Tahar Ben Jelloun - By Fire - Writings on the Arab Spring

Today, we’re still talking about the collapse of Berlin’s immense wall. Other walls, other taboos, and other oppressions continue crumbling at this moment. Poets were among the first to see what might happen: the Russian Vladimir Mayakovski, the Turk Nazim Hikmet, the Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish, the Iraqi Shakir al-Sayyab, the Egyptian Ahmed Chawki — each in his own way raised his voice during the last century to reveal the intolerable and the vital need for freedom and justice. Yet, no authoritarian regime took seriously what a poet or an artist had to say about society.

Everybody knew what the police were doing in Arab countries; the international media often spoke about the repression whose victims were the common people, the destitute, the forgotten, and all those who suffered from injustice but couldn’t speak for or defend themselves. Many journalists or exiled militants wrote books that denounced dictators, yet these dictators were “acceptable” for Western leaders, who were too tolerant. But isolated voices can never bring down dictators; it took many incidents, clashes with the police, glaring injustices, and intolerable acts for the spark to finally ignite.

This is how people live in developing countries. This is how they die in countries where, in the eyes of the West, stability and security are guaranteed, although the people are denied their freedom and rights.

Everyone supported Ben Ali’s takeover in the late 1980s. They even called it a “medical coup d’état.” On a beautiful morning on November 7, 1987, the person whom Habib Bourguiba had named minister of interior, and then prime minister, entered the palace and forced the sick old man out of his bed and informed him that he was no longer the president. The day before, Ben Ali had assembled seven doctors at the Ministry of Interior and obliged them to sign a certificate attesting to “Bourguiba’s incapacity to govern.” It is said that one of the doctors who didn’t want to sign, as he hadn’t seen Bourguiba for ten years, was ordered by Ben Ali: “Sign. You don’t have a choice.” For some time, Ben Ali had placed his own henchmen in the ministries. He got rid of a great man and shamelessly took his place. Bourguiba, of course, could have decided to leave power on his own if his health condition didn’t allow him to govern anymore. But once one has tasted power, one acts as though infected by a virus. Only Léopold Sédar Senghor, president of Senegal, left office voluntarily, to dedicate his time to writing, poetry, and reading. To say the least, not all heads of nations are poets — far from it!

Let’s now remember Bourguiba’s audacity and sense of modernity. Above all, he negotiated with France for his country’s independence. Straightaway, he led Tunisia on a path to modernity that was rare in the Arab world at that time. He changed the personal status code — Tunisia was the first, and, for a long time, the only Muslim and Arab nation to recognize women’s rights: polygamy was forbidden, divorce was authorized, and abortion legalized (long before France!). It was revolutionary. Bourguiba was the only leader to publicly advocate secularism: on a day during Ramadan in March 1964, he gave a live television presentation during which he drank a glass of orange juice in front of amazed viewers. He justified his gesture by invoking economic reasons. He said he couldn’t tolerate the country’s economy going to sleep for an entire month, because by fasting, workers have neither the strength nor the energy to do their work well. During the decades in which Bourguiba ruled, Tunisians were free to fast or not to fast. Cafés and restaurants remained open. People could eat in peace. No one reproached or bothered those who fasted due to religious convictions.

Bourguiba gave a visionary speech on March 3, 1965, in Jericho, but no one could accept it at that time. He advised Arabs to “normalize their relationship with the state of Israel,” claiming “the politics of everything or nothing brought the Palestinians nothing but defeat.” He antagonized all the Arab heads of state, especially Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, whom he criticized for his fanatical nationalism. The people in Arab countries protested in the streets against the capitulation of a “traitor to the sacred cause of Palestine.” This didn’t dissuade Bourguiba from demanding that the United Nations “create a federation among the Arab states in the region and Israel.”

Two years later, on June 5, 1967, Israel launched a sudden war against Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq. Naqba , meaning catastrophe, is the Arabic name they gave to their defeat. Today, the Palestinians might dream of getting back their territory from before June 1967… but Israel will never give them even a square meter.

Bourguiba was secular, educated, and a visionary man. His authoritative temperament damaged his image. He was, despite his reforms, an unjust president, particularly to those who democratically opposed his politics. But was it a sufficient reason for Ben Ali, a military man married to a hairdresser, to dispose of him like a decaying body awaiting death?

Ben Ali didn’t make radical changes when he first took power. He continued Bourguiba’s reforms, particularly in the field of education. He consulted Mohamed Charfi, a human rights activist, and put him in charge of the Ministry of National Education with the aim to cleanse textbooks of Islamist and fanatical ideology. With a team of about fifty professors, Mohamed Charfi did remarkable work. He rewrote all the textbooks in the spirit of the Enlightenment and open-mindedness. Ben Ali encouraged his work. As soon as the work was completed, though, Mohamed Charfi resigned and disassociated himself from the Ben Ali government.

The fight against Islamic fundamentalists rapidly became one of Ben Ali’s obsessions; it turned into a witch hunt, involving arbitrary arrests and torture at police stations in the worst possible conditions imaginable. Under the pretext of the Islamist threat, Ben Ali became more and more dictatorial, instilling fear in the country, forbidding the foreign press, hunting down opponents, even those who had nothing to do with Islamism. The country’s economic growth and its appearance to the West as a fortress of stability — even at the cost of repression — rapidly framed Ben Ali as a reassuring “rampart against Islamism.” That’s how, during three decades, Ben Ali was able to subject his country, without any opposition, to a dictatorship that strictly denied Tunisians any rights. Tunisia became his private affair. His family, in the strict and broad senses, profited from the country excessively and shamelessly. Paris officials released one of Ben Ali’s brothers, caught red-handed trafficking drugs in France; he calmly returned to his golden villa in Tunis. At the same moment, activists were getting arrested. Graduates, young and jobless, roamed the streets rather than swell the ranks of illegal immigrants.

Tunisia and its president, who got himself reelected every five years with up to 90 percent of the vote, always enjoyed good ratings from Western embassies. During his official visits to Europe, Ben Ali was applauded and celebrated, and his country was recognized as an optimistic example of “making progress toward democracy.” It was beyond belief. When he fled as a thief from Tunisia (because he was a thief), TV channels rebroadcast talks by Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Silvio Berlusconi, and others. It was frightening to hear what these people said in front of Ben Ali, and baffling when they were at a loss for words when the thug ran away. This is called “realpolitik.”

Thanks to Tunisia’s positive image, the country gradually became a popular tourist destination. This helped boost the country’s economy and employment. Tourists couldn’t see any of the regime’s scandalous aspects; it took an informed journalist or an attentive writer to see these traits. I first experienced them in 2005. I was invited to give a talk to university and high school students at the invitation of the French Cultural Center of Tunisia. Before long, I noticed that civilian-clothed police officers were continuously following me. The students asked strictly literary questions, but as soon as the talk was over, they came to see me and spoke in whispers. I hated this trip and the leaden atmosphere. Journalists who dared denounce this hyper — police state were simply imprisoned. The best known among them, Taoufik Ben Brik, spent six months in prison during 2009 and 2010 after a trial built totally on lies. The regime found intolerable his outspokenness and criticism against the regime, especially regarding torture and disappearance of opponents.