By Sébastien DuhamelPosted on 20-09-2019Modified on 20-09-2019 at 00:11

He remembers the Ben Ali era. For good reason, Kamel Jendoubi lived in exile in France for 17 years at that time. Back in Tunisia two days after the fall of the regime, he later became the president of the Independent Higher Electoral Commission (ISIE), and he set up the first democratic polls of the post-revolution, in October 2011. Today member of the Committee for the respect of human rights and freedoms in Tunisia, he confides in RFI after the death of the former president, which occurred Wednesday, September 18 in Saudi Arabia.

RFI : What memory do you have of the deceased president ?

Kamel Jendoubi : The memory that I have is a man who took power by breaking and entering, it's a coup d'etat that we called a "medical" coup d'etat. A gentleman who, at the beginning, had made promises of change, he was called "the man of change". And his promises were not respected, far from it: after his takeover in 1987, there were apparently relatively free elections in 1989 - but finally completely faked.

If one spoke at the time of a man of change, it was all the same that there was a real hope of improvement when he came to power ?

Yes, because the end of the reign of Mr. Bourguiba has been terrible for the country. There was a very strong confrontation with the Islamists and Bourguiba decided to "cut heads" in sum, even risking to plunge the country into a crisis very serious. It was a very unstable period, very uncertain and full of dangers. The coup d'etat thus seemed for many to be a relief in the end, a sort of announcement of a new era for Tunisia. What he quickly grasped with the famous statement of 7 November 1987, in which were elements relating to freedom, commitments to abandon the presidency for life ... ingredients that sounded like a liberating announcement.

But a hope finally disappointed ?

Yes, very quickly we realized that the good intentions of the statement of November 7 were in fact powder. It was rather to allow Mr. Ben Ali to gain time to settle and settle accounts with certain personalities deemed dangerous for power. Very quickly, he showed his true face: a despot, an authoritarian. It began with a crackdown on the Islamists, the Ennahdha supporters at the time, and then gradually the field of repression widened to any critical expression. Tunisia has in fact become a kind of well-guarded barracks, where fear reigned supreme. We could not even talk in family without fear of being denounced, I do not even speak on the street or in taxis, I say with family! All phones were tapped, faxes blocked or controlled. So it was a police regime that framed everything that moved, and with the complicity of the West, including France. The latter supported him, she said, to warn of Islamist and fundamentalist danger. However, we can see that the repression of the Islamists was almost futile since the day after the revolution, they came back as strong if not more, boasting of the image of victims, which they were partly .

And this " barracks " that you mention was confined to political expression only ?

No, artistic expression also and even scientific research. Very little research has been conducted, sociologically for example, on the phenomenon of the rise of Islam in Tunisia. Because researchers were prevented from going to the neighborhoods, to mosques, to understand the foundations that later produced phenomena such as the recruitment of young people. Tunisia has produced numerous masses of young jihadists who have taken action, not only in Tunisia but elsewhere, in Libya, Syria, Iraq, everywhere ... And this, in my opinion, is the product of the monumental failure of dictatorship, lack of freedom: the monsters, the young jihadists were manufactured in the prisons of Mr. Ben Ali. He boasted at the time of having arrested hundreds or even thousands of young people. But we are not talking about a single man, it is a diet, a whole system.

Observers have sometimes spoken of a " mafia " system, set up by the " Ben Ali clan ". Beyond the political field, we can say that there was a real capture of the national economy ?

Yes, the Ben Ali system reproached me precisely at the time for writing several articles on the subject. In 1997, I wrote a forum for Le Monde, which was considered a declaration of war. And I am not the only one. You know, the World Bank had also done a very interesting study after the fact, after the revolution. It showed the capture of a very important part of the wealth of the country by the clan of Mr. Ben Ali, and its ramifications at the level of the state apparatus or at the level of the regions. Some regions were more favored than others, hence the problem of regionalism noted later. Because the regions that rebelled in December 2010 and January 2011, it is actually the regions that have been abandoned by the system. It is no coincidence that the beginnings of the revolution began in the mining basin in 2008, well before 2011.

And today, what is the legacy left by Mr. Ben Ali, how do the Tunisians perceive it ?

Tunisians are divided. The nine years since the revolution have created a sense of pride, we have gained freedom - especially freedom of expression - but there is a "but". For many people, for the working classes, for the regions inside including even for a part of the middle class, the situation has not improved. On the contrary, it has deteriorated. There is a kind of nostalgia. There are some ideological and political nostalgics who regret the time when the country was held with an iron fist. They are largely in the minority. Yet there is what I call economic and social nostalgia. When we speak with them, they answer systematically: " Under the Ben Ali regime, I could dine with 5 dinars, today with 20 dinars I can not do it anymore, I do not have drugs etc ... ". There is indeed a form of legitimate nostalgia that is not unique to Tunisia, it has been found elsewhere. In the end, in my opinion, Mr. Ben Ali left nothing in the country. Peace to his soul but I do not think he left a mark such as that of Bourguiba for example. No, Mr. Ben Ali, it was really, really, a long parenthesis that equates to a long accident in the history of our country.

    On the same subject

    Death of Ben Ali: In Tunis, little emotion after the disappearance of the deposed dictator

    Ben Ali, 23 years of power from the fall of Bourguiba to the Tunisian revolution

    Tunisia: death of former president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali

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