This post is also available in: Français (French) العربية (Arabic)
Fear is back and with it, humiliation, the one that rises in your throat with a suffocating grip.
“It’s a whole country’s breathing that stops when information ceases to be free,” as journalist Françoise Giroud used to say.
Despite the turbulent periods that Tunisia has experienced during this long and difficult transition, and despite all the attempts at recovery that have marked these 12 years following the revolution of January 2011, I never would have thought that I would live under an authoritarian system again. Under a regime which, for several months now, has been stifling independent speech, threatening, calling in, and detaining journalists, using defamation, intimidation, and harassment campaigns against them, and silencing critical voices and those that oppose the president’s having too much power after his “coup” of 25 July 2021.
There are no bounds to my disappointment. I cannot believe that all the topics and ground covered, all the investment into autonomy and new horizons, and all the possibilities opened up by fellow Tunisian journalists, thanks to the slogans of 14 January 2011, were all just a parenthesis. An illusion. A “breakthrough”, as worded by political scientist Larbi Chouilkha.
“Keep moving, there’s nothing to see here!”
Because up until now, despite the persistent fragility of the sector in which I was working, euphoric and free from censorship, freedom of expression had truly come to represent the unique and precious achievement of a Revolution that marked the beginning of the “Arab Spring”. A Revolution whose demands for social justice, regional equity, and national dignity have been repressed, obstructed, and blocked by the political staff of the various governments and their obscure lobbies.
“Twelve years after the revolution of January 2011, I never would have thought I would live under an authoritarian system again”
Up until now, Tunisia had remained the leading country in the Arab world in the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) World Press Freedom Index, with a profusion of independent websites, community radio stations, and new radio and television channels. Reforms aimed at the media sector, eagerly sought by professional organizations, could have strengthened this freedom, but for the past twelve years, successive governments have blocked the establishment of a lasting legal framework for freedom of the press and information.
Everything in the archaic system of journalistic training, everything in the repressive legacy of former president Ben Ali’s* press laws is perfectly suited to the “business” of the executive power. To journalists’ demands, current authorities have maintained a deafening silence.
“This official silence has become paradigmatic, insofar as it is set up as a policy to manage media relations,” protests Sadok Hammami, a professor at the Tunisian Press Institute.
Feeling that they are back in their element—authoritarianism—the former Ben Ali propagandists, mercenaries of the pen, are reinstating the requests of several media platforms, carrying their inhibitions and their narrow-minded reflexes loud and proud, exhibiting their consanguinity with the world of politics and money. Adapting to everything, including the prevailing post-Revolution liberal vocabulary, is second nature to them. In the chiaroscuro of this in-between space separating two worlds, a sort of liminal, transitional space, monsters roam free…
It's amazing how fear takes over again…
And I now realize how I have not fully recovered from this trauma, despite the twelve years of freedom. It was therefore an instinctive choice for me to leave politics and instead write about cultural topics, having worked for a newspaper with close ties to the government for the last 34 years, a daily newspaper that was largely devoted in the past to praising Ben Ali and which is now reconnecting with its old demons thanks to Decree-law 54* (a massive deterrent aiming to neutralize any criticism of the president, his ministers, and his allies). I had already exiled myself to the cultural section back in the mid-1990’s when the old regime imposed a policy of total control over the media.
Less than a year from now, I would have thus ended my career at the French-language newspaper La Presse. It is with great bitterness that I acknowledge that my journey as a journalist is ending as it began: in fear.
