The Tunisian government has just obtained a nice prize: the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women (ATFD). A symbolic prey, perfect to fuel the great hunt for freedoms that has been going on for some time.
The suspension and freezing of the association’s accounts are added to the long list of arbitrary decisions targeting independent civil society. So here is the ATFD, guilty of having existed too much, talked too much, been too disturbed.
Foreign financing, this convenient sin
The pretext is known: the famous “foreign financing”this magical accusation brandished every time it is necessary to smear, disqualify, frighten. In the Tunisia of July 25, suspicion is enough to condemn. The accusation is launched, repeated over and over, amplified by the docile media and the digital armies at the service of power, as if it were enough to prove treason.
It does not matter whether this financing is legal, declared and controlled by the Central Bank. It doesn’t matter that the law in no way prohibits partnerships with foreign donors. The truth is that the rhetoric of conspiracy and foreign financing serves as a screen for the bankruptcy of a regime incapable of governing other than through fear.
Meanwhile, the State lives on credit, increases loan requests, reaches out to the same international donors, without anyone seeing this as an attack on sovereignty. Foreign money is only dirty in the hands of civil society. Hypocrisy is always national.
A general hunt for civil society
This campaign against the ATFD is not isolated. It is part of a climate of generalized suffocation. Activists, human rights defenders, journalists, lawyers, trade unionists and political opponents have become the scapegoats of a regime that is desperately looking for culprits to hide its economic and moral bankruptcy.
When poverty sets in, we blame the activists; when anger rises, we invent plots; and when authoritarianism runs out of steam, we cry threats against national morality. The word “conspiracy” has become a universal key to locking down all debate and condemning all free thought.
Ironically, those who claim to be guardians of values are often the first to trample them. They claim to defend the homeland, but trample on the rights of its children. And they accuse feminists of perverting society, while they themselves are disfiguring it in the name of a moral order that is as rigid as it is empty.
Patriarchy, an eternal regime
But there is something even more revealing in the ATFD’s suspension: the patriarchy’s obsession with feminist voices. From Ben Ali, through Ennahdha, to the oddballs of the July 25 process, the ATFD has always crystallized the hatred of the guardians of moral order.
Too free, too critical, too feminist. They were called “ugly”, “old maids”, “badly fucked”, “hysterical”. Of “sold” to the West, of “traitors”, of “apostates”. Today, the same insults are circulating on the networks, relayed by the new crusaders of virtue. Only the police have changed (or not), not the mentality. Interestingly and just as revealing, Islamists, themselves oppressed by those in power, expressed their joy at the suspension of the association.
I still remember, as a teenager, this small apartment in Sidi El Bahri where workshops and discussion circles led by tireless activists were held. Opponents found it difficult to find their way there, surrounded and harassed by plainclothes agents who were very reluctant to talk about equality, freedom and democracy. These simple, almost forbidden words, which the regime of the time already found dangerous. And now, 25 years later, they are again.
More than a suspension, a declaration of war
The ATFD is this free breath that has crossed all dictatorships, refusing to be silent. The association survived Ben Ali, resisted Ennahdha, faced smear campaigns and threats. She stood firm when others gave in, because she carried this simple idea: women are full citizens, and equality is not a concession.
What the current power cannot support is precisely this: that an associative framework dares to think differently, refuse submission and remind us that democracy cannot be decreed, it is built. In its increasingly authoritarian language, the word “independence” has become synonymous with the enemy. Civil society, this valve of freedom, is now seen as an existential threat.
The decision to suspend the ATFD and other associative organizations and media is therefore not a simple administrative abuse. It is a deliberate political act, a declaration of war on civil society, one more step in the authoritarian drift of a power obsessed with total control. The regime believes it is muzzling activists; in reality, he awakens a heritage that he does not understand. Because these women survived the dictatorship, resisted the Islamists, and they will stand up to all the apprentice tyrants of the present. Maybe that’s the real problem. They never knew how to keep quiet.
