Along with dozens of other free speech groups, Index on Censorship and Article 19 had long questioned the suitability of Tunisia to host last week´s United Nations World Summit for the Information Society (WSIS). Following days of mayhem, rights abuses and attacks on freedom of expression, Tunisia proved that concerns were justified.
Following the close of the summit, the International Freedom of Expression Exchange´s Tunisia Monitoring Group (TMG) called for a full investigation by the United Nations into the abuses that took place in Tunisia on the eve of and during WSIS.
“This week in Tunis, both inside and outside the official summit”, the group said, “we have witnessed serious attacks on the right to freedom of expression, including harassment of delegates, attacks on Tunisian and international journalists and human rights defenders, denial of entry to the country, the blocking of websites, the censorship of documents and speeches, and the prevention and disruption of meetings”.
In the run up to the 16-18 November conference, Christophe Boltanski, a journalist with the Paris daily Liberation, was tear-gassed, beaten and stabbed in Tunis under the eyes of police who later refused to log his assault. The attack occurred less than 24 hours after Liberation ran Boltanski´s story on how plain-clothed police had beaten human rights activists in the weeks before WSIS.
“This escalation in violence shows how extremely nervous the Tunisian authorities are”, Boltanski had written. “Western leaders have taken the opportunity of this summit to call on the Tunisian government to prove its firm commitment to protecting and promoting human rights. But obviously this message has been ignored.”
On 14 November, Tunisian lawyer and human rights defender Radhia Nasraoui and two foreign journalists were threatened by plain clothes security officers. Then plain clothes police moved in to forcibly shut down a preparatory meeting for a Citizens´ Summit open to banned Tunisian civil society activists, planned to parallel WSIS activities.
The private meeting was to have been held at the offices of the German- government-supported Goethe Foundation. Instead police sealed off the building and tried to forcibly prevent a German diplomat from entering the building. In front of a score of international journalists and officials, a news crew from Belgian RTBF TV was manhandled. Reporter Marianne Klaric was threatened and her tapes seized.
Protest
The response of the Tunis authorities was familiar: deny everything. “Contrary to the claims of the RTBF journalist, at no time was there any aggression or violence used against the journalist or her team,” an official told the French news agency AFP. This falsehood soon came home to haunt the Tunisian authorities.
Swiss president Samuel Schmid took up the matter in his address to the summit. “It is, quite frankly, unacceptable for the United Nations to continue to include among its members states which imprison citizens for the sole reason that they have criticised their government on the internet or in the media,” Schmid said in his opening speech to the WSIS sessions in Tunis´ giant Kram centre.
“As far as I´m concerned, it goes without saying that here in Tunis — inside these walls as well as outside — everyone can express themselves freely. It is one of the conditions sine qua non for the success of this international conference. Any knowledge society respects the independence of its media as it respects human rights”.
Tunisian state TV cut its live coverage of the conference until Schmid had finished speaking.
The TMG group cancelled its own events on Monday 21 November in protest against the Tunisian abuses. They estimated that about a quarter of civil society groups at WSIS followed suit in solidarity.
“These serious incidents also illustrate that concerns about holding a United Nations summit dealing with communication and freedom of expression in such a country as Tunisia were justified”, said the TMG.
Authorities adjust under pressure
The sheer weight of international opposition soon began to have its effect. Most expected the police to forcibly close down another controversial meeting, a session of the Tunisian League of Human Rights (LTDH), scheduled for 16 November. The authorities banned it from holding its last congress.
Instead the meeting went ahead, packed with foreign media and international dignitaries, chief among them Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, with UN free expression rights rapporteur Ambeyi Ligabo in the audience.
Thanks to the efforts of Alexis Krikorian of the International Publishers Association and Sara Whyatt of the Writers in Prison Committee of International PEN, a letter from eight leading Tunsian human rights defenders on the 30th day of a hunger strike in protest at state repression was delivered to UN secretary general Kofi Annan.
The strikers called for freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, and the release of prisoners of conscience. Annan sent a message to the LTDH meeting promising to address the hunger strikers´ concerns. In marked contrast to its past events the police presence at the LTDH meeting was minimal.
The conclusion was that the obvious had finally been understood. Whatever advantage there might be in forcibly silencing the opposition, it wouldn´t be worth the international humiliation that would follow.
Fleeting freedom
It is not clear whether the tolerance will extend beyond the end of the summit. Ebadi was allowed to meet the hunger strikers unimpeded on 17 November. Yet the same day Amnesty International officials were prevented from meeting banned journalist Sihem Bensedrine at the offices of the National Council for Freedoms in Tunisia (CNLT).
And Ben Ali´s censors continued to roam the conference at will, beyond the control of the summit´s nominal UN hosts, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).
A world map marking the 15 “enemies of the Internet” — “countries that trample on free expression on the net”, pointedly including Tunisia — was put up by media rights group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). It was removed by officers in minutes.
The Dutch development agency HIVOS was brusquely told to change the name of its pre-agreed seminar from Expression under Repression to something less suspect in the eyes of the Tunisian state.
HIVOS, to their credit, declined. Dutch and British officials — Britain speaking for the EU as current holder of the EU presidency — stood by the agency.
The opening debate, led by Taurai Maduna of Zimbabwe, Hossein Derakshan of Iran and Chinese weblog host manager Isaac Mao, barely mentioned Tunisia. Officials continued to put pressure on HIVOS, citing strict conditions forced on the ITU by Tunisia ahead of the opening of WSIS.
Tunisia’s strategy for censorship
Just as documents for distribution at the summit had to be pre-vetted by officials, Tunisia insisted that all comment deemed off the subject of the information society should also be barred. The same rules applied to debates. “Off the subject” turned out to be whatever the Tunisian authorities said it was.
Pro-government agent provocateurs tried to provoke the speakers into angry exchanges that could be used to justify the session´s closure. As a strategy it was all too familiar to free expression groups in Tunisia and the members of the TMG, Index on Censorship included, but in the refined environment of a UN summit it was shockingly crass.
HIVOS´ second session offered “an overview of encryption tools and techniques to keep email, data and voice communication secure for NGOs in repressive environments”, followed by details of a one-stop security solution for dissidents who wanted to go online anonymously.
The information offered could be used by Tunisians to access a score of websites blocked by the Tunis authorities, among them on occasion this website. A study released this week by the Open Net Initiative, which investigates state attempts to control internet access, found that nearly 10 per cent of the 2,000 sites it tested from within Tunisia were blocked.
In one particularly bizarre incident, plain clothed police physically prevented RSF secretary general Robert Ménard from leaving an Air France plane after landing in Tunis on 17 November. Ménard said he was told that he would not be allowed off the plane since he did not have accreditation for the WSIS. He did.
The Tunisians told WSIS executive director Charles Geiger a completely different story. They told him that Ménard was banned from Tunisia until he was summonsed by Tunis court to answer an official complaint laid against him.
That will probably never happen. Unspecified complaints, buried in courts, left deliberately outstanding and beyond legal challenge, are routinely used by the authorities to justify censorship and block free public assembly. The Tunisian LTDH is effectively banned from planning and thus holding its annual congress on the basis of an unfathomable outstanding ´complaint´ about the body’s official procedures.
‘Living up to reputations’
The summit over, the TMG concluded: “Never again should a United Nations World Summit be held in a country that does not respect its international commitments to human rights and freedom of expression.”
Tunisia is a developed, economically diversified, educated country. Its record on women´s rights is among the best. The only real stain on its record is its habit of knee-jerk censorship and systematic repression of free expression. By their actions at WSIS the Tunisian government and president Ben Ali did more than activists could ever do to illustrate this fact.
“The running joke leading up to this week´s UN Summit on the Information Society was that it was being held in Tunisia, a state whose restrictions on freedoms of the press and expression are harsh even by Arab standards,” commented the Wall Street Journal. “But no one´s laughing now that the regime of President Ben Ali has lived up to its reputation…”
