‘Tunisian Girl’ bravely blogged about Arab Spring
The Lina Ben Mhenni I will remember is perched over a laptop in a hip, smoky Tunis café, or under an umbrella along tree-lined Avenue Habib Bourguiba, sending out her latest dispatches after documenting the violent front lines of a revolution very much in progress.
It is where I met her, shortly after the uprisings that began in 2010 and led to the ouster of a Tunisian dictator in 2011 — and set in motion what became known in other countries as the Arab Spring.
Ben Mhenni, 36 — teacher, heroic figure in Tunisia and considered at one point a Nobel Peace Prize favourite — died last month after suffering a stroke. She had long been dealing with an autoimmune disease, which she wrote about in her blog.
“I have accomplished a lot in my life but there has always been a very expensive price to pay. Behind every smile, there are excruciating tears and pain, needles, dozens and dozens of pills and days and days in hospitals,” Ben Mhenni wrote, in French, in a Jan. 8 post.
Her blog — which she simply called “A Tunisian Girl” — was a must-read and has been since late 2010. On Twitter, she had 350,000 followers. In the beginning, she travelled the country, documenting violent government clashes with protesters. It was journalism, with great risk. The regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali rounded up bloggers it did not like.
She reported on Mohamed Bouazizi, an educated, under-employed young man living in Sidi Bouzid, a depressed farming town. Bouzid left his fruit stand, which a municipal bylaw official had deemed illegal, bought paint solvent and lit himself on fire. His death sparked the revolution.
When Ben Ali fled, Ben Mhenni, ever critical of human rights infringements, continued her work and became an even more prominent voice of a new Tunisia, which history may prove is the only success story to come of the Arab Spring.
I remember strolling the streets of Tunis
before meeting Ben Mhenni for the first time, in early February 2011, and seeing a spray-painted message on construction hoarding thanking Facebook. Social media indeed played a large role in the uprisings; but more so, Ben Mhenni and other brave bloggers, who brought down an autocratic regime.
When I met her, Ben Mhenni was 27, a teacher in the faculty of human and social sciences at the University of Tunis. She started writing things unpopular with the regime a couple of years before the uprising and found that both her blog and Facebook page were being censored.
She wrote about censorship and human rights issues in Tunisia. She visited the homes where young people had been killed during the uprising, their corpses still laid out. At the insistence of their families, she photographed the dead and posted the photos for all to see. And the world did.
Even after the uprising, she was targeted. In 2012, she was beaten by police at one protest and had equipment seized.
She was one of the first people I had lined up to meet and interview, and when I pointed out that what she was doing was journalism, in English — she also spoke Arabic and French — she proceeded to vivisect the Tunisian press.
“I’ve been following the newspapers,” she said. “They are not improving. The same journalists who were praising Ben Ali and insulting the dissidents are now insulting Ben Ali and praising the dissidents, talking about their fight and everything.
“But they are not writing analysis of what is going on. So they are working in the old manner and they are not trying to improve themselves.”
I saw her again in the fall of 2011, freshly after Moammar Gadhafi had been killed in neighbouring Libya and following Tunisia’s first election after the toppling of the regime. Ben Mhenni was by then making unofficial short lists for the Nobel, which she would not win. I met her in Tunis on Avenue Habib Bourguiba, under the trees, at a café. She was dressed in black, and wore her usual studs in her nose and right eyebrow. Her laptop was open.
After everything, she told me she decided not to vote, saying too many members of the old regime were still around and playing politics.
Ennahda, a once-banned moderate Islamic party, had come out ahead in the successful election, and Ben Mhenni said she feared for the hard-won rights of women.
After her death on Jan. 27, her coffin — draped in the Tunisian flag — was carried in a procession on the shoulders of women. Tunisian women, lifting up a “Tunisian girl.”