Tunisia blocked access to both popular video-sharing websites, Youtube and Dailymotion, in order to prevent Tunisian netizens from watching video content featuring testimonies from former political prisoners and human rights activists. However, and as shown in this example, Tunisian cyberactivists from Nawaat.org are successful enough in besieging Carthage presidential palace, on Google Earth, with tens of human rights videos.
And you can explore more human rights videos when flying over other Tunisian regions and cities Google like Bizerte, Kef, etc.

Please, feel free to download this Google Earth kmz file (Keyhole Markup Zip) which will start Google Earth and fly you to Carthage Presidential palace.

View on Google Earth:   2.0 activism

To activate the Google YouTube layer, you have to navigate to the “Layers” menu on the left-hand side of Google Earth (see image above). Expanding the “Gallery” node in the layers tree will expose the “Youtube” layer. Once you select the YouTube button all the Google YouTube icons appear all over the globe.

His wife, Dalenda Boukhdhir, told Global Voices that the prison authorities placed Slim in “dry cell” for three days, from 20-23 March, 2008, turning off the water in his cell so he couldn’t wash. These measures have further aggravated the already serious health condition of her husband, she said. Mme Boukdhir has complained to the Red Cross about prison conditions and is hoping the Red Cross staff will visit Slim at the prison.

Slim Boukhdhir has staged several hunger strikes to protest the inhumane conditions under which he is being detained. His most recent hunger strike was called off on February 22, 2008, on the urging of his wife.

“Preventing a prisoner from seeing his family or having a clean cell is a flagrant violation of human rights,” Reporters Without Borders has said, “the injustice of sentencing this journalist to a year in prison is being compounded by his conditions of detention and staging a hunger strike has become his only way of making himself heard.”

We include below an alert from Luiza Toscane, a Human right activist, posted on the forum section of the Tunisian website Nawaat. (The English translation was done by Jennifer Brea, Global Voices’ French Language editor):

Lors de la visite qu’elle a rendu jeudi 13 mars à son mari, Slim Boukhdhir, journaliste incarcéré à la prison de Sfax, Dalenda Boukhdhir a pu constater que l’acharnement des autorités pénitentiaires à l’endroit de son mari ne connaissait pas de répit : ce dernier lui a dit que non seulement il vivait toujours dans sa cellule infecte et exiguë, mais aussi que depuis trois jours, il n’avait plus accès à un point d’eau. Les autorités pénitentiaires ont fait couper l’eau, et à la différence de ses co détenus, il ne peut sortir pour se laver ailleurs.

Slim Boukhdhir a alors envisagé une nouvelle grève de la faim pour protester contre cette nouvelle atteinte à ses droits élémentaires, projet que ses proches lui ont proposé d’abandonner. Et aujourd’hui, le couffin de nourriture qui lui a été apporté par sa mère a été accepté par l’administration pénitentiaire, signe que le détenu aurait consenti à renoncer à sa grève, signe aussi que Slim Boukhdhir renvoie la balle dans le camp des défenseurs des droits de l’homme : à nous d’exiger que soit mis un terme à ses conditions infra humaines d’incarcération, à nous de tout mettre en oeuvre pour sa libération.

Slim Boukhdir was arrested on November 26 and charged with “aggression against a public employee” and “affront to public decency”. He started blogging on the Arabic Blog Service: Maktoob Blogs after losing his job as journalist at the Tunisian “Akhbar Al-Joumhurya” (News of the Republic) newspaper on August 2004. In July 2007, his blog was hacked into and deleted. Until his arrest on November 26, 2007, Slim Boukhdhir continued his work as correspondent for the Al-Arabiya TV Website, the London-based pan-Arab daily Al Quds Al Arabi and the German Qantara web portal.

The outspoken Tunisian journalist and blogger Slim Boukhdir has been arrested on November 26 and charged with “aggression against a public employee” and “affront to public decency”. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, the court denied his release and the hearing is scheduled to resume tomorrow, December 4th. Slim Boukhir could face up to 18 months imprisonment.

Slim Boukhdhir during his hunger strike.

During the last year, Boukhdhir has undertaken numerous hunger strikes to denounce government harassment and political restrictions on his right to leave the country. His most recent hunger strike was held on November 1st to denounce the authorities’ refusal to grant him a passport.

Slim Boukhdir is continuously being harassed, assaulted and threatened by both plain-clothes police and gangsters close to President Ben Ali’s brothers-in-law. After loosing his job as journalist in the “Akhbar Al-Joumhurya” (News of the Republic) newspaper on August 2004, Slim Boukhdhir started blogging on the Arabic Blog Service: Maktoob Blog. But in July 2007, his blog has been hacked and deleted.

Several Tunisian bloggers are reporting today not being able to access the popular video-sharing site Youtube. One Tunisian blogger who has done a traceroute from Tunisia to check the block has sent us this screenshot:

If it turns out to be true, Youtube will be the second video sharing site blocked by Tunisia. Since September 3rd, 2007, Tunisia is still blocking access to Dailymotion.

Dailymotion, France’s YouTube-like video sharing site has been blocked, again, in Tunisia. Still unclear if the government-controlled body, ATI (Agence Tunisienne d’Internet), throw whom all Tunisia’s ISPs are operating, has imposed the ban.

On April 1st, 2007, Dailymotion was blocked in Tunisia for almost a week. Citizen Lab’s technical research director, Nart Villeneuve who has been following the case concluded that dailymotion is most likely blocked because it has been categorized by SmartFilter - the filtering software produced by Secure Computing, a US-based company andused by Tunisia- as pornography: “It was blocked because SmartFilter categorized the web site as pornography, and, since Tunisia blocks the pornography category the web site was blocked. Some time between April 4, 2007 and April 9, 2007 SmartFilter removed dailymotion.com from the pornography category.”

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has condemned the Tunisian authorities’ blocking of access to Dailymotion. “The blocking of the www.dailymotion.com site may have been prompted by the posting of a number of videos on the political situation in Tunisia” said the organization in its statement issued on April 3, 2007.

On April 6th, 2007, following the ban on Dailymotion, Tunisian bloggers and activists have launched the “Unblock Dailymotion” campaign “in order to highlight the unfair ban and to draw the public attention to the aggressive censorship prevailing in the country.”

But in the main time, the editor of the online news website Kalima (censured in Tunisia) Omar Mestiri is facing a libel suit based on an online article he wrote last year accusing a pro-government lawyer of fraud. The suit could result in a three-year prison sentence. “The charges are invalid because the article in question cannot be read online inside Tunisia as the website is censored by the authorities,” Reporters Without Borders said.

From his prison cell in Bizerte (65km north of Tunis), The Tunisian prisoner Ramzi Bettibi managed to smuggle a very alarming letter that found its way on to the Internet (available in French). Ramzi is serving a four-year sentence at Bizerte for copying, onto a forum board he moderated, an online statement from a group threatening terror attacks if former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon attended the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) that was held in Tunisia in 2005. Ramzi Bettibi was arrested on 15 March 2005 at the internet café where he worked. In prison he is frequently subjected to torture, which the authorities hope will make him collaborate with the State Security services. “Bettibi should be freed because the government never proved that he had a criminal intent to threaten others or to incite violence,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, director of the Middle East and North Africa division at Human Rights Watch in a statement published last year. “Under these circumstances, cutting and pasting on the Internet should not be a crime,” she added.

In his letter, Ramzi describes a secret detention facility near Bizerte city, where he has been interrogated by CIA and French-speaking agents about his alleged ties to Jihadist groups in Iraq and online activities. According to the letter, the prisoners are being interrogated and held in containers in a secret location around 15 minutes drive from Bizerte prison.

Since the closure of the secret CIA jails hosted by Poland and Romania following the Washington Post’s revelations and other media reports, there have been rumors circulating about the transfer of prisoners to other CIA facilities somewhere in North Africa. But this letter from an “eye-witness” (even if no one can confirm or deny that Ramzi Bettibi was the real author) appears to offer the first concrete “evidence” of the existence of such facility in Tunisia. It also details the prison’s possible location and the identities of some of the prisoners who are being interrogated and held clandestinely. Surprisingly, the letter was written on June 9, 2007, one day only after the publication of the second report of “Secret detentions and illegal transfers of detainees involving Council of Europe member states” adopted by the Council of Europe’s Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights.

This is a call from my imprisonment in Bizerte Civil prison. It’s a call to the world to save me from imminent danger to my safety. At the end of last April, I was transferred to another prison located 15 minutes driving from my previous Bizerte Civil prison. I was totally shocked when I found myself in a secret CIA detention where other detainees also were held in containers.

I was interrogated by a French-speaking person about my online relationship with Iraqi Jihadist groups. I mentioned to him that his information is totally not accurate and I’m a free speech prisoner. I also told him that HRW, Amnesty, and many other organizations have talked about my case. The American interrogator so surprisingly yelled at the Tunisian officers. They assaulted and threatened me with fabricating a story of my attempting to escape from prison. They also threatened to relocate me to another secret prison if I talked to my family about what I saw.

Things didn’t stop at that. They returned two weeks later. Tunisian state security officers cuffed me and an American security officer asked me about my role in ALSAHAB (Al-Qaeda’s media agent). He also questioned me about the ALIKHLAS website and Alansar online forum. They gave me two documents to pick from. The first is my death certificate and the second is my release certificate. They also threatened me to hurt my brother.

I no longer can bear what is happening to me. At once, Tunisian state security agents attack me, and this time CIA agents and secret detentions came into the picture.

Oh God, witness that my fate is in great danger. Save the other detainees in this American detention. I’ve heard of a Saudi detainee named Saeed Al-ghamdi, and another Tunisian detainee named Abou Omar Al-tunisi.

Search for this prison. It’s not far from Bizerte. I understood that It’s may be located in a military Barracks.

According to a previous report issued by the International Association for the Support of Political Prisoners (AISPP), Ramzi Bettibi began a new hunger strike on January 18, 2007 in protest against maltreatment and abuse in prison. In a statement published online on March 12th, 2007, the National Council for Freedoms in Tunisia (CNLT) described the way he was tortured:

Le 23 février 2007, Ramzi Bettibi, le prisonnier du net, a été soumis à la violence extrême de 3 officiers en civil dans la prison de Bizerte, et qui se sont présentés comme la brigade de la Sûreté de l’Etat. Ils lui ont attaché les bras et les jambes à une chaise et ont voulu lui faire ingurgiter du lait de force pour qu’il cesse sa grève de la faim commencée en protestation contre des violences perpétrées à son encontre antérieurement. Une des ses dents a été cassée.
C’est la cinquième fois en l’espace de quelques mois que Ramzi Bettibi subit des séances de torture en prison visant à le faire collaborer avec les services de la Sûreté de l’Etat.

On February 23, 2007, Ramzi Bettibi, the Tunisian “prisoner of the Net”, was subjected to extreme violence in the Bizerte prison at the hands of three plain-clothes officers who claimed to be members of a State Security brigade. They chained his arms and legs to a chair and tried to force-feed him milk, to break the hunger strike he started in order to protest previous episodes of violence against him. One of his teeth was broken in the process.

This is the fifth time in the space of a few months that Ramzi Bettibi has been tortured in prison, in order to make him collaborate with the State Security services.

In this post I would like to draw attention to a list — which makes no pretensions to completeness — of under-covered advocacy campaigns and point to specific cases of bloggers, online writers and activists whose causes are worth supporting. A few of them have been in prison for years, and a few others are being sued or harassed because of what they are writing online. Not all of them are bloggers, and I personally do not believe that blogging communities should reserve their support and activism for persecuted bloggers and abandon other online writers who suffer harassment and torture. They all deserve our support to protect their basic human rights. One hopes that we can learn from other people’s experiences in order to spread the word and raise awareness among blogspheres whose support is crucial in putting an end to a silence that ought not to be allowed to continue.

Blogging about the need for a “better solidarity-based blogosphere”, and commenting on the video made by Mistral, the Tunisian blogger and activist Astrubal said that:

Many things still can be done to help for the release of those who still jailed and certainly much more steps to take to prevent such harms. And whatever it can be done, Mistral is so right when he thinks that it can not be as efficient as actions done by a much solidarity-based blogosphere.

In order to have a clear picture about the disparity in the level of coverage of the following cases, in comparison with the Kareem case, I’ve posted a few Technorati graphs showing the number of blog posts, containing the studied cases, per day for the last year (please click on the images to see the results). The graphs illustrate the hard work that needs to be done in order to unveil certain injustices and ensure equal support for all persecuted online writers, be they bloggers or not.

ABD AL-MONEM MAHMOUD (Egypt)

Abd al-Monem Mahmoud, a 27 year-old Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood blogger, Ikhwanweb reporter and correspondent for the Cairo-based British Alhiwar channel, was arrested on Sunday April 15, 2007, at Cairo International Airport. It is believed that Abd al-Monem was arrested after reporting on torture. Abd al-Monem, who was detained several times because of his activities as a student at in Alexandria University, spoke last week on a video broadcasted on Youtube, (transcript in Arabic here) about the mistreatment he experienced four years ago while in detention at the State security offices.

The last time I saw Abd al-Monem was at the 3rd annual Al Jazeera Forum at Doha, Qatar at the end of March 2007. In an exclusive interview with Global Voices that I’ll be publishing here as soon as we have an English translation, Abd al-Monem Mahmoud talked about his experiences as a blogger and the history of the use of Internet by the Muslim Brotherhood. He also expressed support for his fellow jailed blogger Kareem Amer and explained why the younger generation of the Muslim Brotherhood has chosen blogs as one of the tools in their arsenal.

ROUKANA HAMOUR (Syria)

A Technorati search for “Roukana Hamour” (in Latin characters) won’t yield many results. The only result that shows up on Google points to one entry published on Global Voices by Amira Al Hussaini, translated from a post in Arabic I wrote after meeting Ms. Hamour in Dubai last month.

Roukana Hamour is a Syrian blogger. She was taken from her home last year and dragged into the street in her nightgown, after being threatened at gunpoint in front of her young children by members of the country’s Criminal Security forces, who had no warrant for her arrest. This incident, which took place on October 15, 2006, was a direct result of Roukana’s blogging.

Due to a feud between her and her brothers, Roukana, daughter of a leading Syrian businessman, was denied the right to inherit $20 million of her father’s fortune. She was denied justice because of the involvement in the case of top judicial figures such as the Syrian Justice Minister. After failing to secure of her rights by legal means, she started blogging about her experiences with the Syrian legal system and exposing the corruption on the part of individuals in the country’s administrative, banking and judicial sectors, who stood in the way of her claim on her father’s estate. As a result of her writings, Roukana was subjected to a great deal of harassment.

Despite the fact that Roukana received no attention from either the media or any NGO, she is preparing her self for another battle. In a e-mail exchange, she told me that:

LI HONG (China)

On March 20,2007, the Chinese cyber-dissident Zhang Jianhong,(aka Li Hong) member of the Independent Chinese PEN center (ICPC) was sentenced to six years in prison. Zhang, who was arrested last year, was charged with “incitement to subvert the state’s authority”. Zhang had posted articles online calling for political reform.

ABDULSALAM BAROUDI (Algeria)

Abdulsalam Baroudi is one of the first Algerian bloggers to be sued by Tlemcen’s Director of Religious Affairs, who has accused the blogger of posting defamatory material on his personal blog on February 20, under the title “Al Sistani Appears in Tlemcen“. In a post translated earlier by GV’s Arabic Language Editor, Amira Al Hussaini, Abdulsalam wrote:

I received summons from the Tlemcen Province’s Security to make myself present in front of the Judiciary on Saturday after Tlemcen Religious Affairs Director filed a libel case against me for the article I posted on my blog The Province of Tlemcen on February 20 under the title Al Sistani Appears in Tlemcen.

The official had earlier requested the ministry to allow him to sue me and (by giving him the go ahead) this ministry has now opened the door for the initiation of legal proceedings against bloggers.

This is happening at a time when organisations monitoring freedom of expression have classified Algeria among the countries in which Internet users enjoy a wide freedom in blogging in their 2006 reports which listed four Arab countries - Egypt, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia and Syria - as being restrictive of freedom of expression on the Internet,”

Jeff Ooi (Malaysia)

Jeff Ooi, the outspoken Malaysian blogger — along with the blogger and veteran journalist Ahirudin Attan (aka Rocky’s bru) — was sued by the pro-government local English daily New Straits Times Press (NSTP).

On 11 January 2007 the Malaysian courts ordered Jeff to remove all allegedly defamatory posts from his blog, Screenshots, by Jan 17th. This was the first time in the country that a blogger was being sued by a newspaper for what is being published on his blog.

The Malaysian blogsphere responded by launching the “Walk With Us” and Bloggers United campaigns in support of freedom of speech in a country where the media is controlled by the government.

MOHAMED FOURATI (Tunisia)

On March 9, 2007, the Tunisian regime condemned, in absentia, the journalist and blogger Mohamed Fourati to a 14-month prison term on account of two articles he wrote in 2002 in the Tunisian dissident webzine Aqlma online. “The Tunisian government does not permit any opposition, whether in the traditional press or on the Internet,” Reporters Without Borders said in a statement.

Now, the Tunisian regime is refusing to allow Fourati’s wife to leave Tunisia and join her husband in Qatar, where he works for the daily Al-Sharq.

MOHAMMED ABBOU (Tunisia)

March 1, 2007 marks the second anniversary of the imprisonment of Mohammed Abbou, lawyer, internet writer and human rights defender, who was sentenced to prison for writing online articles criticizing the Tunisian penitentiary system and comparing his country’s political prisoners with those held in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Abbou’s article was published in August 2004 on the Tunisnews website. During his time in prison he has gone on hunger strikes several times in order to, as he himself puts it, “draw attention to what is happening in my country as regards the repression against all those who voice dissent.”

On another occasion, he sewed his lips together with staples for four days. The blogger behind …Or Does It Explode? has this to say about the case of Abbou:

Readers may recall that as an act of protest, Abbou last year sewed his own mouth shut - in a gut-wrenchingly symbolic attempt to highlight the suppression of free speech in Tunisia. But our mouths aren’t sewed shut, so why is the world so quiet about his case?

In an interview attributed to Tunisian activists, Abbou’s wife, Samia, talked about the brutality of the Tunisian regime towards her family.

The following is an extract from the rough translation that was published previously on Global Voices:

I am asking myself if they treated me like that, how about my husband? One told me: you are the wife of Mohamed? He threw me on the floor with rage, and was sweeping the floor with my body, my shoes were off, my bag dropped down, I was screaming until voiceless. He did not consider that I was a woman, that I did nothing to him, that I came for my husband. He had no respect neither for the court, nor the judge, nor the lawyers. These people know no limits, they are like beasts that were put on starvation for 3 days and then released after their victim.

RAMZI BETTIBI (Tunisia)

March 15, 2007 also marks the anniversary of the arrest of Ramzi Bettibi at the internet café where he worked. Ramzi was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment for copying, onto a forum board he moderated, an online statement from a group threatening terror attacks if former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon attended the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunisia. According to the second report of The Initiative For an Open Arab Internet, “Bettibi was treated violently and his books and CDs were confiscated from his home even though there was no court order to do take these items.”

According to the International Association for the Support of Political Prisoners (AISPP), Ramzi Bettibi has been on open hunger strike since January 18, 2007 in protest against maltreatment and abuse in prison. In a statement published online on March 12th, 2007, the National Council for Freedoms in Tunisia (CNLT) described the way he was tortured:

Le 23 février 2007, Ramzi Bettibi, le prisonnier du net, a été soumis à la violence extrême de 3 officiers en civil dans la prison de Bizerte, et qui se sont présentés comme la brigade de la Sûreté de l’Etat. Ils lui ont attaché les bras et les jambes à une chaise et ont voulu lui faire ingurgiter du lait de force pour qu’il cesse sa grève de la faim commencée en protestation contre des violences perpétrées à son encontre antérieurement. Une des ses dents a été cassée.
C’est la cinquième fois en l’espace de quelques mois que Ramzi Bettibi subit des séances de torture en prison visant à le faire collaborer avec les services de la Sûreté de l’Etat.

NEILA CHARCOUR HACHICHA (Tunisia)

Tunisian blogger and activist Neila Charchour Hachicha was forced to stop blogging since the Tunisian regime threatened her family after she spoke out publicly against Ben Ali’s regime on Al Jazeera and at the conference “Dissent and Reform in the Arab World” organized by the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC. This is what she wrote in her last article “From Tunisia, a Tale of Cruelty and Silence“, published by the Lebanese Daily Star:

Within a month, the government had made bogus charges against my husband for a real estate transaction, which led to a 10-month prison sentence. Eyewitnesses watched the police confiscate my car, although they continue to deny involvement. Plainclothes police surrounded my house and registered the license plate numbers of all visitors. Some friends told me they received instructions not to visit or contact me. Others alerted me that they were receiving by mail an indecently doctored photo taken of my daughter during her engagement party. The government blocked my Internet connection. Finally the police summoned me for hours of questioning. They asked me to sign a statement never to blame the police again for its abuses.