Tunisian Repression Hiding Behind Women

Tunisia using marketing to distract from the cruelty.

This is a hallmark of the repressive Tunisian regime of Ben Ali (in power since 1986): Using its admittedly liberal social policy as a smokescreen to project an otherwise non-existent liberalism elsewhere and distract from political repression.

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Tunisia has the most liberal social policy in the Arab world. Even Lebanon is conservative by Tunisian standards. Tunisia is the only Arab country - since a Personal Status Code law in 1956 - which grants women strong favor in child custody cases, the protected right to divorce, bands polygamy and has genuinely fostered an environment where the rights of women are upheld and where women have been free to pursue careers. But the rights of women are only upheld so much.

All is well if one sticks to being non-political, because when it comes to politics Tunisia is the complete inverse. It is an understatement to say that it is political restrictive: Tunisia is one of the worst offenders. Annually named by NGOs as one of the Top 10 enemies of press and internet freedom, the state heavily censors any dissident in the domestic press (even resorting to rounding up foreign newspapers if their daily issue features some criticism of the regime), the ministry of the interior was recently discovered to have been running several seemingly independent newspapers and magazines by proxy, and any daring publications were suffer constant harassment until they are finally shut down directly or left no other choice. The internet is equally heavily censored. So much so that the Twitter accounts of dissidents are also targeted. And Tunisia, this seemingly liberal place, has locked up more journalist since 2000 than Syria, Saudi Arabia or any other Arab country despite have one of the small populations in the region.

But the regime has cynically hide behind its progressive status laws and the hyped rhetoric to Western powers that if the authoritarian regime fails it will be replaced by a non-existence Islamist state:

"Today, though, Tunisian women are not spared from the long and ruthless war on freedom of expression and association, of a kind unseen even under the French protectorate and which can no longer be camouflaged by the personal status code or Ben Ali's "achievements" or by western public relations firms.

The launch of this dirty war in the early 1990s coincided with new amendments to the personal status code and more rhetoric about Ben Ali's trumpeted commitment to women's rights, widely seen as an "attempt to project an image of modernity and democracy" while hiding another part of Tunisia's picture. The raging war at that time in neighbouring Algeria (between the military-backed government and armed groups infuriated by the cancellation in 1992 of the results of legislative elections the Islamists were poised to win) led many to overlook the merciless repression in Tunisia. The first victims among women were scores of alleged supporters of two banned political opposition parties. They were jailed or held for interrogation, intimidated and threatened with prosecution and rape at police stations and the interior ministry, according to local and international groups. Most of them were close to or related to the jailed or exiled activists of the Islamist an-Nahda movement. A few others have been accused of supporting the Tunisian Workers' Communist party. None of the thousands of prisoners used violence or advocated the use of force to achieve their political goals."

This cover needs to end.