Tunisia: Understanding Conflict 2012 - Johns Hopkins School of ...

intermediary preventing the Ennahdha Movement from turning Tunisia into an Islamist
nation, standing against the threat of creating a new Afghanistan or Iran. Western capital
that therefore poured into Tunisia in the form of military aid, preferential trade
agreements with Europe and strong political relations with Western nations, all served to
strengthen Ben Ali’s regime, and, while calls for political reform from outside were far
from uncommon, in reality there were very few real conditions or constraints placed on
the President or his single-party.
Heads of state from France, Italy, Spain and Germany all visited Tunis in the
immediate aftermath of 9/11, and in 2003 the association culminated in German Interior
Minister Otto Schily signing an agreement on increased cooperation in fighting organized
crime and terrorism (Report of the March 2011 Delegation of Attorneys to Tunisia, 10).
By the middle of the last decade, therefore, Tunisia had some of the harshest and most
heavily enforced anti-terrorism laws in the Arab World, which were applied stringently to
political opponents coming from Islamist movements, including both Ennahdha and the
salafi movement.
“Ennahdha has the stance of victims,” the secularist politicians whine, seeking to
explain the strong victory of the Islamist party in the elections for the Constituent
Assembly—and it is true that much of the legitimacy that Ennahdha lays claim to as an
opposition power comes from the strong and often violent treatment that its members
received from the regime, including the exile of its leaders and the torture and
imprisonment of many of its members, often after visibly unfair trials. But this treatment
was not limited to Ennahdha, and, while the salafi are admittedly much less mainstream,
and their actions often considered more counter to the general public good in many
cases—there remained a sense immediately after the revolution that all of Tunisia had
suffered under the repression, and, regardless of ideology, all Tunisians should
experience their freedom. As Mokhtar Trifi, the head of the Tunisian Human Rights
League (LTDH), himself has argued, the League demanded the release of everyone,
because the conditions that surrounded their trials were universally poor, and as such,
irrespective of their guilt, they cannot be considered legally imprisoned (SAIS Group
Meeting, 24 January 2012).
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