31

Miracles

Ben Ali began his career as a dictator with a series of liberal reforms which he claimed would help modernize the country. They also helped to distinguish him from Bourguiba, presenting himself as a believer in social justice and political openness. His first major act was to declare a policy of National Reconciliation and in his first six months in office he released over 5,000 so-called political prisoners.

Certainly during his first years in power, most Tunisians did well under Ben Ali. Political censorship was relaxed and opposition parties were allowed to stand for election. Ben Ali changed the name of the ruling party to the Rassemblement Constitutionnel Démocratique (RCD) and established elections every five years, though he maintained the ban on the party Hizb Nahda (Party of the Awakening), and there were frequent clashes as he sought to establish control over the most influential mosques, including the Zitouna Mosque, the most prestigious in the country. During the early 1990s, there were constant rumours of plots and attacks on all sides, and the Tunisian government kept a wary eye on its porous border with Algeria. Meanwhile, Tunisian Islamists began to move between Tunis, Afghanistan and Pakistan to visit ‘training camps’ on the model of their Algerian brothers.

Soon after taking power, Ben Ali began to reverse Bourguiba’s implacably anti-French foreign policy. Ben Ali made his first state visit to France in 1988, a clear signal to both Tunisians and the outside world that France had special status as an ally and friend. This relationship was quickly cemented by Tunisia and France jointly lobbying the United Nations Security Council to condemn Israel for the murder on Tunisian soil of the Palestinian militant Abou Jihad at Sidi Bou Said in 1988. This had the dual effect of raising France’s profile as a defender of the Muslims in the region, while allowing Tunisia to flex its muscles and show its Arab brothers that it was quite unafraid of the West.

Most significantly, as a result of this first contact, Ben Ali, who had been trained as an officer in France, was able to secure huge amounts of military aid from the French. The aid took the form of special advisors and special forces, who claimed to be experts in counter-terrorism and able to extinguish the Islamist threat, but also millions of francs, to be spent on upgrading Tunisian military hardware to European standards. Sandwiched between volatile Algeria, which was fast disintegrating into civil war, and the madness of Gaddafi’s Libya, Tunisia somehow had to be made safe. Moreover, the French saw investment in the Tunisian military as a key diplomatic victory, a new way of entering into the power play in the region. The two countries were now locked together in a ‘special relationship’ as political partners.

*   *   *

The slow disintegration of human rights in Tunisia really began in the early 1990s. It was hard for French foreign-policy experts to understand exactly what was happening as Ben Ali clamped down on the Islamist opposition with increasing ferocity. On the one hand, this seemed to be a logical and appropriate response to the growing threat of Islamist forces in Algeria, but at the same time Ben Ali had a tendency to denounce all dissident voices as de facto Islamists and act accordingly. By the time of the revolution of 2011, there were simply no opposing forces left, save for the Salafists who had endured throughout the years of repression.

In 1994 Amnesty International complained about a wave of mass arrests and trials, which involved some 3,000 people loosely described as ‘Islamists’. Amnesty denounced the treatment meted out to the detainees as ‘cruel, inhuman and degrading’. More specifically, the report detailed instances of rape and torture – the alleged ‘Islamists’ or ‘political prisoners’, male and female, were often raped by criminal prisoners who were bribed or encouraged to punish these ‘enemies of the state’. Torture methods included ‘beatings, especially on the soles of the feet, sometimes when the victim was suspended by the ankles; suspension for long periods in contorted positions, often accompanied by beatings; semi-suffocation with cloths drenched in dirty water or bleach; sexual abuse with sticks and other objects; and electric shocks’.1

Only twelve months after the Amnesty International report, in November 1995 Jacques Chirac, France’s newly elected president, made his first official state visit to Tunisia. In a photograph published in Jeune Afrique, Chirac poses in front of Ben Ali’s palace in the company of the Minister of Interior, Jean-Louis Debré; the president of the National Assembly, Philippe Séguin (who was widely known to be a close friend of Ben Ali); and the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Henri de Chavette. Sixteen years later, when the Ben Ali régime imploded, Henri de Chavette insisted that support for Ben Ali had been entirely logical, that France had no other choice. But he also admitted that the French allowed themselves to ‘drift’ into complying with a dysfunctional and dangerous régime.

None the less, Chirac publicly hailed what he described as the ‘Tunisian Miracle’ – by which he meant that Ben Ali had somehow managed to construct a modern Francophone state out of the wreckage of colonization, a model for the entire region. This was a myth. The reality was that ‘stability’ in Tunisia had been imposed by force of arms and the systematic use of torture: its ‘Francophone’ identity was undermined by the fact that few Tunisians could ever get to France, and those who did often found themselves living in worse conditions than they had known at home. However, the French needed Tunisian intelligence on Algeria, Libya and Morocco, and even used Ben Ali as a channel to communicate with Yasser Arafat, who was resident in Tunis until 1995.

When the Socialists came to power in France in 1997, Lionel Jospin was quick to distance himself from Ben Ali. The days of presidential visits to Tunis were suddenly over, but this did not stop the mayor of Paris, Jean Tiberi, from holding a magnificent reception for Ben Ali at the Hôtel de Ville, with Ségolène Royal and other luminaries in attendance. The former president of the National Assembly, Philippe Séguin, presided over a speech made by Ben Ali at the Grande Arche de la Défense, attended by thousands of Tunisians resident in France. Jospin hosted a dinner at the Matignon.

Ben Ali’s Tunisia had become a tough and ugly place, but it was still a cheap and popular holiday destination for European, especially French, holidaymakers. Along the strip of coast south of Tunis, often in partnership with French travel firms, the government invested millions in the zones touristiques, which grew ever more lavish and grotesque.

The government boasted that living standards were higher than in all other comparable nations, but the price to pay for this was a devastating paralysis of thought and action among ordinary Tunisians. All the young people dreamed of Europe, and thousands died as they tried to turn the dream into reality by attempting to get across the Mediterranean. This was the same story I had heard from Tangier to Tunis. Imen Yacoubi told me of a young man, a friend who enjoyed swimming at night in La Goulette, the port of Tunis, where he could see the tantalizing lights of distant Italy. One night he swam right out and never came back. He was a member of a generation who were literally dying of boredom.

England Away!

The outside world first caught a glimpse of the secret inner life of Tunisian youth when England played Tunisia on 15 June 1998 at the FIFA World Cup, which was being held that year in France. The violence of the Tunisian youths on the streets of Marseilles seemed to come out of nowhere, at least for non-French observers who had no idea of the realities of Tunisian life in France or Tunisia.

The most dramatic fighting erupted on the Quai des Belges in the centre of Marseilles on the evening of Sunday 14 June. The match was scheduled for the Monday, which meant the English fans had a whole weekend to drink their way down to the South of France. It is still unclear who started the fighting, but on the Saturday night in La Canebière, in the heart of Marseilles, English fans had burned a Tunisian flag, made Nazi salutes and jeered at Tunisians and other North Africans as ‘Pakis’. The young Tunisians were not afraid, however, of these fat, stupid white men. They buzzed them on mopeds, threw beer glasses back at them, and, whenever they could pick one off, beat them into the ground with kicks and blows.

By Sunday night the Tunisians were joined by Moroccans and Algerians. The general feeling was that the English needed to be taught a lesson. This was not about football or football hooliganism anymore. The English had come to Marseilles and strutted around as if they owned it. To Tunisian eyes, their behaviour was disgusting – they walked round half-naked, bloated bellies pink in the sun, and were mostly drunk and chanted like animals. For their part, the English had no idea who or what they were fighting and were surprised to be so effectively hammered over the three days of combat. Their defeat at the hands of Tunisian youth bred even more hatred: ‘We didn’t lose that much money really, as we had already drunk most of the money we had on us,’ remembered one English fan, ‘but I tell you, there was no way we was leaving without giving some Arab shit a good hiding.’2

The events in Marseilles were barely reported in the Tunisian press, and certainly there was no reference to disaffected youth. The French press, having had some experience of what was happening in big French cities, got nearer the mark: almost everywhere the battle of Marseilles was reported as the French banlieues against the rest of the world.

Images and Illusions

Although there were enormous posters of the oily visage of Ben Ali plastered all over the country, nobody in Tunisia ever really knew anything about the man himself. There was a legend that the ‘Supreme Combatant’ had been born in Monastir in a zaouïa – a holy building that, according to local folklore, was often the birthplace of Muslim saints. This rumour was started partly because Bourguiba was known to favour the natives of Monastir. But the reality was that Ben Ali was born in the countryside between Gabès and Médenine in the south of Tunisia, one of eleven children in a family of modest means. His father had served in the French navy. His mother and grandmother hoped that he would become a primary-school teacher.

But Ben Ali never finished school and never gained the baccalaureate (le bac), the leaving certificate which was the basic requirement for any civil-service job. In later years, Ben Ali was nicknamed in the French press ‘bac moins trois’ (three years short of a bac) as an explanation for his stubbornness and stupidity. Indeed, Ben Ali never lost a sense of insecurity in the company of ‘intellectuals’, saying that he preferred to be with the ‘simple people’ of Tunisia. This never stopped him from claiming in the French press that he had a degree in law from the University of Tunis.

Ben Ali’s career began in the years after Tunisian independence when he was one of a group of young army officers selected to train at Saint-Cyr, the French military college in Brittany. This meant he had a thorough education in the French art of war and, as much as anyone of his generation who went through that process, he respected law, order and discipline. He gained a reputation for ruthlessness and severity as a military commander. Beyond this, he revealed no taste or interest in culture or history. His training at Saint-Cyr was followed by a brief stint in the United States, studying Intelligence and Security Issues in Baltimore.

In her sickly and self-serving autobiography, published as an apologia in 2012, Ben Ali’s second wife Leila paints a portrait of a man driven by duty to the Tunisian people, displaying the same sense of responsibility towards them that he showed towards his children.3 But he emerges in this book, too, as a singularly colourless individual, lacking any political ambition beyond survival. From this point of view it is easy to believe the rumours that Ben Ali’s ascent to power was manipulated by the Italian and Algerian secret services to ensure nothing more than security in Tunisia. Certainly, in the years to follow he never made a political statement of any note.

He was undoubtedly paranoid and it was this quality which drove his realpolitik and, in 1999, compelled him to turn against and humiliate the veteran French journalist Jean Daniel, hitherto a self-identified ‘friend of Tunisia’. Daniel had been wounded in the conflict at Bizerte in 1961 and since then had professed nothing but admiration for the country. Daniel’s ‘crime’ was to have noted in his published diaries the importance of Ben Ali’s ‘cult of personality’ in Tunisian politics. His punishment was to find himself attacked in the Tunisian press and immediately excluded from the charmed circles of political contacts. When I spoke to Jean Daniel in 2013, by then a frail old man in his nineties, he snarled at the mention of Ben Ali.

The politics of paranoia were also played out on the larger world stage. The attacks of 9/11 were a gift to Ben Ali (as they were to many other equally dubious Arab leaders). He was now officially one of America’s best friends in the Arab world, the official face of the anti-terrorist Arab order. From his palaces in Carthage Ben Ali took it upon himself to lecture the Western world on ‘laxity’ in the war against terror, singling out London, or ‘Londonistan’, as the capital of radical terror (it was no accident that London was also home to a generation of Tunisians in exile). In the pages of L’Express in France, Ben Ali was praised as the potential saviour of the Maghreb, and the paper was unable to resist the play on words in the headline ‘Ben Ali against Ben Laden’. Shortly afterwards, the ‘good democrat’, as he was described, made himself President for Life.

In April 2002 al-Qaeda launched an attack on the synagogue on the quiet isle of Djerba in southern Tunisia, which left over thirty dead. In the wake of this attack, the Tunisian authorities clamped down. But still the violence grew; in 2006 a shoot-out between police and a suspected al-Qaeda cell in the Tunis suburb of Grombalia killed thirty people. The Islamist revenge was to be swift and cruel: a planned attack on embassies and tourist hotels on Cap Bon in 2007. When the plot was uncovered, the Tunisian army was called in to deal with a terrorist cell armed with rocket launchers. Battle raged for an afternoon in a suburb of Tunis. The leader of the group ‘Sassi’, shot through the brain by a sniper, was found to be Tunisian-born and educated in France.

In the meantime, Ben Ali’s stranglehold on Tunisia grew even tighter. There were, of course, a few dissenting voices. In 2000 a magistrate, Mokhtar Yahyaoui, wrote an open letter to Ben Ali complaining that he was ashamed to work in such a rotten legal system. He then disappeared. The writer and journalist Taoufik Ben Brik started a hunger strike in Tunis, which he then took to Paris – much to the irritation of Ben Ali. He ended up in prison on trumped-up charges. When he was released in 2010 he took his message about Ben Ali’s wickedness to Paris. He claimed that France had to intervene, that France owed Tunisia a debt – as former colonizers who had left behind ‘native colonialists’ – but no one was really listening.

There were others who spoke out: lawyers, teachers and journalists, including Radhia Nasraoui, Hamma Hammami, Sihem Bensédrine, Moncef Mazouki, Mohamed Bouebdelli. These names were pretty much unknown to the outside world. But on trips to Tunis and other cities, crude evidence of Ben Ali’s totalitarian machine was never far from view. Like all visitors to Tunisia who were not holidaymakers, I was immediately an object of suspicion. My female Moroccan colleague, Fatima Ahloulay, was accosted and insulted by men in dark glasses and leather jackets – the secret police – when we walked the city streets together. They followed us everywhere. We would joke about it and she would reply with insults in Spanish, which they didn’t understand. But we never really found it amusing. When we mentioned this low-level harassment to Tunisian colleagues, they simply shied away from the subject. They knew that, for all its stability and alleged prosperity, Ben Ali’s Tunisia was a diseased and rotten place.

Gangsters

In its last years, the Ben Ali régime was marked by criminality and farce. One of the more notorious scandals was the involvement of Imed Trabelsi, nephew of Leila Ben Ali, in the theft of a yacht from the Corsican port of Bonifacio. Trabelsi normally described himself as a politician and businessman – he was mayor of La Goulette, dominated the construction industry in Tunisia and managed the French DIY franchise called Bricorama.

In 2006, at the age of thirty-two, he was also a spoilt and sleazy playboy. ‘I’ve got Ferraris, limousines,’ he once said, ‘but nothing gives me a hard-on, not even my wife, like a boat. It’s like an uncut diamond.’4 On the morning of 5 May 2006, in the port of Sidi Bou Said, he was seen at the helm of the yacht Beru Ma, a top-of-the-range vessel worth a million and a half euros.

The problem was that the yacht actually belonged to Bruno Roger, the multi-millionaire banker, head of the Lazard Brothers banking group. Roger also happened to be a personal friend of Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy. The yacht was tracked down by Jean-Baptiste Andréani, a former French police officer working as a private detective, who used his contacts with the French secret services to identify Imed and the boat. Andréani also reported that Imed was a ‘well-known hooligan who could act with total impunity’.

In her book Leila Ben Ali recounts that she had no idea why Nicolas Sarkozy personally telephoned Ben Ali, asking him to release the two Corsican crew members of the Beru Ma who were being held in Tunisia. She adds that her charming nephew had been a victim of his own innocence and gullibility and the real villain was an Algerian yacht thief whose name no one could remember.5

Unsurprisingly, the visit of the French President Nicolas Sarkozy in April 2008 provoked divided opinions among Tunisians. Many ordinary people felt flattered that Sarkozy had bothered at all, and the papers were full of pictures of his wife, the glamorous Carla, consorting with the great and good of this small North African country. There were others, however, who argued that Sarkozy was primarily on a mission to do deals and make money for France. Ben Ali could do whatever he wanted – imprisonment without trial, even assassination – as long as it was in the name of the struggle against Islamic terror.

Much to the satisfaction of French diplomats, the Sarkozy visit to Tunisia went off quietly, with no mention of the Trabelsis. The truth was that the French wanted as little fuss as possible. Leila herself was conspicuous by her absence, having most likely been ordered to keep out the way. In 2009, to the stupefaction of all observers, the charges of ‘organized theft’ made against Imed Trabelsi in a Corsican court were suddenly dropped, and the pair were released to face trial in Tunisia, where, as Leila put it, due to ‘an excess of zeal’, the Tunisian judge acquitted them both.

This had all the elements of high comedy, except that at stake was the integrity of the French government at the highest level. It was a sorry state of affairs; the French ambassador had recently commended the Ben Alis to his American colleague as ‘leaders who are in touch with the people’, who were making steady progress with their human-rights issues. The French turned a blind eye and refused to take action against corruption, which encouraged worse acts of theft and piracy. In December 2010 the Trabelsi clan reunited in Dubai, a favoured destination, where they were sent 500 million dollars from Tunisia. This was aside from the 1,500 kilos of gold which Leila had openly stolen from the Central Bank of Tunisia. As the country stood on the brink of a revolution which would shake the Arab world to its core, the ruling élite of Tunisia systematically pillaged the country for every penny they could lay their hands on.

These were the people, it is worth remembering at this late stage in the drama, to whom the French Minister of State for Justice, Defence and Home Affairs, Michèle Alliot-Marie, was shortly to offer French military and police assistance.

The end for the Ben Ali régime came all of a sudden on 14 January 2011. According to Leila Ben Ali, the family was the victim of a plot by greedy and selfish politicians to depose the noble Ben Ali and seize power for themselves. In reality, in the classic mode of revolutions, the turning point was that the military had decided to serve the people and not the regime, in order to ‘protect the revolution’. The Ben Alis became aware of this when the military attacked their own security forces. This was a direct threat. The model for this, as far I could see, was the Romanian revolution of 1989, when Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu were summarily tried and executed by a people’s court at the height of the revolutionary fervour. The Ben Alis had no desire to go the same way. Frantic phone calls bought them the promise of exile in Saudi Arabia, after the French had refused asylum to their oldest and closest friends in the Arab world.

A plane was chartered and flights hurriedly organized, first to Malta and then to Riyadh. The convoy to the airport was a tense affair, heightened by Leila Ben Ali’s demands that the Central Bank of Tunisia should give the family a further 1,500 kilos of gold from the country’s gold reserves. This was refused – the first time ever that the bank had stood its ground.

The Libyan security services, on the direct orders of Colonel Gaddafi, provided cover and protection on the way to the airport. The colonel would shortly go on Libyan television to accuse the Tunisian people of folly and call for the return of Ben Ali.

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The mutiny lasted no more than four weeks. But it changed everything in Tunisia and indeed across the Arab world, as ordinary people from Morocco to Yemen felt inspired and fearless enough to take on their rulers. The uprising would eventually lead to the fall of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and the violent civil war in Libya, which culminated in the killing of Gaddafi. Other revolts in Algeria and Morocco began to unsettle governments. In Jordan, Iraq and Bahrain, there were protests, disturbances and deaths. In Syria the protest movement unleashed a brutal civil war which, at the time of writing, is not yet over and has the potential to engulf the region.

None of this could have been predicted the day after Ben Ali left Tunisia and the streets were filled with happy crowds, melting together in euphoria and disbelief. There was, however, an undercurrent of violence. The main railway station in Tunis was firebombed and militias set up as neighbourhood protection units. Gunfire was constant. The breakout of some 1,000 prisoners from the main jail at Mahdia, and then from other prisons across the country, introduced a new, harsher edge of fear into the atmosphere. Those who were left in power were cautious about going too near to the edge of anarchy. A state of emergency was established, which effectively meant that the military was in charge. An interim government was soon in place, including opposition figures and old hands from the Ben Ali régime, but was soon removed from power as street protests continued. Free elections were promised within sixty days. The Ennahda party, the moderately Islamist grouping that had been banned under Ben Ali, led by the human-rights activist Moncef Marzouki, took power with 41 per cent of the vote.

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But Tunisia does not yet feel safe. Salafists are threatening to turn the country into the ‘new Pakistan’ – a nation making total war with the West, from only a few hundred kilometres from the European mainland. Credible security services estimate the number of radicals ready to take up arms at around 3,000. In a country of 10 million people this is a dangerous statistic. Worse still, the numbers of young people who feel enough hatred and contempt to kill is growing fast.

Most Tunisians, not just the Salafists, now feel twice betrayed by France, the country which has dominated and shaped Tunisia’s political and cultural identity for over a century. Whether they wanted to or not, they grew up believing that France was their mother county, and that at the very least the French had the Tunisians’ best interests at heart. During the heady days of the revolution, France was in fact revealed as a cynical and corrupt enemy.

On the evening of 14 October 2008, there was a friendly football match at the Stade de France between France and Tunisia. The French government had been anticipating trouble for months. Ever since the riots in Clichy-sous-Bois in 2005, all matches with North African teams had become potential triggers for trouble in Paris. Still, Tunisia was held to be a less volatile and dangerous place than either Morocco or Algeria and Tunisians in Paris are not seen as gangsters or Islamic radicals. But to defuse any possible tensions, the authorities had decided that the teams should mix together as they lined up and that the ‘Marseillaise’ should be sung by Laam, a young R&B singer of Franco-Tunisian extraction.

As soon as Laam picked up the mike, the hissing started, rising quickly to a high-pitched crescendo of whistling which carried through the stadium like bad feedback. The young girl looked around for help but none came. She fought on through the blizzard of white noise, but it was hopeless. When she finally stopped, Tunisian fans were laughing and high-fiving as if they were 3–0 up on the home team. ‘Where did it come from, this wall of hate?’ I asked a Tunisian bloke next to me in the bar where I was watching the match. He smiled goofily and slugged back the remains of his beer: ‘Made in France!’