La Tunisie n’est clairement plus épargnée par les campagnes massives de désinformation à l’ère du trollage et des fake news. Objectif : semer la division, défigurer l’espace public et influencer les électeurs potentiels via des campagnes clandestines menées sur les réseaux sociaux.
On March 21, 2019, the Medenine refugee shelter closed its doors. Tunisia Red Crescent’s regional committee called for the closure two weeks after the protest movement carried out by a group of immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers on March 7. Protesters had left the center and set out on foot towards the Libyan border, calling attention to catastrophic conditions at the center, a facility which houses 210 occupants in spite of a 100-person capacity. It was here where, on March 11, a 15 year-old asylum seeker attempted suicide by cutting his wrists. Nawaat met with some of its residents to uncover the truth about this shelter.
Since March 25, 2019, more than 140 university professors have held an open sit-in before the Ministry of Higher Education. The demonstration is the latest development in the course of a two-year mounting crisis involving the Tunisian University Professors and Researchers Union (IJABA) and concerned Ministry. With a warning to the government about the possibility of losing out on an entire academic year, the protest movement is drawing attention to the precarious future of Tunisia’s public universities. As they demand sector reforms, professors are shedding light on the deterioration of the institutions that serve as the country’s incubators of thought and knowledge.
Human Rights Watch has recently criticized the inaction of Tunisian authorities in the attempt to bring home the children of Tunisian ISIS fighters. The NGO says that 200 Tunisian children are currently being held in prisons and camps in Libya, Syria and Iraq. In an interview with Amna Guellali, Human Rights Watch director for Tunisia, we touch on an HRW study concerning the situation of these children today.
From March 4-8, the Ministry of Vocational Training and Employment launched Vocational Training, Private Initiatives and Employment week. Nawaat visited a training center in the suburbs of Tunis where official discourse doesn’t quite reflect reality.
Held on March 9 at Tunis’ City of Culture, the Forum de la Francophonie marked the beginning of the month of Francophonie which is celebrated by French cultural institutions in Tunisia. The country will host the Summit of Francophonie in August 2020, even as the use of French language is on the decline and questions around language are charged with identity issues.
New elections are around the corner, and the monitoring of party financing has yet to catch up. Between political parties incapable of respecting the law and authorities that struggle to sanction them, the trust of a small segment of citizens still inclined to vote could be easily shaken.
As per the official request of prime minister Youssef Chahed, the name of Marouen Mabrouk was removed from the list of 48 Tunisians sanctioned by the European Union for misappropriation of state funds. Unlike other friends and relatives of deposed president Ben Ali who saw their money frozen by the EU, Mabrouk was able to find himself a new political shield to protect his wealth following the revolution that swept the country in 2011. With help from telecommunications company Orange France, he managed to get Tunisia’s prime minister to unfreeze over seven million euros in assets held in EU countries.
Having endured multiple scissions since coming to power at the end of 2014, Nidaa Tounes is all but in pieces. Today, the party is trying to mend its wounds by absorbing the Free Patriotic Union (UPL) and, seven years after its creation, organizing its first elective congress. To this end, a na-tional conference of regional coordinators was held in Mahdia over the weekend of December 21-23, 2018. The event is telling about the banalization of murky relations between the business world and Nidaa Tounes, whose own treasurer is playing the role of party financer.
Over the past month, Tunisia’s streets have provided the setting for a number of social movements marked by the new campaign slogan Basta (« enough »). The emergence of this campaign has raised a number of questions around the effectiveness of this form of struggle in achieving its demands and independence from political parties, especially in terms of its ability to preserve a horizontalist organization. Questions frequently raised in the context of youth protest campaigns that have been carried out in Tunisia over the past several years (Fech Nestannew, Manich Msameh, Tamarrod).
To write signs in Arabic… or not? It didn’t take long for the question to turn into a debate on identity. The story behind the ministerial circular which provided the basis for this decision shows how the political instrumentalization of language is nothing new in Tunisia.
On December 23, 2018, Falikou Coulibaly, president of the Association of Ivorians in Tunisia, was killed during a robbery in Soukra (Greater Tunis). As protests led by the Subsaharian community multiplied across the capital, Nawaat met Eric. Settled in Tunisia since March 2017, the 31 year old Ivorian—like hundreds of his compatriots, has found himself uncapable of regularizing his status. Forced to relinquish his studies, Eric got a job as a construction worker. Racist acts of aggression, a lack of medical care and an exploitative work situation are some of the challenges he faces on a daily basis.
Another hot summer in Tunisia gave way to teachers’ strikes in the fall, while winter follows suit with plans for a general strike on January 17. In this context, on December 10 the government adopted the Finance Law of 2019, a package of measures that perpetuate fiscal injustice, aiming to handle the country’s growing deficit by reaching into the pockets of those most impacted by economic crisis. Ahead of the 2019 elections, the new public budget was passed amidst a rejection rate of 30% in parliament, suscitating a new wave of popular and political rejection in the most recent test put to the government of prime minister Youssef Chahed.
Déclenchée par le limogeage du ministre de l’Energie et quatre responsables du même ministère, la polémique sur l’affaire Halq El Menzel a duré peu de temps avant de tomber dans l’oubli. Accusant la société TOPIC d’exploiter ce champ pétrolifère sans autorisation depuis 2009, le gouvernement a ensuite révisé sa copie et a fini par résumer l’affaire en une confusion dans l’interprétation des articles du Code des Hydrocarbures. Quant aux soupçons de corruption, ils ont été plus tard présentés comme une simple question de négligence administrative. Ces évolutions ont laissé la société accusée dans une situation ambiguë et le gouvernement dans une position suspecte.
Over the past month, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has been breaking space records left and right. On October 29, PSP became the closest and fastest human-made object orbiting the Sun, while October 31 marked its first solar « encounter ». In light of these events, Nawaat speaks with the Project Scientist of the NASA mission to reach our solar system’s star, the Sun. Nour Raouafi, Tunisian solar physicist at John Hopkins University Applied Sciences Lab which built the PSP spacecraft, describes the early phase of this seven-year journey into the Sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona, and also talks about his own trajectory to working on this stellar mission.
Since October 3, Saudi planes have launched into Tunisian skies, where joint military exercises are underway with Tunisian air forces. A statement issued by the Kingdom’s defense ministry describes the exercises as « highlighting the capabilities, professionalism and readiness of the Saudi airforce ». Such capabilities, which the Saudi regime seeks to « refine » with the help of Tunisia, were demonstrated on August 9 of this year when it targeted a school bus in Sana’a, Yemen, killing 29 children. With Saudi-Tunisian joint military exercises underway, Tunisia has provided Saudi Arabia with the airspace it needs to sharpen its knives before shedding more blood in Yemen.
Beginning in October, farmers in Tunisia’s northwest, particularly Beja, Jendouba, Zaghouan, will begin planting cereal crops like wheat and barley and leguminous crops including chickpea, lentil and faba which will both feed soil and stock pantries. A select few farmers in the region will also plant canola, an industrial oilseed supplied by French agribusiness giant Groupe AVRIL who is partnering with the Tunisian Ministry of Agriculture to develop a canola sector that is « 100% Tunisian ». The project is in fact part of a decades-long push to introduce canola as a « locally grown » alternative to imported grains and oils.
3ich Tounsi has been the subject of lots of talk over the past months, suscitating a number of questions in its overexposure. Mega-events with ambiguous objectives, copiously-sponsored television and internet ads, opaque funding sources—such characteristics render 3ich Tounsi a veritable extra-terrestrial to the non-profit world, especially when it comes to the association’s discourse which has become more and more openly political.
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