The following was written by a Tunisian academic now living in the UK who wishes for the moment to remain anonymous. In it she describes in detail how it felt to live under the internationally supported and recently deposed dictator Ben Ali.
I shall never forget that cloudy Saturday morning, 7th November 1987, when all Tunisia woke up to hear that president Habibi Bourguiba was no longer President. It was a big shock for most of us. Since 1956, Bourguiba had been running the country very much according to his own point of view and without listening to anyone else. When the coup d’Etat happened, I wasn’t yet mature enough to understand and criticize the way Bourguiba's way of governing the country. All that I knew was about the measures he took after independence in 1956 and that was much of a concern for me, especially in relation to education. That was enough for me at that time to say “we are safe with him”. He was a very clever person and he knew how to communicate with Tunisians, how to talk to them.
But I later developed a much more mature point of view, and I am convinced that the way Bourguiba ran the country, especially in the early '80s led to Ben Ali.
In 1987, it was very clear that the paternalist Bourguiba (at least that was the image many Tunisians had of him) had left the post to a harsh and rigid man. The elections of 1989 were a first proof that things wouldn’t be easy with Ben Ali. His mysterious relationship with the United States and his very low level of education, together with the kinds of people he surrounded himself with were already good reasons to conclude that nothing good could come out of his regime.
I don’t want to talk about things I don’t feel I am aware enough about. But I will talk about how I lived over the last 23 years.
In September 1989, I was a new student in the Institute of Higher Commercial Studies in Carthage, less than one mile from the President's residence. I was like any other Tunisian student looking to build my career and looking for a better future for me and for all the country. I wasn’t involved at all in any political activities. “Politics is not my cup of tea”, I thought. I realize now how crucial the impact of politics on our lives is.
In the early '90s, I remember my professors talking about the measures the government was taking in order to enhance the Tunisian economy's ability to face globalization. I also remember how some of my professors were talking about the plans concerning higher education in Tunisia and how the government was trying to fit in with the World Bank's conditions. The arguments presented by these professors had no or very little foundation.
I got my first degree, and then faced my first experience looking for a job. I was sure about my choice of doing a doctorate and then becoming a professor. But I was very curious and I wanted to know how one can get a job, if it would be easy, what a job gives to a person and how it feels to be financially independent.
I applied for lots of posts and got an interview and then a job in a very famous bank. I was very proud. But on my first day I had my first encounter with the famous “invisible hand” which interferes in everyone’s life. The same morning someone working in the bank told me that they had decided to take on someone else. I tried to find out how they could do such a thing after telling me that I got the job. But nobody could tell me anything.
It was my first experience with the lack of transparency of Tunisian administration. I was lucky, living comfortably with my parents and being very well looked after, so I decided to concentrate on my ambition of becoming a professor and focus on my master's and then my doctorate.
In Tunisia, to get a position in a university, you have to take a national exam organized by the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research and Technology. I did this and I was lucky enough to get a job in one of the new Universities in Tunisia. There again I faced the lack of transparency of the Ministry. I tried like many other successful candidates to find out how I had come to be allocated a University that I didn’t ask for. Many of us were living in Tunis and we asked on the forms we filled to be allocated to one of the universities in Tunis. Funnily enough, the daughter of Lazhar Boouni (who was at that time the Chancellor of the University and then quickly became the Minister of Higher Education and Scientific research) was very lucky. She was initially appointed to a University in a city far from Tunis and was the only one of all the successful candidates to be transferred to Tunis in just one week! Once more, the invisible hand was very active in deciding people's destinies.
I had to fill out application after application every semester for several years in order to be transferred to one of the universities in Tunis. I wasn’t happy and I made that quite clear to colleagues and all people around me. One day, after filling another application, the dean of the University spoke to me in his office and said that I should be grateful to be working there. I answered that it wasn’t by choice. He tried to highlight the advantages of being in my position and I was naively contradicting every single advantage he was speaking of and also giving him proof. Then he changed his tactic and got angry. He said that people were reporting to him about my unhappiness and I should be happy and show it around me. I was shocked and told him he didn't need to go to see other people to know about my happiness and unhappiness and what he has to do is just to ask me and I will be very honest and tell him the truth. From that day he got to know me and I got to know him, but whereas he got promoted several times, when I moved to Tunis 4 years later my promotion was a much slower process, as I am one of those who say no!
When I was a student I was aware of the police at the University. They were there to quash any anti-government protests from either students or professors. When I became a lecturer I realized that the police wasn’t only the man in the university courtyard but also some of my colleagues. Over the last 10 years, you could be reported by certain colleagues if you acted differently then what they are expecting you to do, and you could also be held back in your career because you refused to cooperate with corruption. The men of the regime were everywhere.
Because of that, many notoriously corrupt professors at the university became powerful and they used this power to abuse colleagues. Harassment and exploitation of colleagues and also of students was very common. One of my friends could not get promoted because he once reported to me that in his institute one of the corrupt professors was sexually abusing men and women. Anyone intending to apply for promotion, faced the very real prospect of being abused by this man, who was very well supported by the party of the regime. This professor and others I know were reported to the ministry but no one could stop them because they have full support from the party leading the country. The ministers turned a blind eye to this kind of behaviour.
I found it very difficult to live with the knowledge that all this was going on around me. I felt I just had to be strong and get on with my work. But looking back I can see that I was very sad and depressed and my career was progressing very slowly despite all the work I was doing in research and teaching, while for other corrupt colleagues, it was easy to get to prestigious positions in the university with very little insignificant work. They were also getting grants from the ministry while the others who weren't aligned with the regime weren’t getting any. But to whom could you report these things? Not to professors, to the chancellor of the university, or to the minister. You were either in or out. There was no middle position. You could not be apolitical. Being apolitical meant being for the regime rather than against it.
But I wasn’t the only one faced with this unfair situation. Many other persons like me were implicitly saying no. We were implicitly supporting each other just by being patient and trying to keep away from the corrupt people of the regime.
But in our implicit and silent fight against the regime, gradually our economic situation was getting worse. Prices were getting higher everyday and our wages were the same. The already humble position of a lecturer, assistant professor or professor was getting more and more downgraded.
I can remember how one day an eminent Tunisian professor working in France for more then 20 years got very angry after listening to the Minister of Higher Education give a talk in Paris. The minister said that in Tunisia the priority was not for scientific research as the country had no need for it. That was a way of saying that highly educated Tunisian people working in France are not needed back to Tunisia. With the regime of Ben Ali there was in theory support for higher education, but I could not understand where all the money given by the World Bank had gone. But it wasn't just higher education; in Tunisia under Ben Ali every sector was just as corrupt.
I had never considered working abroad. But in 2006, I was a member of a conference organizing committee and I met a professor from the UK. She helped me to get a position of senior research fellow at one of the universities in the UK. I enjoyed being in a different work environment and I was amazed to see all the facilities that a lecturer and a researcher can get in any of the universities. I stayed in that position till 2010. I learned a lot from the experience but at the same time I was more aware of the unfairness of my work situation in Tunis and the unfairness of the “invisible hand”.
By 2011, I and many other people had had enough. In January I was trying to apply for a work permit in order to be able to join one of the universities in the UK. It was during the famous week of Monday the 10th. I remember every day clearly and I experienced like all Tunisians the security problem after Ben Ali left on the 14th. He left but left his dogs to terrorize us. He trained them with our money in the States and in Europe. Most of them have no families; they are bastards, rejected by society. They don't hesitate to kill, steal and burn other people’s possessions.
On Friday the 14th, the Prime Minister announced in the evening that the President had left the country and according to the constitution (article 56) he was the one who should be running the country when the president leaves. That was apparently very helpful for the King of Saudi Arabia as he received Ben Ali as a President and then gave him refuge in accordance with International law.
The following day, Tunisian people were claiming in all Tunisia that Ben Ali had gone for ever and that claimed for the article 57 of the constitution which says that the president of the parliament should be the one to run the country till the elections. And that was done the same day. So we had three presidents in less than 24 hours!
The security problem got worse throughout Saturday and Sunday. My brothers were patrolling during the night with all the young men from our area. They did that with the agreement of the army as the curfew had been decided two nights before. The police of the president were trying to burn everything, shops, police stations, food storage, any thing that the people might need, with no public police to be seen at all. My cousin is married to a police man who later admitted that before the events he and his colleagues were asked to leave their posts and not to protect people if anything happened.
Saturday, Sunday and Monday night were very frightening. I even felt one night very unsafe with all my family. But we now realize that there were a lot of rumors nurturing our fear. Tuesday night the army asked all the young men in our area to stay home at night and that they were handling the area. They needed the streets empty so they could act easily. I was so tired after three sleepless nights. My mum convinced me to go to bed early, at 11pm and to hope for the best. I went to bed with the feeling that it was too quiet to be true!
At 2.30 am I was woken up by a strange noise. I could hear shooting very close to our house. It wasn’t just once or twice but a continuous firing. It didn’t stop till 3am. I called mum in the room next to mine and I realized that mum and also my sister and my brother were awake. I rang my neighbor and he answered very quickly just to say “they are very close, I can’t talk now”. The following day, he told me that he was able to see from the window the light of very sophisticated guns which apparently were functioning with lasers. I finished the night in my mum’s bed thinking that if the worst happened I would be next to my mum.
Strangely, things got better on Wednesday and people started to go out more often. The next Monday people were back to work. But there are still riots in Tunis and all the cities in Tunisia protesting against the RCD Rassemblement Constitutionnelle Démocratique, because people think that althought Ben Ali was the head of the tree, the roots and the trunk are still there and still have power to damage the country.
Two types of media were important during the event, TV channels and the Internet. The Tunisian Channels tried to deal the situation clumsily. They had lost their credibility long ago. Two of these channels (Nessma TV and Hannabal TV) are owned by corrupt people. I still wouldn’t trust them just because Ben Ali has gone. The other one was called Tunis7 and changed its name to the National Channel, because before the 14th of January, 7 was the number that you would see associated with the preferred color of Ben Ali, everywhere in Tunisia. Then there was Al Jazeera TV, which was much more credible and kept us in touch with what was going on. I realize that all TV channels like Aljazeera can not be 100% unbiased and objective, but this channel was outstanding compared to all the corrupt channels in the Arab countries.
The Internet, through Facebook, Skype, and Twitter was the weapon that Tunisian people used in order to defeat Ben Ali. Ironically, Ben Ali spent all the last few years trying to understand the computer! I think he is too stupid and hopeless as he couldn’t see the revolution coming despite spending so much time on his computer and despite the help of a very strong censorship organization.
Since Monday the 10th of January, I had been using two laptops and two mobile phones plus the landline phones. These were the main communication technologies which supported me and all Tunisians before and during the revolution. I think the Tunisian people developed enough prudence in using these tools despite all the potential treats they represent.