Tunisia’s 2 Faces of Progress

The men pounced, their beefy hands grabbing, pushing, shoving. There were a dozen of them, at least, and they hurled themselves at anyone in their way. Others banged bottles on a car, menacing a group of women as they tried to flee.

The assailants didn’t identify themselves, but here, as in much of the Arab world, there was no need. It wasn’t so much the clothes, which were casual, as much as it was the attitude: These men could do whatever they wanted, whenever they felt like it. They were the police.

In this case, they’d been dispatched by the government to stop a group of human rights activists from demonstrating for the release of political prisoners.

“Tunisia presents itself as this good student to the international community,” said Omar Mestiri, the founder of a banned human rights monitoring group who sported a deep purple bruise under his eye after the recent fracas. “It’s very progressive in economic matters, and it says it is working on human rights. That’s the face of it. But on the inside, it is a police state.”

Tunisia’s general-turned-president, Zine el Abidine ben Ali, promised democracy when he came to power in 1987 in a bloodless coup. He instituted the usual trappings, allowing for opposition press, freeing some political prisoners and even abolishing the post of president-for-life.

But all it takes is a quick stroll down most any street here in the capital to experience what it’s like to be followed by agents who make little attempt to stay hidden. The system is designed to intimidate--and to keep the ruling group in power. Just last month, the president pushed through a constitutional change that will, in effect, allow him to serve as president for life.

Like many regimes in the Arab world, Ben Ali’s government is sitting on a volcano of popular discontent stoked by religious fervor and international events such as the Palestinian intifada. Tunisians, like many Arabs in the Middle East, are also immensely frustrated with their own entrenched leadership, limits on democracy and the widespread use of force and intimidation to silence political opposition.

Tunisia is a stable country in North Africa, sandwiched between two volatile and even more oppressive neighbors, Algeria and Libya. Its capital, Tunis, is a cosmopolitan city, with a European flair and majestic palm trees lining the main boulevard. Tunisia does more than 70% of its trade with Western Europe, spends more than 50% of its budget on social and developmental programs and reports that 85% of the population owns a home.

Its streets are clean, its shops are filled, and it is eager to present itself as a modern, secular state.

Fear of Speaking Out

The government rejects the notion that the nation is a police state, but from Tunis to the coastal resort towns of the south, many Tunisians--shopkeepers and homemakers, nurses and senior citizens--speak of a regime that relies on fear and intimidation to keep everyone, not just Islamists, in line. Speak out against the regime, and your mother might be harassed. Join a banned organization, and your children might be thrown out of school. Your phone lines might be cut. Your cars stolen. Offices ransacked. Passports confiscated. Jobs taken away.

Bashir Abeid, 34, is a typical example of what happens when someone gets involved in activities the government doesn’t condone. He was studying general history more than a decade ago when he became a student leader calling for better conditions for students and prisoners. Over the years, he’s been arrested, held in prison and had his passport taken away, though it was returned.

Worse, he says he has been repeatedly tortured, charges that have been supported by independent human rights groups. The authorities, he says, shocked him on his genitals, manacled his wrists behind his ankles and beat him while suspended from a rod. He says he was hanged from his neck, dropped in a vat of urine and kept awake for days at a time.

“I have chosen this path, and these are the consequences,” he said. “It is not easy fighting a police state.”

The modern state of Tunisia was fathered by Habib Bourguiba, a French-trained lawyer who led the country to independence from France in 1956. His was a dictatorship, but a relatively enlightened one for the region. He granted unparalleled rights to women, including the right to vote and serve in government, to sue for divorce and to have an abortion. Polygamy, permitted in the Koran, was outlawed.

Roots of Repression

In the 1980s, the Bourguiba regime concluded that the Islamic movement Nahda had gained too much power. Motivated by the success of the Islamic revolution in Iran and financed by Persian Gulf states, Nahda, according to government officials, was planning to overthrow the regime. Islamists were rounded up en masse and thrown in prison, and the party structure was dismantled.

So-called moderate regimes such as those in Egypt and Tunisia have succeeded in minimizing the influence of Islamic-based opposition groups with strict security measures.

In Tunisia, government critics say the iron-fisted approach has turned a moderate Islamic movement with limited support into a radical underground with widespread sympathy. They say the April suicide bombing at an ancient synagogue on the island of Djerba is a sign of such a backlash. The explosion left at least 16 dead and has been linked to Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network.

“The lack of democracy, the lack of a political process and the lack of pluralistic society brings Islamists together and will make all or most of the opposition go toward the Islamists,” said Mokhtar Yehyaoui, a Tunisian magistrate who was thrown off the bench when he appealed to the president for judicial independence last year. “Religion is the only tool left that will integrate society together

Radiha Nasraoui, a prominent human rights lawyer and wife of a now-imprisoned opposition leader, belongs to a political class that initially supported the crackdown on the Islamists. These were people who wanted Western-style democracy, who looked to Europe as a model, not to Tunisia’s Arab neighbors. The thought of an Iranian-style republic terrified them.

Three years after Ben Ali came to power, Nasraoui defended an opposition political leader who had been charged with a crime. When she entered the courtroom, she was arrested and held in prison for many days.

“Bourguiba was a dictator,” she said recently, “but he never arrested a lawyer.”

Sihem ben Sedrine, another activist who has been beaten, harassed and jailed for her human rights work, said: “What we realized was he was not just crushing the Islamists. He was crushing democracy and civil society too.”

Today, Ben Sedrine, Nasraoui and others of their political leaning find themselves pressing for Islamists to be allowed to join the political process and for all of the approximately 1,000 political prisoners held by the state--the majority of whom are Islamists--to be granted amnesty. They may not support the Islamists’ agenda, but they support their right to pursue that agenda.

Fifteen years after the coup, Ben Ali is still in power. The constitution, however, permitted only three five-year terms in office. Ben Ali and his ruling Constitutional Democratic Rally party had other ideas, and he presented the country with a referendum. It would change the constitution to allow the 65-year-old president to run again in 2004 and in 2009. If he should live so long as to lose power, the referendum granted him immunity from prosecution for life.

Attempt to Infiltrate

Nasraoui and her colleagues in the democracy movement wanted to discuss the referendum, so they gathered two days before the May 26 vote in a tiny two-room office on the second floor of a Tunis walk-up.

When they arrived for the meeting, a crowd of men was standing outside, bunched together in a knot, staring at everyone who went in, following some as they left.

Taha Sassi was sitting on the steps outside the office when he spotted a man in a green suit, smoking a cigarette, trying to mingle with the crowd. Sassi jumped up, grabbed the man’s lapels and hurled him down the stairs. He said he knew that the man was an informant.

Sassi, a 27-year-old philosophy student, had already spent more than a year in jail because of informants, and he had no tolerance for them.

The next day, he sat in a cafe talking about the incident when two large men entered the nearly empty restaurant and sat right beside him. The men sat for a few minutes, stared at Sassi and his friends, then left.

“You can only guess who is secret police,” he said, reflecting the paranoia many Tunisians live with.

Leader’s Term Extended

Two days after Nasraoui and her colleagues met, the polls opened for the approximately 3 million Tunisians eligible to vote on the referendum. When a government official was asked how soon vote results would be available, he said, “Officially, we expect this to pass.”

Although voters stood behind a black curtain to cast their ballots, secrecy was virtually impossible. “Yes” ballots were white; “no” ballots were black and could clearly be seen through the thin envelopes. Even if attendants couldn’t see, they reportedly asked for the unused ballots back.

For all the criticism, the government pointed out that this was a major step toward democracy for Tunisia because it was the first time the constitution had been amended through a public vote.

The government was eager for a large turnout, hoping to give the president some cover for staying in office, but apathy on the streets appeared widespread and polling stations in several towns were empty during the day. One Western diplomat said he expected no more than a 50% turnout.

But when it was all over, the headline on the Tunisian daily La Presse said, “A Giant Yes.” The government reported 96.15% voter turnout--and a whopping 99.61% “yes” vote.

The results, Interior Minister Hedi M’Henni said at a news conference, “surprise only those who do not know Tunisia.”