After the executive branch mobilized in early April, the judicial branch took its turn on April 26 in a move against the president of the High Independent Authority for Audiovisual Communication (HAICA), a constitutional regulatory authority. The latter had ordered the requisition of equipment at the Radio du Saint Coran, on grounds of unlawful broadcasting, the station having played a role in the electoral campaign of Al-Rahma party deputy Saïd Jaziri. The deputy, who has no legal status within the station’s organizational structure, hurried to file a lawsuit against the HAICA’s president, who does have regulatory powers. The latter was immediately summoned by judicial police.
A sit-in, protests and chants of « Get out! »; On April 19, both Kamel Ben Younès and Hanen Ftouhi renounced their director positions. And although the first case was clearly unprecedented with regard to the physical and symbolic violence of police intervention, there is nothing new about the drive to control public media. Already in 2012, during the Troika government that was dominated by Ennahdha, prime minister Hamadi Jebali had appointed new directors to public radio and television stations. Under pretext of reforming the public audiovisual sector, these decisions flouted the new decree-laws governing freedom of the press which replaced the former regime’s repressive Press Code.
In August that same year, it was another collaborator of the Ben Ali regime, former police officer Lotfi Touati, who the government appointed as director of Dar Assabah. That company had also been confiscated by the government in 2011. After a two-month conflict in which some journalists even led a hunger strike, Lotfi Touati resigned. A noxious atmosphere in a media sector riddled with political interference—this was the reality that journalists faced under Lotfi Zitoun, an Ennahda adherent who served as counselor to Hamadi Jebali for the media sector.
A worrying turn of events
These last two appointments by the prime minister in April were set against a backdrop of high security tension, with a return of police violence that some might have believed to be a thing of the past. Instead, this violence has resurfaced in the confiscation of arrested protesters’ telephones and violation of their personal data. Police unions have also taken to targeting journalists through their publications on social media. So even if the concerned minister, Hichem Mechichi, is not personally partisan, his policies are nevertheless dictated by the interests of the Islamist party which constitutes his primary basis of support in parliament.
For Mahdi Jelassi, recent manoeuvres are more worrying than what the sector endured in 2012:
There is definitely continuity. Today, however, the government is breaking up and has become incapable of protecting anyone, including journalists. In 2012, beyond civil society, there was a real political opposition that supported us and enabled us to balance out the situation. Today, there are different nuances of the right in power, and Abir Moussi [president of the Free Destourian Party and former official of the Ben Ali party, a heritage she reclaims] as the primary opponent. Political figures who pretend to belong to the revolutionary current have already called on the police to repress demonstrators. We are threatened on all sides.
For the first time since 2013, Tunisia has fallen in the World Press Freedom Index that the RSF publishes each year. And although the country may have fallen by just one point, this is only because of a global trend in which freedom of the press is threatened, according to Amira Mohamed, vice-secretary general of the SNJT. As such, this irrefutable, unanimously celebrated gain of the revolutionary process sparked in December 2010 can be counted amongst the victims of Tunisia’s current political crisis.
