David's Diary: Tuesday, March 25, 2003
The Internet, Politics, and Communications in Tunisia
Typical Internet Cafe
A news story by the BBC dated February 18, 2003 says:
President Ben Ali's government tightly controls the internet. Twenty young men, many of them students, have been arrested in Tunisia for looking at banned websites. The Tunisian Government is believed to censor the internet more tightly than any other country in the world, with the possible exception of China.
The story goes on to state:
It jailed its first internet dissident last year for disseminating "false information" on the web. Zouhair Yahyaoui, the founder of satirical website, www.tunezine.com, which gave a space for opposition groups and politicians to air their views, was sentenced to two years in prison.
Looked Over by Ben Ali
Tunisia is a tightly controlled police state. The government is a dictatorship that controls all media including telecommunications and the Internet. It is rare to go into a store or Internet cafe, where "President" Ben Ali is not looking down on you. It has been a frustrating struggle to try and communicate with the outside world during our stay in Tunisia. There are lots of Internet Cafes, but they are all extremely slow. Almost none allow you to connect your own computer to the Internet. Even if you are allowed to directly connect to the Internet, most of the well-known protocols are blocked. During the first week after arriving in Monastir, we found that we could not send outgoing email because the Tunisian government did not like the fact that we sent our email via a secure logon connection. This made it impossible for us to send email for a time. We suspect that the Tunisian government has computer programs which monitor every email message.
Before we arrived in Tunisia we were told by the marina that it was possible to have a local telephone line installed on our boat. When we arrived, we discovered that it was impossible for us to get a telephone line. We tried getting a local Tunisian SIM card for our mobile phone. After completing all of the paperwork we were told that there were 30,000 people waiting for SIM cards in Monastir and that there was no chance of us getting one.
When using the Internet it is not unusual to receive a special message indicating that the Tunisian government has blocked a site. Whether it is a popular Internet search engine or even a Hotmail account, you constantly run into difficulties in getting the simplest of things done on the Internet. Of all of the things we have had to deal with in Tunisia, lack of good email and Internet access has been one of the most frustrating.