Tunisia

The country has been online since the mid-1990s and the Internet is more widespread than in the rest of North Africa because the government promotes it as a major economic tool. It is administered by the Tunisian Internet Agency (ATI), which is part of the telecommunications ministry. Phone lines are good and the government has encouraged ISPs, of which there are six state-owned and six privately-owned. The authorities have set up 300 cybercafés ("publinets") throughout the country and says all universities and secondary schools and universities are on the Internet. Press freedom does not exist in Tunisia, so people have taken wholesale to the Internet to take part in it there. This is what journalist Sihem Bensedrine did when she could not get permission to publish a newspaper and instead set up an online magazine, Kalima. But President Zine el-Abidine ben Ali and his powerful police apparatus are determined to stamp out all cyber-dissidence. The Tunisian government runs one of the world's most extensive Internet censorship operations. The only ISPs allowed to serve the general public are those owned by the president's associates, including his daughter. The ATI ensures that the market is tightly controlled by the authorities. ISPs must sign a contract saying they will only allow customers to use the Internet for "scientific, technological and commercial purposes strictly to do with their area of activity." Cyberspace in Tunisia has been regulated since 2001 by the press law, which provides for censorship. Access to some news websites, such as Kalima and TUNeZINE, but also those of NGOs and foreign media carrying criticism of the government, is routinely blocked. The powers of the "cyber-police" The managers of the publinets have the right to check what sites their customers are looking at and can force them to disconnect at any time. There is plenty of evidence that cybercafés are closely watched by the police. Plainclothes officers regularly collect details of Internet activity from the machines to check who has been looking at what sites. Control of telecommunications, including the Internet, was stepped up further in 2002 and a full-scale corps of cyber-police went into operation to track down "subversive" websites to be blocked, intercept e-mail or attempts to reach sites containing "political or critical" material, hunt for and neutralise "proxy" servers used to get round directly-blocked access to sites, and track down and arrest "over-active" Internet users - the cyber-dissidents. About 20 young men were arrested at their homes in the southern town of Zarzis on 5 February 2003. In April, seven of them, including a minor, were in prison in Tunis for "delinquency, theft and obtaining material to make explosives" as a result of consulting "terrorist" websites. Their lawyer, who visited them in jail, said they had been tortured. The daily paper La Presse reported on 22 April 2003 that the government had stopped issuing permits to open privately-owned cybercafés and had said access to the Internet would be limited to the government-controlled publinets. "Ettounsi" sent to prison for two years Zouhair Yahyaoui was arrested by plainclothes police on 4 June 2002 in Tunis, at a computer centre where he worked. He was taken to his home, where they searched his bedroom and seized his computer equipment. During interrogation, he was tortured with three sessions of being made to hang by his arms with feet off the ground. As a result of this, he gave them the password to his website, which allowed the authorities to block access to it. Yahyaoui, who used the pseudonym "Ettounsi" ("The Tunisian" in Arabic), founded the website TUNeZINE in July 2001 to put out news about the fight for democracy and freedom in the country and to publicise opposition material. He wrote many columns and essays and was the first to publish an open letter that his uncle, Judge Mokhtar Yahyaoui, had sent to President Ben Ali denouncing the Tunisian judiciary's lack of independence. The judge's own website, almizen.com, which his nephew also ran, was destroyed. TUNeZINE was censored by the authorities right from the start. But its fans each week received a list of "proxy" servers through which they could access it. He was sentenced by an appeals court on 10 July 2002 to a year in prison for "putting out false news to give the impression there had been a criminal attack on persons or property" (article 306-3 of the penal code) and another year for "theft by the fraudulent use of a communications link," meaning an Internet connection at a cybercafé where he worked (article 84 of the communications code). He was jailed in very harsh conditions and staged two hunger-strikes in early 2003 to protest against his imprisonment. LINKS: - Online news magazine Kalima - Online news magazine TUNeZINE - Human rights in North Africa