Tunisia: A brief history

Since the earliest of times, Tunis has been an area of struggle, invaded by first the Phoenicians and later taken over by the Romans, who were in turn forced out by maurauding barbarian hordes that swept through Europe in the 5th century and were followed by Arab and Turkish empires.

Later, when the Allies under General Eisenhower landed in North Africa in November 1942, the Germans and Italians seized Tunis as an operations base for the forces of Rommel. The area was the scene of fierce fighting between the Germans and the Allies, until the Allied forces triumphed in 1943. Following the war, the struggle for independence from the French gained ground, leading to bloody clashes and the eventual declaration of a republic in 1957 with Habib Bourguiba as first president.

Zine El Abidine Ben Ali ousted Bourguiba in a bloodless coup on 7 November 1987, promising to lead the country toward democracy and releasing political prisoners. But after January 1992, President Ben Ali started using the civil war in neighbouring Algeria as an excuse to stifle basic rights, mainly freedom of expression, says the Tunisian Monitoring Group, a body of freedom of expression organisations set up to monitor the human rights situation in Tunisia in the lead up to the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). Opposition and independent papers were closed down and journalists and hundreds of political activists, most of them Islamists, were imprisoned following unfair trials, particularly in the early 1990s, says a TMG report.

Later, the Tunisian government used the attacks in the USA on 11 September 2001, to further restrict freedom of association, movement, and expression. A new law criminalizing freedom of expression was passed at the end of 2003 allegedly to support “the international efforts in matters of the fight against terrorism and money laundering.” As reported by TMG, The Tunisian Human Rights League (LTDH) said after the promulgation of this law, “the year 2003 has been marked by the promulgation of laws of an unprecedented serious character in terms of their violation of the right to information.”