(RSF/IFEX) – The following is an RSF press release: Monday July 12, 1999 For immediate release Tunisia “Silence, we’re gagging the press” After a mission to Tunis from 14-19 June 1999, Reporters sans Frontières has produced a report on the state of press freedom in Tunisia: “Silence, we’re gagging the press”. Since he came to […]
(RSF/IFEX) – The following is an RSF press release:
Monday July 12, 1999
For immediate release
Tunisia
“Silence, we’re gagging the press”
After a mission to Tunis from 14-19 June 1999, Reporters sans Frontières has
produced a report on the state of press freedom in Tunisia: “Silence, we’re
gagging the press”. Since he came to power on November 7, 1987, President
Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali has sought to control the flow of information – and
he has succeeded. Today, press freedom is non-existent in Tunisia. The
Tunisian press, working under censorship, is characterized by a uniformity
of tone, in which any information likely to constitute a criticism of the
regime is, in fact, prohibited. The media are under government influence and
print endless laudatory articles about the person of the President and the
policy of the government. All the daily newspapers, without exception,
publish a photograph of President Ben Ali on their front pages every day.
There is hardly any difference between their headlines. Public radio and
television reflect one and the same message: that of the regime. The
Internet is also censored: there are checks on the sites visited, and access
to certain foreign sites is blocked.
The system is locked in place by a combination of fear and corruption. The
regime has used both straightforward gagging methods such as court orders,
seizures of newspapers, withholding advertising and arresting journalists,
and “rewards” for compliance, including subsidies and big advertising
budgets for the press, social benefits for journalists, and promotions.
For more than ten years, independent journalists have been victims of
various pressures: wrongful dismissals, police surveillance, phone-tapping,
searches of their homes, administrative harassment, cutting telephone and
fax lines, refusal of accreditation, dismissal of their spouses or close
relations, confiscation of passports, tax reassessments, and the like. Some,
discouraged, left the profession. The freedom of journalists has been
reduced to next to nothing, generating frustration and a feeling of
impotence.
Any expression of dissent from the official line is censored. From 1989 to
1991, Islamic journalists were systematically repressed. In August 1992,
Hamadi Jebali, editor of the weekly Al Fajr, semi-official organ of the
Islamist movement Ennahda, and a journalist on the paper, Abdellah Zouari,
were sentenced respectively to sixteen and eleven years in jail.
The foreign press is under surveillance. The few foreign correspondents of
the news services, also subjected to pressures, have limited freedom of
action. Any publication that criticises the regime is not allowed into the
country. Over the past eighteen months, distribution of about sixty issues
of the two French daily newspapers Le Monde and Libération, was banned. The
daily La Croix is permanently prohibited. But beyond pure and simple bans,
or the occasional seizure, there is another type of obstacle to the free
circulation of information: systematic distribution delays. Some foreign
journalists are also regularly refused the entry.
The report on Tunisia: “Silence, we’re gagging the press” can be consulted
on our Website: or from Laetitia Ferreira on (331) 44 83 84 71.
