The Tunisian bloggers: Revolution 2.0?

Published on March 9, 2014

PoliticsEuromed Reporter: Tunisia.Euromed Reporter

I meet Lina Ben Mhenni at the Grand Café du The­atre in Tunis. She ar­rives catch­ing her breath. As she takes her seat, she sig­nals to her body guard to give us some pri­vacy. She has come straight from the uni­ver­sity where she teaches. I start to speak, but she looks in the other di­rec­tion, across the road, at the hun­dreds of peo­ple pass­ing by, the lines of taxis along the street.

Three years ago, in 2011, this was the set­ting of the Tunisian cy­ber-rev­o­lu­tion; a first in the his­tory of rev­o­lu­tions. Even as one of the most fa­mous blog­gers in the coun­try, Lina says it’s all a myth. “Peo­ple were dying in the streets, not on­line”, she says- seem­ingly tired of in­ces­santly ex­plain­ing the same thing over and over. The barbed wire that still runs along­side the street adds some weight to her words.

A Tunisian girl

Lina was a guest on French tele­vi­sion in 2011. Tariq Ra­madan, a well-known Ara­bic in­tel­lec­tual, ac­cused her and other blog­gers of not being real spokes­men for the peo­ple, and of being paid by Amer­i­can or­ga­ni­za­tions.

“Per­son­ally, I don’t know any­body who has re­ceived money for start­ing a blog. Money for what? How much does it take to start a blog?”, Lina says dryly, re­call­ing the TV show.

Her own story isn’t far from a Taran­tino movie: in 2007 she started her first blog, a Tunisian girl on a lap­top “bought in a reg­u­lar Car­refour”. Ini­tially she ad­mits it was “a blog for fu­tile ques­tions”. But with the cen­sor­ship under Ben Alì and the nom­i­na­tion for the Nobel Peace Prize, sud­denly Lina be­came one of the most im­por­tant faces of the “rev­o­lu­tion”.

Today, with one dic­ta­tor gone and a new con­sti­tu­tion, Lina lives with con­stant po­lice pro­tec­tion. “Be­fore the rev­o­lu­tion I was in a kind of prison, but at least it was a big­ger one. Today I suf­fer from mas­sive defama­tion cam­paigns and death threats on face­book. I wouldn’t sur­vive with­out po­lice pro­tec­tion”, she ex­plains, gaz­ing at her body guard with a mix of sar­casm and res­ig­na­tion.

How did this hap­pen? Weren’t the blog­gers at the fore­front of it all loved by the peo­ple of the Tunisian rev­o­lu­tion? Wasn’t the in­ter­net the weapon of choice for the young gen­er­a­tion? “Blogs, so­cial media, the in­ter­net… dur­ing the rev­o­lu­tion they went from being im­por­tant tools to be­com­ing dou­ble-edged swords,” Lina ad­mits, be­fore de­liv­er­ing her judge­ment: “three years ago I thought that every­body wanted to im­prove our coun­try, but I was an ide­al­ist.” With a tem­per­a­ture of barely 15 de­grees, the rain is falling over Tunis. The weather, just like the pic­ture of the frag­mented cyber com­mu­nity that Lina is paint­ing, clashes with the ex­pec­ta­tions of the West.

The bat­tle­field

In re­la­tion to na­tional pop­u­la­tion, Tunisia has the largest num­ber of Face­book pro­files of any coun­try in Africa and the Arab world. In 2011, 50% of Tunisian in­ter­net-users had a Face­book ac­count. Today, the amount of Zucker­berg-fol­low­ers has reached 3,4 mil­lion and the num­ber sug­gests that Tunisia has been thor­oughly per­me­ated by so­cial media. (see in­fo­graphic)

Per­haps this was one of the rea­sons that Abdel Karim, 37, founded the So­cial Media Club of Tunis in 2013. His ob­jec­tive? To make young peo­ple aware of how these plat­forms can be used for pol­i­tics (60% of Tunisian face­book users are be­tween 24 and 34 years old). Abdel comes from Za­ghouan (50 km south of the cap­i­tal), where pre-2011 in­volve­ment in pol­i­tics amounted to “ap­plaud­ing whichever of­fi­cial was on duty, on be­half of Ben Alì”. Hav­ing lived in Tunis since 2002, he speaks Ara­bic and French, but also un­der­stands Ital­ian: the TV an­tenna at his home picks up RAI 1. I meet him to­gether with Henda, 30, who comes from the Ar­i­ana-quar­ter in the far north of the cap­i­tal. They both call them­selves blog­gers and ac­tivists and are hold­ing a lec­ture on web radio in the base­ment of the Tunisian In­ter­net Agency (ATI). Ten peo­ple are fol­low­ing the lec­ture. The sun is shin­ing through the win­dows fac­ing the court­yard.

The shad­ows of the palm trees grow long on the other side of the win­dow. Ab­delka­rim takes out his sticker cov­ered lap­top and puts it on the table. The re­strau­rant is prac­ti­cally de­serted.

“The blog­gers? They are free rad­i­cals, every man for him­self”, he says, “but the En­nahda  party is now re­cruit­ing young peo­ple to mon­i­tor so­cial media and to con­duct po­lit­i­cal cam­paign­ing on­line: it’s be­come a bat­tle­field”.

It seems that so­cial net­works, spear­headed by Face­book, rep­re­sent the new Wild West of pol­i­tics, where Is­lamists, com­mu­nists and an­ar­chists fight it out. I ask about the role of blog­gers dur­ing the rev­o­lu­tion and Henda tells me straight out that “the blog­gers had a lim­ited role in the course of the up­heaval”- she rarely uses the word rev­o­lu­tion. Ac­cord­ing to her “there was a gen­eral ten­dency in the media to try and down­play the role of other ac­tive so­cial move­ments in Tunisia; or­ga­nized groups that were not al­ways peace­ful and were not sat­is­fied with what was achieved.”

So, what was the role of the blog­gers?

“Every rev­o­lu­tion needs a face” Henda con­fesses cyn­i­cally. As I ask Ab­delka­rim about the al­le­ga­tions made by Tariq Ra­madan, a car passes the win­dow with a po­lice es­cort and his gaze fol­lows it as he smiles am­bigu­ously. When he an­swers me, his smile is gone.

“Five fa­mous Tunisian blog­gers were trained by an Amer­i­can Think Tank”- he pauses be­fore con­tin­u­ing- “after all, who could have re­fused? To get rid of Ben Alì we had to make a deal with the devil!”

It’s hard to dis­agree with him. Ten years ago, long be­fore “blog­ger” ac­quired a po­lit­i­cal con­no­ta­tion, “the regime trained peo­ple to su­per­vise the in­ter­net and par­tic­i­pate in fo­rums”, Henda ex­plains. At that time, the in­ter­net was used al­most ex­clu­sively for pri­vate mat­ters. Then, every­thing changed, with the ar­rival of a “po­lit­i­cal web”, the rev­o­lu­tion 2.0 and a new gov­ern­ment. And yet, talk­ing to these ac­tivists you won­der if things re­ally did change. In a way it is as though Ben Alì and the Tunisian rev­o­lu­tion are both “dead”. And it seems that even the blog­gers aren't doing so well.

This article is part of the Euromed Reporter project, conducted in partnership with I WATCH and Search For Commong Ground and supported by the Foundation Anna Lindh.

Translated from I blogger di Tunisi: "Non chiamatela rivoluzione 2.0"