Abstract
Government attempts to control the media show how far Tunisia has to go.
The people nicknamed him ‘Ammar 404’ – the faceless official responsible for censoring the internet during the days of now-ousted Tunisian president Zine Abidine Ben Ali. He was named for the ‘404 Not Found’ messages that had replaced the web pages the regime didn’t want them to read. Then came the ‘Arab Spring’ and the official suddenly earned a face and a real name, Sami Zaoui.
Though a quick post-regime appointment, Zaoui was still reluctant to unplug all his powers. Even countries that ‘were more evolved in the matter of freedom’ blocked terrorist sites, he said. But he said it in a tweet-back to Tunisian online rights advocate Riadh Guerfali only days after Ben Ali fled in January 2011. It suggested to some that a more web-savvy official mindset was now at work.
Click forward to 4 September 2012 and an announcement by Information and Communication Technologies Minister Mongi Marzoug. He formally lifted Tunisian internet censorship and added that ‘Ammar 404’, figuratively speaking, was no more.
Having worked on Tunisian free expression issues extensively, I voiced caution in a tweet of my own, and got a prompt tweet-back from Moez Chakchouk, CEO of the Tunisian Internet Agency (ATI), intended to reassure me. Moaz, who writes in this issue (see page 60-61), is a smart man and a leading defender of the freedom of the web in the Arab world. But Tunisia’s environment for free expression was in a febrile state even before the violent protests over The Innocence of Muslims YouTube video that month. At least four were killed and 46 injured during demonstrations outside the capital’s US embassy on 14 September.
Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch was warning that free speech rights would be put at risk by clauses in a draft constitution that was then about to be unveiled by the country’s elected interim Constituent Assembly. The clauses will criminalise ‘attacks on the sacred’ and ‘normalisation of relations with Israel’ without defining the ‘sacred’ or what constitutes an ‘attack’ on it, never mind what the phrase ‘normalisation’ should mean to a Tunisian judge.
The judiciary itself is divided on this issue, in fact on everything, between factions within the Tunisian Association of Magistrates (AMT). One is led by dissident judges penalised during the old regime days for not toeing the party line, a second by the regime-era placemen who still run the unloved Supreme Council of the Judiciary. The public forum for their fight was the internet and control over the association’s website and its Facebook page, where the bad opinions of both sides were freely expressed, leading to a suspension of both sites in September.
Minister Marzoug has convened a new National Internet Governance Forum to start work in 2013, with a mandate guided by principles of freedom of expression under a new constitution. It’s a big ask: the constitutional drafting process poses its own challenge to free expression. Even a mission supported by the usually politically-sensitive UNESCO was so exercised by the situation that it advised the Constituent Assembly’s Commission on Rights and Freedoms to adopt a law to protect freedom of expression following the example of Indonesia’s press law, which makes it ‘a crime to wilfully obstruct the exercise of the right to freedom of expression’.
In September, a coalition of online activist groups, including the pro-transparency initiative OpenGov.tn, activist bloggers Nawaat, partners of Index in Tunisia, and the pro-democracy group al Bawsala, filed their own lawsuit against the Constituent Assembly for violating transparency standards requiring publication of vote counts and committee reports. ‘If they don’t follow their own rules,’ Nawaat’s Malek Khadraoui told the news website Tunisia Live, ‘how are we supposed to have confidence in their creation of our national laws?’
Journalists protest against the appointment of a former security services director to run a prominent media outlet, Tunis, 28 September 2012
Credit: Zoubeir Souissi/Reuters
Everywhere battle royals are breaking out between new forces and the old guard, mostly unaffected by the fall of Ben Ali, and determined to retain as much of their influence as possible. Index, along with other members of the International Freedom of Expression Exchange Tunisia Monitoring Group of international free expression NGOs (IFEX-TMG), continues to highlight media rights abuses triggered by power struggles between factions.
On 22 August, the government replaced the head of the national TV network and put Lotfi Touati, a former security services officer, in as director of the media group Dar Assabah, publisher of two influential daily newspapers and a weekly magazine. Three days later the Court of Appeal in Tunis ordered the arrest of Sami Fehri, director of Attounisia TV, on charges of ‘financial impropriety’. Only two days before, prime ministerial media advisor Lotfi Zaitoun called Fehri to complain about his channel’s satirical show Political Logic and demand its suspension. He faces ten years in jail if convicted.
Boutheina Gouia, who presents the News & Rumour programme on national radio, was suspended for inviting Tunisian media union officials on air to discuss the situation. ‘There has been a change in the attitude of employees with the national radio; it looks like a policy of intimidation has succeeded,’ Gouia told the IFEX-TMG.
Throughout August the intimidation increased. On 5 August, Tunisian blogger Lina ben Mhenni was targeted and beaten by police during a demonstration in Tunis’s Avenue Bourguiba. On 14 August, ultra-conservative Islamist Salafists attacked the comedian Lotfi al Abdali and stopped his show in the town of Manzil Bourguiba. On 23 August, Salafists brutally attacked poet Sghaier Ouled Ahmed after he criticised the Ennahda party and its leaders on Attounisia TV. ‘No officers or officials will be saved from the bombs of my poetry and prose,’ said Ouled Ahmed, according to the IFEX-TMG, ‘if they continue to turn a blind eye to such attacks.’
It looks like a policy of intimidation has succeeded
But on 24 August, poet Mohammed al Hadi al Waslati was also attacked by a group of Salafists in Tunis and hospitalised, suffering serious injuries. Minister of Culture Mehdi Mabrouk told Express FM Radio that the Salafist attacks needed to be confronted but that the situation was ‘under control’.
As Index’s Afef Abrougui writes in this issue (page 148-151), similar attacks on visual artists only further prove that the Salafist extremists are acting with impunity, free of interference from the government. It’s a difficult environment for efforts to deliver the kind of open internet that Tunisia needs to share information about the constitutional process. It’s also limiting for citizens trying to organise, to protest and to provide the protection for its journalists and artists that the authorities can’t.
The deliberate hogging of political influence by old regime forces and the inconsistency of the interim Islamist government will essentially create two spheres. One is private, manipulative, small and concentrated. The second is larger – a public sphere of individuals and, crucially, networks of individuals. They have shared a frustration with an incompetent government, violent extremists, corrupt police and judiciary, a controlled media and a rapacious political elite. The parallel with the confrontation between citizens and the shallow Ben Ali regime before its fall in 2011 is easy to draw.
A live-and-let-live relationship has to be built between Tunisia’s large online community: secular, Islamist, civil society activists, trades unions, women’s groups, students, journalists and other self-organising networks. This will be the principal responsibility of minister Mongi’s freshly convened National Internet Governance Forum. Google’s North Africa policy manager Khaled Koubaa told Lisa Goldman of TechPresident that to be sure internet censorship really ‘ends’, the forum has to be a multi-stakeholder, open, participatory policy-making process, able to challenge censorship at the level of policy and standards as well as at the level of content.
The true relevance of the internet to the Arab Spring is strongly debated. But that does not mean that it can’t have a role in guiding new changes in Tunisia – and it should not be actively blocked from doing so.