Tahr Ben Hassine, Executive Director of the El Hiwar Ettounsi television station has spent most of his life opposing the ruling power. During the Ben Ali era, that meant standing with the one-time outlawed Ennahda. Today, it means that the very party he once supported, is calling for his punishment.

“I spent 17 years of my life struggling for the release of the Islamist Ennahda Movement prisoners. Today, they want to imprison me just because I am calling for the return of the legitimacy which they have forcibly taken from the people,” he said.

Tahr Ben Hassine, Executive Director of the El Hiwar Ettounsi television station has spent most of his life opposing the ruling power. During the Ben Ali era, that meant standing with the one-time outlawed Ennahda. Today, it means that the very party he once supported, is calling for his punishment.

“I spent 17 years of my life struggling for the release of the Islamist Ennahda Movement prisoners. Today, they want to imprison me just because I am calling for the return of the legitimacy which they have forcibly taken from the people,” he said.

Tahar Ben Hassine is on trial after being accused of two charges: calling for civil disobedience on his channel’s broadcast and bribing one of the security officers in order to give him information about the so-called parallel security apparatus.

These are serious charges, according to Tahar’s lawyers, and they may lead to life imprisonment, and possibly to the death penalty.  “These are malicious charges that aim at silencing and suppressing free voices, which is a policy pursued by the Ennhada government to stifle freedom of speech and domesticate journalists,” Ben Hassine said.   

Abdel-Sattar al-Masoudi, one of Tahar’s lawyers said that some of the court’s charges against his client relate to his calls for civil disobedience such as when he urged people not to pay electricity and water bills. These calls were considered by the court as conspiracy against the security of the state and as an attempt to overthrow the regime.

“My client was charged based on chapter 72 of the Criminal Code, which penalizes the perpetrator of an attack with the aim of changing the shape of the state or the overthrow of the ruling regime with the death penalty. Thus, this government is dealing with Tahar Ben Hassine as if he is Abu Ayyad, the terrorist,” said al-Masoudi. 

Parsley: the path to Freedom!

When his channel faced financial difficulties last year, Ben Hassine launched a distress call on social networking pages. Pages close to the government and to the Ennahda Movement responded by telling him to go and sell parsley in an attempt to ridicule and humiliate him. 

Before this incident, Ben Hassine had questioned the transparency of financing the al-Zaytouna channel owned by the son of the Minister of Higher Education and the leading member of the Ennahda Movement, Moncef Ben Sale. Ben Hassine wondered why Ben Sale was able to own a television channel, although his father used to say that he sold parsley during the years the Islamists were suppressed.

Ben Hassine responded to Ennahda’s ridicule by organizing a day for selling parsley in front of his TV channel. This amusing act was met with unprecedented sympathy and enthusiasm by Tunisians. Ben Hassine said that he was surprised with the large number of Tunisians who came to buy parsley in order to express their support and solidarity with his channel.

“The reaction of the Tunisian people was wonderful. Al-Hurriya Street, where the channel is located, was full of people throughout the day. I received hundreds of calls from Tunisians all over the world who expressed their solidarity with the channel.” 

Life in exile

In 1981, he benefited from the amnesty issued by Bourguiba and he got back his Tunisian passport. He returned to his country for the first time after 11 years in exile. However, his stay in Tunisia—a journey he says was charged with emotions—did not last for a long time and he returned to Paris.

After decades, and when the revolution broke in 2011, Ben Hassine returned and settled down in his country. His long-time dream of seeing Ben Ali regime’s fall had finally become a reality.  

Despite the success of the revolution in Tunisia, Ben Hassine maintained his image as a leftist revolutionary fighter obsessed with the achievement of social justice in a country where one third of the population lives in poverty.

He joined the Nidaa Tounes Party (the Call for Tunisia), which has always been questioned. This step was an unexpected surprise for many people, especially for those who are close to him. They were surprised to see Ben Hassine joining the old “warriors” (members of ousted president Ben Ali’s Constitutional Democratic Rally and members of the Republican Party who all joined the Nidaa Tounes Party).

Tahar justified his step saying that “I am with the Nidaa Tounes Party as long as it is in opposition. When it reaches power, I will leave the party and join the opposition.” 

Some days ago, Tahar Ben Hassine resigned from the executive body of Nidaa Tounes because of the absence of the “minimum standards of democratic governance of the party,” he said. “This is very harmful to the party as well as to the country because it lays the grounds for the reproduction of a totalitarian regime.” He did not, however, completely walk out of the party but only left its leadership bodies and accepted to become an ordinary member of the party. 

A new battle

Today, Tahar Ben Hassine’s political battle is limited to his endeavors to overthrow the Ennahda government, which he claims is involved in the bloodshed in the country.  “Some of the Ennahda leaders are at the same time leaders of the Ansar al-Shariah Organization, which the government of Ali Larayedh has categorized as a terrorist organization. The Ennahda Movement popular base and the terrorist groups’ popular base are interrelated,” he said.   

On the El Hiwar TV Channel, Ben Hassine said: “We have limited capacities and financial means but we were able to break the security restrictions and the siege imposed by Ben Ali in order to hide the realities of the protests raging in the mining basin cities in southern Tunisia in 2008.”

The aim of the channel was “to show the ugliness of the Ben Ali’s dictatorship regime and to expose its practices to the world and to the people of Tunisia,” said Ben Hassine. “I never thought the revolution, which I dreamed of for years would eat its children.” 

“They want to silence all voices calling for the departure of the illegitimate government.  The government wants to use all its cards by fighting a battle to determine the cost of staying in power – a battle where there is only two options: either to win or to lose.”  But Ben Hassine insists that “the government will lose this battle. “Its attempt to domesticate the judicial system is just another way it uses after trying other policies and methods such as assassination, violence and terrorism,” he said.  

The communist medical student on the run

Tahar Ben Hassine, was born at the end of the Second World War and instead of focusing on his medical studies, became engaged in underground political activities with the Afaq Movement (Prospects) – a leftist movement that emerged after the suppression of the Tunisian Communist Party and the police-method prosecution against university students. It was then that a number of students decided in Paris in 1963 to create the Afaq Movement (Prospects) to unite the left factions.   

After working in France for a year, the Movement started its activism inside Tunisia. The nature of the work was essentially motivating people to rise against the regime. He soon found himself in confrontation with the authorities and he was put on trial in 1968 because of his persistent calls for demonstrations and for his direct confrontations with the police. 

Tahar Ben Hassine was among the students who had been arrested and put on trial. He was sentenced to nine years and six months imprisonment in the Rumi Tower (northern Tunisia).

But he says he no longer remembers the prison’s horrors. “Those years, despite their ugliness, remain the most beautiful experiences of my life,” he said.  Ben Hassine served two years of his sentence before being released and placed under judicial control in al-Mahdia where he was ordered to go to the police station every day and sign a police report.

Instead, Ben Hassine escaped to Libya on foot in 1970. He later obtained a permit to stay in the country as a politically exiled person.  Along this perilous journey, Ben Hassine said that “being hunted by the Tunisian police until I reached Libya made me think of leaving it with the help of a friend.”

In Paris, nicknamed the “City of Light,” Ben Hassine was not so lucky. “I was obliged to do all kinds of jobs. I used to sell newspapers, sandwiches, and drinks in train stations,” he said.  “In 1975, and because of my good knowledge of Arabic, French and English, I was lucky enough to find a good job with one of the biggest weapon manufacturing companies in Europe.” 

“I could have easily chosen a path of money but I have chosen to defend freedom,” Ben Hassine said. “I never thought that there would be people who would try to take away my own freedom forever, especially after a revolution that I helped spark.”