TUNeZINE

» see tunezine.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Between roughly 2002 and 2005 I spent a lot of hours in Turkish internet cafes. Counter-Strike on a local network with MSN open in another window, and the cafe was simply where the connection was cheap enough to sit on for a whole afternoon. In exactly those years, from behind the counter of a cafe in Tunis, a man named Zouhair Yahyaoui was running a magazine that the Tunisian state treated as a crime, on a line he was later accused of taking without paying for it.

He started TUNeZINE in July 2001, shortly after graduating in economic sciences, and wrote under the name Ettounsi, meaning the Tunisian. The site carried opposition material that had nowhere else to be published, mostly reports on human rights cases and satire aimed at the fifteen years Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali had spent in power. It also ran forums, where readers argued in the open under names that were not theirs. Tunisia blocked the whole thing inside the country, so most of its traffic came from the diaspora and from people who knew how to get around a filter.

His uncle was Mokhtar Yahyaoui, a judge who had sent Ben Ali a letter criticizing the state of the Tunisian judiciary and was removed from the bench for it in 2001, the same year the site started. That family name is part of why TUNeZINE drew the attention it drew, and part of why the answer to it went past a block.

On 4 June 2002 police came to the internet cafe in Tunis where he worked and took him from it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the charge sheet ~

Two weeks later a court sentenced him to twenty-eight months. The first charge was publishing false information under Article 306 of the penal code, which is the ordinary instrument for this everywhere and needs no explanation. The second one was stranger and is the detail worth keeping: Section 84 of the Telecommunications Code, for using stolen communication lines to post his website.

The state prosecuted him for theft of the connection he had used to publish. It is a charge that only makes sense in a country where the act of publishing itself has to be described as something else, and it is the reason the case is still cited in accounts of the first generation of online censorship in the Arab world.

~ eighteen months ~

He served his sentence at Borj el Amri and went on hunger strike more than once during it, over prison conditions and over his own case. Reporters Without Borders gave him its Cyber Freedom Prize in 2003 and PEN gave him the Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award the same year, both while he was still inside. He was released on 18 November 2003, roughly eighteen months in, with his health noticeably worse than when he had gone in.

He died on 13 March 2005 of a heart attack. He was in his thirties.

~ after him ~

TUNeZINE kept publishing for about a year after his death and then stopped. There was no acquisition and no wind-down notice. The forums went quiet, and then the domain went.

Six years later the Tunisian uprising began, and the organizing that carried it online ran through Nawaat and through a generation of bloggers who had grown up reading what he built. The state that came out of that uprising now marks the anniversary of his death: Tunisia's own communications ministry publishes a commemoration page for the man its predecessor prosecuted for stealing a phone line.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »