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The Mysteries of Tunis

On 14 January 2011 President Zine Ben Ali finally fled his palaces in Tunis, heading for exile in Saudi Arabia. On the streets of Paris the mood that day was as festive as it was in cities across Tunisia. This was because the unthinkable had happened: Ben Ali had been in power since 1987 and seemed poised to stay in command for as long he liked – which, given his good health and vanity, could have been for a very long time – but, within a few short weeks, he was gone.

The catalyst for the angry demonstrations that led to his departure was the self-immolation of a twenty-six-year-old street vendor called Mohammed Bouazizi in the obscure Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid. At 8 a.m. on 17 December 2010 ‘Besboos’, as he was known locally, set up his cart of fruit as usual in the centre of town. At around 10 a.m. he began to be harassed by police officers who claimed that he did not have a permit and had no right to be there.

The reality was that Mohammed had simply not paid enough bribes and kickbacks to the local police, even though he had already put himself 200 dollars in debt by borrowing money to pay off officials. But Mohammed was in a defiant mood that day and stood his ground when a middle-aged female officer insulted him, cursed his dead father, and tried to seize his cart. When the officer grabbed his weighing scales, his most expensive piece of equipment, without which he could not conduct any business, the young man broke down. Angry beyond belief, unable to control his weeping, he ran to the local governor’s office to complain at this vicious injustice. The governor refused point blank to see him. In a torment of frustration, Mohammed stood outside the governor’s and threw a can of petrol over himself. To the horror of the small crowd that was gathering around him, he then set the petrol alight. His body was ablaze as he staggered in circles in mute agony. This was at 11.30, just an hour or so after the original row over his cart.

Mohammed died a few days later in hospital. His suicide has now gone down as the spark that lit the flame of the Tunisian revolution. As he lay dying, the ordinary people of Sidi Bouzid rose up against the petty bureaucrats who had held them in check until then. When the insurrection gained momentum, the military stopped trying to control the events and hundreds of thousands of Tunisians glimpsed that this was their first chance to oppose the authorities. Riots spread across the country and within a breathless few weeks, in the face of the hatred of his people, President Ben Ali was gone.1

In the meantime, riots and rebellions had spilled over into Algeria, Morocco, Jordan, Egypt and Yemen. This was the beginning of what would later be called the ‘Arab Spring’ or the ‘Arab Revolution’.

It was the fairy-tale nature of the revolution which was celebrated on the streets of Paris on the day of Ben Ali’s departure. France has a Tunisian population of more than 700,000 people, mostly concentrated in the Parisian region. Everywhere you went in Paris during the revolt in Tunisia, portable televisions blared at top volume in shops, takeaways and cafés, broadcasting a polyglot, polyphonic babble from Al Jazeera, Al-Arabiya and the French-speaking channels from the Maghreb. Everybody was excited and wanted to talk, especially the Tunisians themselves.

What was most stunning about these events – at least for those who did not know Tunisia – was that they had been set in motion in a country the West saw as a moderate, stable and apparently inconspicuous player in the politics of the region. Until this happened, the entire outside world thought of Tunisia as a downmarket tourist destination, with a servile attitude towards the West. All Tunisians knew that this view of their country was at best no more than wishful thinking and at worst a deliberate lie.

The bullying experienced by Bouazizi was the kind of thing which happened in Tunisia every day. It was directly connected to the people in power, who not only permitted but actively encouraged this low-level intimidation. When Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire, his action spoke directly to a nation ready to stake all for freedom. The president’s flight into exile was justice long overdue. ‘When Ben Ali left it was a beautiful moment,’ I was told by a young woman who had been out on the streets to protest against him in Tunis. ‘I did not know that such happiness was possible.’

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In contrast to the jubilation of the Tunisian population in Paris that day, the mood of official France was sombre. The fall of Ben Ali was not at all what the French government wanted to happen. From the moment that he came into power in 1987, successive French governments had supported his régime, spurred on by him invoking Algeria and the threat of Islamist terrorism as a possibility in Tunisia. The French had taken Ben Ali at his word and turned a blind eye to all manner of abuses in the name of preserving ‘stability’ in Tunisia. They had also believed his hold on the country was unassailable.

‘We were taken by surprise,’ said Henri Guaino, special adviser to Nicolas Sarkozy with a particular brief for Mediterranean affairs. ‘Nobody saw what was happening. It all happened very fast, a chain of events that degenerated very quickly.’ He also admitted, ‘I had not been vigilant enough about the development of the régime and Tunisian public opinion.’ This was putting it very mildly.2 Since the late 1980s, successive French governments had become mired in compromising and contradictory relationships with Tunisia. French diplomats had reported on the brutal nature of Ben Ali’s régime as far back as 1990, but the authorities in Paris had looked the other way.

Most disgracefully, on 11 January 2011, Michèle Alliot-Marie, the French Minister of State for Justice, Defence and Home Affairs, stood before the National Assembly in Paris and declared that the revolt in Tunisia was ‘a complex situation’ and that it was not for the French government to ‘give any lessons to the régime’. It was hard to imagine a more arrogant and self-serving statement, as the people of Tunisia were fighting for their freedom. But there was worse to come: Alliot-Marie went on to offer the French military’s ‘world-renowned savoir-faire’ to Ben Ali’s régime, and to deliver this ‘savoir-faire’ to Tunis. The response, across all parties, was open-mouthed incredulity. Was the French minister really suggesting that French soldiers or police would fire on crowds in Tunis?

Sarkozy immediately distanced himself publicly from her – his adviser reported that Alliot-Marie had been giving her ‘own personal analysis of the situation’. The Left was slower to react, partly because many on the Left, including the mayor of Paris, had their own issues with Tunisia. In the regions and in the banlieues of France, however, the speech provoked anger. In Algeria the daily newspaper Liberté made the point that, in her arrogance, Michèle Alliot-Marie ‘has apparently no fear of awakening the memories of peoples who have already known historically the military “savoir-faire” of France. These memories are facts: regarding Algeria, we can recall 11 December 1960 in Algiers, in the quartier of Belcourt, and 17 October in Paris in 1961 – just to give two examples.’ Tunisians bloggers – blogging was now the main form of communication in the country – were furious and sarcastic. ‘Merci La France!’ was the response from a campaign on Facebook.

The controversy deepened even further over the next few days when it emerged that Alliot-Marie, who had close and friendly links with Ben Ali himself, had spent the Christmas of 2010 in a luxury resort in Tabarka, and had travelled there in a private jet belonging to an intimate friend of Ben Ali, who also happened to be criminal. It was then revealed that she had recently bought an apartment in the holiday complex of Gammarth, just outside Tunis. Meanwhile Tunisia went up in flames.

Few Tunisians were surprised at this French duplicity. In the past few years they had seen Ben Ali and his family and friends become extremely rich by plundering the nation. Tunisia was not a wealthy Arab country – for one thing, it has no oil money. But this did not prevent Ben Ali and his associates looting the country’s resources and spending the money in France.

After the Revolution

When I arrived in Tunis in the autumn of 2012, I was practically the only Westerner landing that afternoon. I could see straight away that everything had changed since my last visit in 2011. I had been a fairly frequent visitor to Tunis from 2005 onwards, but had not been back since the revolution. Now it was the same city but a very different place.

On the short drive into town from the airport, the suburbs looked dirtier and more broken than they had before. The most obvious change to the cityscape was the absence of the huge portraits of Ben Ali, which, until the revolution, had lined every main road in and around the city. As we headed into the city centre, there was graffiti everywhere, often in several languages, not just Arabic; the graffiti in English, French and Spanish called for more revolution, declaring war on the West and all those who hated Islam.

A few days earlier the US Embassy in Tunis had been attacked and the American School had been burned down by a Salafist mob, apparently demonstrating against the provocative anti-Muslim film The Innocence of Muslims. Only days before this, the American ambassador to Libya had been murdered by a jihadist militia. In Tunisia, the Americans had pulled out all their staff and citizens to let the Tunisians know that they were not to be messed with. The atmosphere was made even more brittle by the publication in France of images of the Prophet in the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. As a consequence, the substantial French population of Tunisia had been frightened off the streets by death threats from the Salafists and stayed at home.

On my previous visits to Tunis, I had always thought that it was an easy place to work; it was safe and well organized. But despite its beauty and apparent order, there was always a secret and sinister side to Tunisian life. You were not exposed to the kind of violence and extremism which had so marked life in Algeria, nor was it as wretchedly poor as Morocco. Instead, Tunisia reminded me of my time in Romania in the early 1990s, where, even after the fall of Ceausescu, ordinary people were afraid to say what they really thought. Romanians described this as ‘auto-censure’ – self-censorship – and said that it was far more effective than the Securitate, the secret police. Nearly everybody I met in Tunisia before the revolution had adopted these habits of mind. It was a place where you could not really connect with anyone. The secret police were ever-present, listening and watching. But they were not really needed in a country where no one dared to criticize the government anyway.

When the journalist Christopher Hitchens came here in 2007 to write a piece for Vanity Fair, he wrote that his friend Edward Said had described Tunisia to him as the ‘gentlest country in Africa’.3 He was not disappointed by the stylishness of the Avenue Habib Bourguiba, the main artery in Tunis, the olive groves and the sheer gorgeousness of the island of Djerba (where nineteen tourists were killed in an al-Qaeda attack in 2002). Hitchens found Tunisia to be a ‘mild’ place and, although he expressed disquiet at the twenty years that Ben Ali had been in power, the ubiquity of his image and the general reluctance of people to discuss politics, he was comforted by the availability of contraception, young people holding hands, and other clearly visible signs of ‘Western values’ and indifference to the puritan values of Islamism. Hitchens was obviously writing in good faith and reporting what he saw. This is what everyone saw when they first came to Tunisia. Below the surface there was, however, a bitter version of Tunisian reality at work within the nation’s psyche.

As in Algeria and Morocco, one of the few places you could glimpse the inner rage of the Tunisians was at football matches. In September 2008 I watched a crowd of no more than a hundred fans of Espérance Sportive Tunis – the major team of the country – take on the riot police in the backstreets around Place de Carthage and Place de Barcelone. What impressed me most was how skilled and organized the ‘hooligans’ were – they were a quick-moving, agile force, constantly changing while remaining a solid phalanx. They smashed windows and roared through back alleys. They were completely in control of the situation and evidently enjoyed this battle with the foot soldiers of the régime. Later, in the Bar Celestina, a smoke-filled drinking den near the metro station, I spoke to a group of them. They were quick to make the point that they were not fighting other teams but only the police, which was the armed wing of the government. No one mentioned Ben Ali, but he was the obvious enemy.

So were the French. During the Ben Ali years, Tunisia was unofficially France’s most favoured nation in the Maghreb. The links between Ben Ali and a succession of French presidents, from Mitterrand to Chirac and Sarkozy, were always firm and longstanding. Ben Ali travelled often to Paris, his ‘real capital’, where he lived lavishly and courted not only the French political élite but also the more dubious figures of the Trabelsi clan. Ben Ali’s second wife Leila was a member of the Trabelsi family, a Mafia-like organization based in the most expensive quartiers of Paris and Nice that effectively ran Tunisia as their private fiefdom. All Tunisians knew that the fall of Ben Ali was not only due to the ideological sterility of his government, but also to the fact that his large-scale pillaging of the country in collusion with the Trabelsis was about to be exposed. That is why he fled Tunisia so quickly.

The New Tunisia

On a bright and sunny Friday morning in late September 2012, I set out to rediscover Tunis. I wanted see for myself what exactly had happened here since the revolution. I had arranged to meet friends and colleagues who had lived through the events. It seemed to me to be a rare and magical privilege to be in a place that had changed history, and to speak to the people who had seen it happen. I began my walk from my hotel near the Nelson Mandela metro station, heading for the Place Palestine and then the centre of town.

For all the low-grade tourist packages, Tunisia still struck me as a mysterious country for non-Tunisians. In fact, tourism had mainly served to visitors keep away from Tunisians and Tunisian life by herding them into so-called zones touristiques – phoney hotel complexes which, if you stayed in them for more than a day or two, felt like miniature prisons. When I left for Tunis, there were huge advertisements in the Paris metro promising commuters ‘douceur et tranquilité’ (gentleness and tranquillity) on the beaches of Tunisia. The same advertisements were the first thing I saw at the airport in Tunis, even though it was heaving at the time with refugees from the chaos in neighbouring Libya.

Beyond these hotel complexes the country was pretty much unknown territory to foreigners. This was especially true of Tunis. The few foreign writers who had paid any attention to the city in the nineteenth century – notably Gustave Flaubert and Guy de Maupassant – saw it as either a museum or an exotic repository of Oriental treasures.

In the twentieth century Tunis remained a cultural backwater. The most famous writer to emerge from the city was Albert Memmi, a native of the Jewish quarter, who argued loud and long against colonialism. His writing was matched in Arabic by the likes of Tahar Guiga (who also wrote in Greek and French) and the poet Abou Kacem Chaabi. But none of these writers ever had the international reputation or readership of Albert Camus. Nor did they bring the avant-garde glamour to Tunis that Paul Bowles, William Burroughs and the Beats brought to Morocco. One of the greatest jazz tunes ever composed is called ‘Night in Tunisia’, covered by Charlie Parker and Miles Davies among others, but the title was a random accident. To this day, Tunisia has barely registered as a cultural or political entity beyond France and the Maghreb.

Yet Tunis remains one of the loveliest cities in French North Africa. The Avenue Habib Bourguiba cuts through the centre, starting at the Porte de France on the lake, near the rue Charles de Gaulle, in a straight line to the Medina. It is flanked by trees, shops and café terrasses. The architecture is the rich, creamy art nouveau you can find in Algiers or Casablanca, except that here it is on a smaller, more intimate scale. The Medina is elegant and cool, with wide paved alleyways that feel more Turkish than North African. The mosques, with their thin minarets and low domes, have a Levantine appearance. The nerve-centre of the city is the quartier populaire of Halfouine at the far end of the Medina. As I walked through this district, it seemed much poorer and more wrecked than I had ever seen it before.

The greatest surprise was that you could no longer walk freely through the city. I had constantly to keep changing my route, diverted by armed patrols and checkpoints. The mosques that I passed were surrounded by the military, all carrying heavy weaponry and tense in face of the provocations from the robed and bearded young men who were going to prayer.

I kept hearing the muttered insult ‘Dégage!’ (the French term meaning ‘Get out!’) which had been the slogan of the crowds during the revolution. The bearded young men were yelling this in the faces of the soldiers of the post-revolutionary government. The soldiers flinched, cocked their weapons but did not respond.

When I got to the French Embassy and the Saint-Vincent-de-Paul Cathedral, I found the road blocked by barbed wire and tanks. Most sinister of all were the so-called ‘Ninjas’ – special forces dressed in black, wearing ski masks and carrying sub-machine guns. They were lined up in front of the embassy, spilling over into the arcades leading to the Place de la Victoire. From a safe distance, bearded young men made throat-slitting gestures. It occurred to me that this how it must have been in Algeria in 1992.

I mentioned this to my friend and colleague Imen Yacoubi as we drank coffee in the Grand Café du Théâtre, just a hundred metres away from the soldiers and Islamists. The café was part of the old, elegant Tunis: a direct counterpoint to the poverty and anger outside on the streets. I asked Imen how long she thought this could last and whether it really was like Algeria in 1992 all over again. ‘We don’t know yet,’ she said, ‘but there is a lot of fear of the Islamists. Everyone is scared that they will make a revolution within the revolution.’

Imen teaches at the University of Jendouba, a poor town less than a half hour’s drive from the Algerian border. She had come to Tunis during the demonstrations that signalled the end for Ben Ali. She stayed with her sister and watched history unfold in the streets, willing the changes to happen. She is a direct person who is not given to exaggeration or hyperbole, yet she described the mass movements as ‘beautiful’, ‘unbelievable’ and ‘mystical’, and when she did so her eyes shone.

But now the revolution was entering a dangerous new phase. The current bogeyman was Abou Iyadh, leader of the Salafist group Ansar-el-Charia (Partisans of Sahria), who was then being hunted by the police for organizing the attacks on the US Embassy. Iyadh had followed an entirely predictable route for a jihadi, from Algeria in the 1990s, via Afghanistan and Britain. He had returned to Tunisia after the revolution vowing ‘to sow discord’. His followers were now poised for action, he declared in the wake of the attack on the US Embassy. I had just come from the Mosque El Fatah, where he usually preached, which was now surrounded by soldiers in a stand-off with the faithful – not just ‘les barbus’ but young men without beards, who could have been a football crowd from the French banlieues, wearing T-shirts and scarves over their faces.

Imen said she was ‘ashamed’ at what was happening. ‘This is not Tunisia,’ she said, ‘this is not what we fought for.’ However, Iyadh’s star was on the rise: according to the Ministry of the Interior, the Salafists controlled nearly a quarter of the mosques in the country and had almost 100,000 hard-core supporters. A security expert from a Western embassy told me that what had been most shocking about the attack on the US Embassy was the scale and the savagery of the violence, and that this could quickly get worse.

In the eyes of the Tunisians, the real problems were unemployment and the sense that nothing had changed under the revolution, that life had in fact got worse. That evening I walked past the bars and semi-brothels in rue Ibn Khadloun and rue Oum Khaltoum. They were just around the corner from the quiet stylishness of Avenue Habib Bourguiba but were as hard-drinking and hard-core as any place in Algiers, Casablanca or Tangier. As darkness fell, men were literally falling over themselves in a fog of cigarette smoke, beer, and an all-pervading scent of piss. Everybody hated the Salafists, but they also hated the government, who they referred to as either ‘Salafists in disguise’ or ‘the French’.

‘We are not yet free,’ I was told by a guy called Omar, who was chain-smoking out on the street but wasn’t drinking. Omar asked me the time and we fell into conversation. He was obviously trying to hustle me but he also had a few things to say. I asked how he felt about the revolution. ‘We thought that the Europeans would help us, that the French would give us money and aid. But instead they insult us.’ (He was referring to the Charlie Hebdo cartoon.) He went on: ‘The French who come here pretend to love us but really they despise us.’ Like all Tunisians, he had not forgotten that at the height of the revolution, the French Minister of State for Justice, Defence and Home Affairs had almost offered to send French security forces to support Ben Ali. Still, Omar wanted to go to France, but he knew no one he could bribe for a visa and had no money anyway. Omar was not a Salafist, but by his admission he could easily become one. ‘Why not?’ he said. ‘I can’t get to France. There’s nothing else here now. Why not fight for God?’