vast sums spent each year to clean them up. Many of the loans are to
the regime’s wealthy retainers. Corruption, too, deters private investment. Tunisia
is extremely competent in getting more than its share of aid from the EU, but
its ability to attract foreign direct investment is limited by business
perceptions of a voracious local mafia. Consequently, unable to attract enough
investment, Tunisia
takes on more debt in the race to grow fast enough to keep unemployment under
control. Although debt service levels have not reached the level that obliged a
major economic stabilization agreement with the IMF in 1986, the need for
continued growth may keep nudging up its debt level ratios. In 2005 the present
value of the short-term and long-term external debt amounted to 79 per cent of
Gross National Income, higher than any other country’s in the Middle
East and North (including Turkey)
except Syria’s
and Lebanon’s.
Support from the United
States and the World Bank helps Tunisia
to stay afloat. The World Bank promised loans worth at least $200–$300 million
annually for the period from July 2004 to June 2008 if Tunisia
pursued structural reform, or $100 million if reforms stalled. Tunisia even
managed to obtain a loan to develop its Internet capabilities in preparation
for the World Summit on the Information Society that it hosted in 2005 (on
behalf of the United Nations and the International Telecommunications Union) to
discuss management of the Internet. It gained this privilege after being
praised by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) for
democratizing the local Internet! No new loans from the World Bank were
forthcoming in 2006 and 2007, however, except $66.8 million toward a Tunis
sewage project.
If corruption has not yet, as in the nineteenth century,
undermined Tunisian state finances, the police as well as the judiciary seem to
be unraveling. Torturing prisoners was becoming routine, and a former minister
of the interior narrowly escaped being indicted in a Geneva
hospital by a former Tunisian victim with the help of TRIAL (“Track Impunity
Always”) a Swiss human rights NGO.
In the opposition press one also reads that the police simply are incapable of
doing routine duties, so caught up as they are in political surveillance and
other tasks. There is a danger, in fact, that the police may displace the
ruling party as the focus of control, as happened to the Baath Party in Iraq.
Within the party, too, there are echoes of disturbances at the local level,
such as the arrest in 1998 of a Central Committee member who was mayor of
Kasserine (in the relatively neglected southwestern part of the country) and
had criticized government policy.
The most spectacular sign of state
breakdown occurred in 2001, when Tunis
civil circuit chief judge Moktar Yahyahoui wrote a letter to the president
denouncing the total absence of independence among the Tunisian judiciary. The
correspondent for Le Monde went so far as to write of “Ben Ali’s lost
battle,” now that the true state of the regime’s foundations lay revealed.
Indeed the human rights opposition seems bolder, sensing a weakening of
authority. Even the cowed and quiescent press showed some signs of life in
March 2004, when a number of journalists from La Presse and Essahaffa
wrote an open letter to the prime minister and a number of other government
officials complaining of “a
return in force of the policy of censorship and of pressure on their writings”
and of their newspapers’ editorial practices. The investigative activities of
independent Tunisian journalists during the October 2004 elections also
indicate a growing impatience with fake competition.
These presidential and
parliamentary elections did little to strengthen the regime. As in previous
presidential elections, Ben Ali had token opposition but won 94.8 percent of
the vote (with a participation rate of 74 percent of the eligible voters).
Independent journalists observed that the president’s campaign virtually
monopolized the media, receiving 77 percent of the time accorded by the
broadcasting media and 92 percent of the surface of the written press. Two of
Ben Ali’s presidential contenders, moreover, expressed their support for the
incumbent president and were permitted prime time, whereas afternoon prayers
interrupted the third opponent’s broadcast! Little time or space remained for
any of the parliamentary candidates, and most was allocated to those of the
ruling Rassemblement Démocratique Constitutionelle (RDC). Whereas the
opposition did manage to be heard, “in several cases the MDS [Mouvement Democratique
Socialiste, the largest of the token opposition parties] and independent
candidates announced their support for President Ben Ali instead of presenting
their own programs.”
Another source of embarrassment for the regime was the World
Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). How could a regime that is so
unfriendly to the free flow of information be an appropriate host to such a
gathering? The International Freedom of Expression
Exchange (IFEX), an international consortium of NGOs such as Article 19 (of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights), the International Federation of
Journalists, and Reporters
sans Frontières, wrote an open letter to UN
Secretary-General Kofi Annan urging the United Nations and member states to
change the venue of the World Summit unless minimal rights could be guaranteed,
including those of local as well as international media. IFEX published a
report in February 2005 that took up many of the themes discussed in this
paper.
During the time from January
14–19, 2005, when its fact-finding mission was in Tunisia,
the authorities unblocked some web sites, but further monitoring demonstrated
systematic filtering, based on an American software program. A careful study published on the eve of the Summit
showed that the government blocked not only the obviously political sites such
as Kalima, an opposition newspaper published online by Sihem Bensedrine, but virtually all “anonymizer”
sites from which Tunisians could engage in undetected
surfing.
When the World Summit convened in Tunis
on 15 November 2005 the
Tunisian government blocked all efforts to hold meetings outside the rigid
confines of the offical conference. The
holding of the Summit did, however,
give IFEX the opportunity for further monitoring of the situation. In a report issued in May 2006 it welcomed
the Tunisian decisions in February 2006 to release Hamadi Jebali, the
long-suffering former editor of Nahda’s newspaper, and the seven cyber
dissidents known as the Youth of Zarzis (while insisting also that the
government stop harassing them outside jail).
But the new report is a further indictment of the regime’s “deceptions
and lies,” concluding that “Freedom of Expression in Tunisia Remains under Siege” and urging “international
organisations not to collude with the Tunisian government's attempts to cover
up violations taking place in Tunisia.” Such comments might also have been addressed
to the EU and the United States, along with IFEX’s
principal findings:
- The continuation of the imprisonment of
individuals related to expression of their opinions or media activities.
- Blocking of websites, including news and
information websites.
- Restrictions on the freedom of
association, including the right of organisations to be legally
established, and to hold meetings.
- Restrictions on the freedom of movement of
human rights defenders and political dissidents together with political
police surveillance, harassment, and intimidation.
- Press self-censorship and lack of
diversity of content in the media, especially in the state-owned papers,
radio and TV stations.
- Attempts to smear the reputations of
activists, which are unlawful actions that are not being investigated.
- Official harassment of attorneys and
judges who press for independence of the judiciary.
- Censorship of books through the legal
submission procedure.
Indeed the human rights situation was deteriorating in 2006,
and this new list of Tunisian malpractices, expanding on those listed in State
Department’s Human Rights Report released earlier in the year (see above, page
2), pointed to a breakdown of law and order.
The authorities went so far to purge the Association of Tunisian Judges
for supporting Mohammed Abbou, a lawyer who had been jailed in 2005 for writing
articles on the Internet about Tunisian practices of torture. He was
imprisoned, like many political prisoners in Tunisia, far away from his family,
so that his wife had to drive hours, often lengthened by arbitrary police behavior, to visit her
husband for a few minutes each week.
Even the Paris Bar Association became concerned in May 2006 about the
flagrant abuse of justice and volunteered to participate in the defense of
Maître Abbou.
As one Tunisian wrote in a six-part
series about Tunisia’s
“political mafia,”
Tunisia
has turned back to the German Gestapo in Hitler’s time. Criminal networks have been formed to shut
off all propaganda or information because they are aware of the dangers of any
arms of confrontation: they have banned the press, have restructured it and
organized it to interdict any access by opposition elements and block all free
thought, reflection, and political activities.
The series of articles observed “signs pointing to the
collapse” of the regime but expressed little confidence in Tunisia’s
divided and impotent opposition parties.
One sign of the regime’s vulnerability, more reminiscent of the Soviet
Union under Stalin than Nazi Germany, were instructions given to
the national soccer team training in Switzerland
not to talk with the foreign press. Of
greater political import, but expressing the same closed mentality, the
authorities sabotaged a seminar of international NGOs in September 2006 to
prepare the 'International Conference on
Employment and the Right to Work in the Euro-Mediterranean Region' to be held
in Berlin in 2007. The various European
and Arab delegates arrived to discover that there were no longer any hotel
reservations, despite the arrangements made by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, a
German foundation that had earlier worked with Tunisia on an EU sponsored project to develop trade unions. Even the Amilcar Hotel owned by the Tunisian
General Union of Labor (UGTT) was closed to the delegates despite ample space.
Evidently the authorities had taken umbrage at the presence of leading Tunisian
human rights activists, protected by the Europeans.
Policy Implications
Were Tunisia,
in addition to freeing hundreds of political prisoners, to meet the other
conditions of IFEX, a sea change in its political life would occur. Tunisia,
the well known état pilote or development model in the 1950s and 1960s,
could again become a modern showcase, albeit not on its present course of
mixing bogus privatization and cosmetic reform with the standard practices of a
police state. For policy makers interested in democratizing the Arab and Muslim
world, Tunisia
deserves serious attention because it offers the best prospects for success: a
relatively large middle class, social capital, political infrastructure,
prudent economic management, and relatively efficient administration. Although
it is still in practice a one-party state, grass roots party organizations
could take on new life, if the rule of law came to be respected. It is a
relatively strong state still, although corruption and a brutal disrespect for
human rights are corroding it.
There is
little that the United States
alone can do to halt the deterioration, but the European Union is also
committed to human rights and democratic reform through partnership agreements
with its southern neighbors. The two must work together despite their
differences; indeed a common European commitment to better governance in Tunisia
would also serve to strengthen its own union. Whether or not Tunisia
is the most egregious violator of human rights in the region, it is the most
promising target for reform. Not only do its internal social and economic
conditions augur well for democracy, but, with fewer economic or strategic
rents than its neighbors, the country is less able to derail a common approach
by the outside powers. Combined EU-American efforts could also help to heal the
divisions within the Atlantic alliance over other countries such as Iraq,
where the stakes are higher.
There are
some signs, at least, that the European Union may be reevaluating its
relationship with Tunisia. Shortly after Hélène Flautre’s mission to
Tunisia in May 2006 the European Parliament passed a resolution regretting that
“the situation as regards freedoms and human rights in Tunisia is still a cause
for concern” and calling for Tunisia to cooperate with the EU and the United
Nations on a number of fronts, including agreeing to a visit by the UN Special
Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers. Noting that Tunisia was holding the
presidency of the Euro-Mediterranean Parliamentary Assembly (EMPA), the
European Parliament also called for “better cooperation” between EMPA and the
Tunisian Presidency “in terms of respecting human rights.” Although the parliament has little power over
the EU executive, much less its constituent states, the countries that have
some influence on Tunisia,
such as France
and Germany,
may use the resolution to put more pressure on Tunisia
and indeed to encourage the parliament’s Human Rights Committee to continue its
fine work. The United
States, too, could be more responsive to the
EU parliament’s concerns and also to those expressed by its own State
Department human rights section.
Working together, “old Europe”
and the United States
could attempt to persuade Ben Ali that his place in history lies in presiding
over a genuinely competitive succession process when his presidential term
expires in 2009. Meanwhile, the Europeans and Americans should continue to
support those few genuinely autonomous NGOs that continue to defy dictatorial
and arbitrary rule. Since
the EU currently enjoys greater moral authority than the United
States in the region, it should be
especially persistent in defending the human rights movement within Tunisia,
as its moral authority may serve to curb some of the excesses of the police.
Awareness of strong outside support may in turn further embolden the domestic
opposition.
Tunisia
could regain the moral high ground that it occupied during its first ten years
of independence under a healthy Bourguiba, but this time under leadership
constrained by stronger institutions and the rule of law. It could again become
a model for development and political change in Africa
and in the Arab world, were the current regime to be exposed to gentle but
focused and sustained international pressure. Unfortunately, the United
States sends precisely the wrong signal by
stationing a regional bureau of the Middle East Partnership Initiative in the
country. Although any liberation of Tunisia
is likely to be accompanied by a torrent of anti-American political rhetoric, a
new dialogue with aspiring Tunisian democrats (including the Islamists) could
also offer both parties an opportunity to recover their political traditions.
If the United States were ready to face up to a Middle East with fewer “sweet
little rogues,” Tunisian civil society (and Tunisian officials embarrassed by
the excesses of the police state) could positively respond to the Bush
administration’s commitment to freedom and democracy.