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Abstract
Tunisia under its long-time ruler Zine Abidine Ben Ali was considered a police state par excellence. However, while the role of the Tunisian police as a key pillar of Ben Ali's authoritarian regime has been commonly acknowledged, analyses of the systemic or structural features of the country's internal security apparatus have thus far been rather limited. This article examines the main characteristics of the Tunisian police system and their relationship to Ben Ali's autocratic rule. These include its opacity and lack of formal regulation, its instrumentalisation by the central power, the broad and politicised definition of police functions, the combination of centralisation and fragmentation of the police, as well as its permeation with cronyism and corruption, all of which were instrumental in sustaining the Ben Ali regime.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. The main exceptions – all of which are general overviews rather than in-depth case studies – include Crystal (Citation2001), Nasr, Crystal, and Brown (Citation2004), and Khalili and Schwedler (Citation2010).
2. Most of the information upon which this article is based is derived from interviews conducted by the author with approx. 20 former and current police officers, national guardsmen, interior ministry officials, military officers as well as two former interior ministers (who wished to remain anonymous). The interviews were carried out in Tunis between April 2012 and April 2015. Most of the police and national guardsmen were mid- or higher ranking officers, such as superintendents or National Guard commanders. Interior ministry officials were mostly directors and director generals of different ministerial departments. The two interior ministers served under Bourguiba (mid-1970s) and Ben Ali (1990s), respectively.
3. Following the French model, the Tunisian National Guard was originally attached to the Defence Ministry, but was transferred to the Interior Ministry shortly after independence. In Algeria (as well as in France), the Gendarmerie is controlled by the Defence Ministry (although in France it has recently been transferred to the Interior Ministry in most respects), whereas in Morocco, the Gendarmerie is answerable to the King. For an overview of the Gendarmerie forces of these countries, see Lutterbeck (Citation2013).
4. In Algeria, the Presidential Guard is controlled by the President, whereas the Moroccan Royal Guard is under direct command of the King.
5. In 2010, the Tunisian armed forces had 35,000 men. This is four to five times less than Algeria's or Morocco's armed forces, which counted 147,000 and 195,000 men, respectively (all figures from IISS Citation2011). Defence spending in Tunisia in recent years has been around 1.5% of GDP, which is very low by regional standards.
6. The author is indebted to one of the reviewers for highlighting this point.
7. The most important role in Ben Ali's coup was played by the Tunisian National Guard. For a detailed account by the then-Head of Bourguiba's Presidential Guard, see Chelly (Citation2012, 13–36). Ben Ali's coup has often also been described as a ‘medial coup’, as Bourguiba was declared medically unfit to exercise the Presidency.
8. For example, In Tunisia there has been no equivalent to Morocco's secret detention facility Tazmamart, where dozens of individuals considered a threat by the Monarchy were held for almost twenty years without even their families knowing about their location.
9. The most densely policed states in (western) Europe are Spain, Greece and Portugal, with police-officer-to-inhabitants ratios of 1/195, 1/215 and 1/220, respectively.
10. According to a survey conducted by the UN in 2006, the average ratio of police officer to inhabitants worldwide amounted to approx. 1/330 (see United Nations Citation2010, 19).
11. The ransacking, during the popular uprising of January 2011, of a police station in a village of 3000 inhabitants revealed that the police counted 95 informants in the village (Yahyaoui Citation2011).
12. One (paradigmatic) example of this phenomenon would be Nazi Germany where the security forces created by the Hitler regime – that is, the SA and SS – acted largely outside the rule of law, despite the country's long-standing legal tradition, and were guided first and foremost by commands of the Führer (Buchheim Citation1984). The same could be said of the police forces of the former Eastern bloc states which also operated not so much based on legal texts but rather on orders of the Communist party (Kowalczuk Citation2013; Shelley Citation1996).
13. The DCAF database can be accessed online at: http://www.legislation-securite.tn/fr. A list of non-published legal texts can be found at: http://www.legislation-securite.tn/fr/loi-non-publiee-dans-jort.
14. According to the UN Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment, between 1999 and 2009 only seven policemen were convicted for acts of torture in Tunisia, while more than 1200 cases of torture have been documented for the period 2003–2008 alone (ALTT/CRLDHT Citation2008; UN Human Rights Council Citation2012, 8).
15. However, while this constitutional amendment (to some extent) strengthened the powers of government ministers, it also declared Bourguiba ‘president for life’ of Tunisia (Article 39).
16. A general thrust of Ben Ali's regime was to concentrate power in the Presidency at the expense of government ministers (Erdle Citation2010, 139–148).
17. This point has been emphasized by many of Ben Ali's former Interior Ministers. See the testimonies on the website of former Interior Minister Abdallah Kallel at: http://www.abdallah-kallel.com/articles/Repression_politique_la_chasse_gardee_de_ben_ali.php; and Séréni (Citation2011). While to some extent these accounts might seem as attempts by former Interior Ministers to whitewash themselves of abuses committed by security forces, their limited control over the Interior Ministry has also been confirmed by opposition figures who suffered abuses at the hands of the police (Manai Citation1995, 169).
18. While during the initial phase of Ben Ali's reign two military officers, Habib Ammar and Abdelhamid Escheikh, served as Interior Ministers, since 1991, all of Ben Ali's Interior Ministers have been civilians. During Ben Ali's 23 years in power, a total of 11 persons held the post of Interior Minister.
19. The longest serving Director Generals of National Security under Ben Ali were Ali Seriati and Mohamed Ali Ganzoui. The former is a General of the Armed Forces, who later became Head of Ben Ali's Presidential Guard, and who has often been described by people close to him as an ‘extremely disciplined’ military officer who would follow orders by his superiors without questioning them. Mohamed Ali Ganzoui is a police officer by training who was one of Ben Ali's (and in particular his wife's) closest confidants. Both of them have been sentenced to prison terms after the overthrow of Ben Ali.
20. According to the UN special rapporteur on counter-terrorism, since 2003 more than 1000 individuals have been prosecuted under Tunisia's anti-terrorism law (UN Human Rights Council Citation2010, 7).
21. Nazi Germany can, again, be seen as a paradigmatic case in this respect, as the Hitler regime created parallel security structures in the form of the SA and the SS, which operated alongside the regular police and military, and which were controlled directly by the Nazi leadership. The combination of centralisation and fragmentation of security agencies in Middle Eastern states has also been highlighted by Crystal (Citation2001) although she does not relate this to the nature of these countries'political regimes. The creation of parallel military forces as a ‘coup-proofing’ measure in Middle Eastern states has been discussed in particular by Quinlivan (Citation1999).
22. According to the law on the general status of internal security forces, the main ‘responsibility’ of internal security forces is to ‘execute orders given by the superior’. Although the law mentions that such orders should be within the ‘framework of legality’, it does not contain any provisions allowing to challenge even manifestly illegal orders (Article 46 of Law No. 82–70 of 6 August 1982 on the general status of internal security forces).
23. Although there is no publically available organigramme of the Tunisian police, the additional five General-Directorates created by Ben Ali are known to be the following: the General-Directorate of Public Security, the General-Directorate of Special Services, the General-Directorate of Technical Services, the General-Directorate of Intervention Units, and the General-Directorate of Training.
24. The Commander of the National Guard at the time of Ben Ali's coup, Habib Ammar, was initially promoted to the post of Interior Minister. Only one year later, however, he was dismissed by Ben Ali and sent to Austria as Ambassador.
25. The transformation of the RCD from a political party into an intelligence-gathering organisation was possibly also inspired by the Tunisian leader's stint as Ambassador to Poland in the early 1980s, where he was able to gain first-hand experience of Soviet-style surveillance of the population by the Communist party.
26. For a path-breaking analysis of the role of the Iraqi Ba'th Party under Saddam Hussein, including its relationship to the country's security agencies, see Sassoon (Citation2012).
27. For general accounts of the corruption of the Ben Ali regime, see, for example, Beau and Garciet (Citation2009) or the US cables leaked by wikileaks: US Embassy Tunis (Citation2006, Citation2010).
28. To some extent, it might be possible to draw a parallel between the (unofficial) economic role of the police in Tunisia to the economic role of the military in military-dominated regimes such as Algeria or Egypt. The main difference, however, is that in contrast to the Algerian or Egyptian militaries, the economic role of the Tunisian police did not derive from its involvement in the production of consumer goods and other commercial operations, but rather from its regulatory (and surveillance) function which allowed it to influence and control a range of economic activities.
29. According to former Tunisian police officers interviewed by this author, around 80% of unlicensed street vendors in Tunis had ‘partners’ within the police. The fact that the taking of bribes seems to remain a common practice in the Tunisian traffic police is suggested by the account of Ghacibeh (Citation2013).
30. Some accounts of this (many of which have been confirmed by interviews with former officials conducted by this author) can be found at: ‘Kamel Ltayef et Taoufik Dimassi, une histoire.. de villas?', available at: https://www.facebook.com/notes/yassine-ayari-page-officielle/kamel-ltayef-et-taoufik-dimassi-une-histoire-de-villas/186785101375517, or : ‘Quand les parasites font un état dans une dictature policière corrompue', available at: https://www.facebook.com/notes/sahbi-amri/ne-lisez-pas-cet-article-%C3%A7a-fait-mal-au-coeur-quand-les-parasites-font-un-%C3%A9tat-d/168739229847902.
31. Eltaief's relationship to Ben Ali is however commonly said to have deteriorated from 1992 onwards, as he disapproved of Ben Ali's marriage to his second wife Leila Trabelsi.
32. While there were no opinion polls during Ben Ali's reign, according to a survey conducted in September 2011, the police was perceived as the most corrupt institution of the country (Slate Afrique, September 9, 2011). Similar results have also been shown by Transparency International's Global Corruption Barometer, available online at: http://www.transparency.org/gcb2013/country/?country=tunisia.
33. Although Abid was never formally convicted, the allegation was that he took bribes from a Tunisian businessman (in the form of paid medical visits to France) in return for excluding certain suspects from the investigation (author interview with former Tunisian police officer, Tunis, January 2013).
34. On security sector reform efforts in Tunisia since the fall of Ben Ali, see Hanlon (Citation2012), ICG (Citation2012), and Lutterbeck (Citation2012).