From Blogging to Writing the Constitution

In Tunisia, the only country of the Arab Spring revolutions with a definite date set for free elections—October 23, 2011—the consensus among many activists is that the revolution has stalled. The interior ministry, where protestors dramatically demanded the exit of Ben Ali, is now surrounded by barbed wire and patrolled by a police force that the local press has accused of returning to its old ways of torture and intimidation. And recently, concern has been growing that popular sentiment has been taking a turn towards the Islamist.

So where are the bloggers who risked everything to send sparks of change through the Internet? At least seven of them are attempting to break Tunisia’s impasse by running for places in the assembly that will draft the country’s new constitution.

I met with Amira Yahyaoui and Riadh Guerfali, two of these cyber-candidates, at the Third Annual Arab Bloggers Conference, held this year at the Cité des Sciences in northern Tunis.

Yahyaoui is a young woman of twenty-seven who has lived in Paris for the last four years, after being exiled for the views she expressed on a series of blogs in the decade before Ben Ali’s fall. The daughter of a judge, Mokhtar Yahyaoui (himself an independent candidate), she is now a candidate for the Paris North region of Tunisian expatriates.

“I started blogging not to analyze things but to do things,” said Yahyoaui, who is staunchly against any form of what has been called “slacktivism,” idle symbolic protesting from the comfort of one’s own home. She spoke to me, for example, of her aversion to a common pre-revolution stratagem of posting blank comments on websites as a sign of resistance to censorship.

“I never did it. Why say nothing? Isn’t the point of dissent to speak?”

Yahyaoui left off blogging when she began to feel that the Tunisian blogosphere was being filled up with such anonymous voices, effectively allowing the regime to boast of a liberty of expression that was in fact deprived of any power to cause real change. She sees her political campaign as a direct continuation of the cyber-activism she engaged in before.

Riadh Guerfali is also well-credentialed in the domain of cyber-dissidence. In 2004, he was one of the co-founders of Nawaat.org, a collective blog that was one of the most important sources of critique before the revolution. Since then, the site has been expanding to fill the gap left by the relatively toothless national papers, even co-sponsoring an initiative to educate young Tunisians in cyber-journalism.

Having been a professor of constitutional and Internet law in France for fifteen years, Guerfali is uniquely positioned to help write the future of Tunisia. The platform put forward by his list proposes, among other things, inscribing the right to Internet access into the constitution.

Guerfali expressed with an irrepressible urgency the excitement he felt about Tunisia moving forward both journalistically and politically: “We used to be in a situation where we were contesting the interior ministry, contesting the despotism...now we are in a position to re-appropriate the interior ministry, to change Tunisian law, to go the way we want to go.”

For years, money and political influence in Tunisia came with strings attached to the regime, so political parties have been suspected of being tainted by the corruption of the status quo ante. Hence the importance of independents like Yahyaoui, Guerfali and the other blogger-candidates. Although the Tunisian election committee has taken stringent measures to ensure that each party gets an equal say, nothing has been done to give a voice to the independents.

“The media is giving plenty of time to the political parties and it is ignoring the independents. In Tunisia, forty-five percent of the lists are independents, but we don’t see forty-five percent coverage in the media. We’re not playing the game of the party,” said Guerfali.

Because of this complete lack of major media coverage, Guerfali’s and Yahyaoui’s campaigns are essentially net-driven ventures, with nearly all media coverage coming from fellow bloggers. Since Yahyaoui’s region is comprised of expatriates in France and she and most of her team are located in Tunisia, her campaign has been particularly net-driven, with much of the mobilization coming through their website.

It is important to remember, however, that while the events of January were hailed as an Internet revolution, it is far from the case that all of the country is capable of logging on: at last estimate, Internet penetration in Tunisia was at just 33.4%. Many Tunisians, especially in the more rural areas of the country, are largely cut off from mass media, leaving them ripe for manipulation. Nawaat bloggers have documented, for example, how Ennahdha, the Islamist party that has so far been leading all polls, has been distributing food in rural areas where residents may not even know party names. This lack of information reaches into the capital, where Yahyaoui described her door-to-door campaign knocking on doors and being greeted by needy residents asking the candidates for money. “I would say that the majority don’t even know what [the elections] are.”

With about a week to go before the election, the task ahead can appear daunting. But no one ever said that the complete transformation of Tunisia’s political system would be anything other than a gradual process. Guerfali and Yahyaoui certainly seem to have the patience, determination, and enthusiasm to see that process through.

[Click here for a Spanish translation of this article.]