In his first year in power, Ben Ali allowed several opposition parties to relaunch papers that had previously been banned. Within a few months of Ben Ali’s coup, his government ended
the bans on the party newspapers of two legal opposition parties: Al-Moustaqbal of the MDS and Tariq el-Jedid of the Tunisian Communist Party (Parti Communiste Tunisien or PCT).
(Africa Report 1988: 8; Murphy 1999: 168). However, the new government maintained tight controls on what these opposition papers could write. Khadija Cherif, a human rights activist, described the liberalization of the press during the early years under Ben Ali as “very controlled” (discussion with the author, May 2016). According to Amnesty International (1994: 4): “Amendments to the existing Press Code [in 1988] only very slightly curtailed the executive’s wide powers to control freedom of expression.” For example, the reform of the press code’s provisions on defamation did not extend to criticism of the president or his ministers (Harris 1989: 822). Samir Taieb, a member of the Movement of Renewal party (Harakat Ettajdid, the successor to the Tunisian Communist Party), which opposed Ben Ali, and an editor of its journal, confirmed that, even during relatively liberal first few years under Ben Ali, criticism of the president and his family was not tolerated (discussion with the author, May 2016). The journalist Slaheddine Jourchi of Er-Rai (Opinion), a journal which was aligned with the MDS, agreed with this assessment, and added that criticism of the defense ministry was also forbidden (discussion with the author, May 2016). Ahmed Mestiri, the leader of the MDS when Ben Ali came to power, reported that Ben Ali;s government did not interfere with the party’s weekly, Al-Moustaqbal during his first year in power, but began to harass it in 1989 after the first legislative elections (discussion with the author, May 2016). Alexander (2010: 55) writes of this period that:
While the government allowed a host of new newspapers and magazines to appear, it also began signaling limits to writers and editors. In December 1988, for example, the government seized copies of Al-Maouqif, the newspaper of the Progressive Socialist Rally (Rassemblement Socialiste Progressiste or RSP) after it published an article on Tunisia’s nonlegal movements and parties. A week later, the government seized copies of R´ealit´es, a popular news weekly, for an
editorial that criticized the lack of judicial independence. These seizures marked the beginning of an insidious new form of press control. The government legalized many new publications and declared its respect for freedom of the press. It even provided funding to help some newspapers. But then security forces would jail a journalist or confiscate copies of publications because they wrote or published an article that did not sit well with the president. Because the government never laid out an explicit list of topics that journalists could not touch, they never knew exactly when they would cross the line into forbidden territory. This uncertainty forced members of the press to err on the side of caution when making decisions about their stories. The result was a wooden, self-censored press even though the government appeared to be relaxing the formal restrictions on it.
Thus, as in the theory presented in the previous chapter, even when dictatorships allow opposition media, they ensure that the content remains tame.
Only secular opposition parties were granted the right to publish newspapers during Ben Ali’s first two years in power, while the MTI/Nahda remained excluded. It was not until January 1990 that Ben Ali’s government finally gave Nahda permission to publish a journal, El-Fajr, which started appearing in April (Wright 1990b). However, the government prevented the distribution of an issue of El-Fajr in June 1990 (Middle East Economic Digest 1990b), and a week later a court suspended the journal for three months (Chouikha, Labidi, and Jouini 1992: 101). After El-Fajr began reappearing in the fall, the government stopped distribution of two more issues (Amnesty International 1991). In February 1991, the government shut down El-Fajr permanently (Donnadieu 1992: 39).
1990 also saw a crackdown on the secular opposition press. The government suspended the
journal Al-Badil, published by the Communist Party of the Workers of Tunisia (Parti Communiste des Ouvriers de Tunisie or PCOT), for six months in October 1990 and permanently suspended it the following April (Chouikha, Labidi, and Jouini 1992: 102.) The MDS stopped publishing its weekly Al-Moustaqbal in June 1990. An editorial in the final issue stated that the paper was closing because of financial difficulties, but also because of the “refusal to let the opposition newspapers work freely” (Chouikha, Labidi, and Jouini 1992: 103). Other secular opposition newspapers stopped publishing around this time, including Al-Watan, of the Unionist Democratic Union (Union D´emocratique Unioniste or UDU), in August 1990 and the RSP’s Al-Maouqif in January 1991. While both of these closures were ostensibly due to financial problems, government interference may have exacerbated those problems: the government stopped distribution of two issues of each newspaper in 1990 (Legum 1992: B 520; Chouikha, Labidi, and Jouini 1992: 102-103).
By 1991, the former (and by then exiled) prime minister Mohammed Mzali observed that in Tunisia “there no longer exists today an organ of opposition press” (Murphy 1999: 203).
In April 1991, however, the government announced that it would provide subsidies to the legal (all secular) opposition parties to publish their newspapers (Donnadieu 1992: 39).
Beginning in November 1991, secular opposition papers began to reappear, while El-Fajr remained suppressed (Chouikha, Labidi, and Jouini 1992: 112).
The shutdown of El-Fajr would turn out to be the prelude to the dismantling of Nahda as an organization. Several thousand Nahda activists were arrested over the course of 1991 (Europa Publications 1994:879; Alexander 2010: 60). In July 1992, 279 Islamists were tried in the Tunis Military Tribunal, which ended in “heavy sentences for most of Nahda’s leading figures,” including life sentences for some (Murphy 1999: 198). That same month the Middle East Economic Digest (1992c) reported: “Police action has crushed Nahda, whose leadership is either exiled, in prison or has dropped out of active politics.” The article quoted a “former
Nahda official” as saying: “We entered into direct confrontation wanting to take over and we lost.” Europa Publications (1994: 880) observes regarding the July 1992 trials: “These mass trials were seen as the culmination of the Tunisian Government’s long campaign against al-Nahdah, whose organizational structures within the country were largely destroyed and its leaders imprisoned or forced into exile.”1