Tunis bans press association meeting

Tunisia, working hard at maintaining its lead in the media repression sweepstakes, barred the Tunisian Journalists Association from holding a founding conference scheduled for early September.   Al-Jazeera quotes the head of the committee seeking to establish the association, Lutfi Haji, at some length about the authorities' moves to prevent its establishment, and quotes an official source explaining that since the proposed association has no legal status it obviously can't be allowed to meet. 

I've pointed out Tunisia's appalling record on media freedoms many times.  Perhaps the American embassy in Tunis - or perhaps the regional headquarters of the Middle East Partnership Initiative, which is absurdly enough headquartered in this most un-free of Arab countries - might want to think about ways to encourage the Tunisian authorities to find a way to allow the association to meet, even if its legal status is currently unclear? 

Comments

[The Lounsbury]

Well, when I first started seeing the Middle East Partnership Initiative diplos out and about, they were all about economic development and policy. In which case Tunis makes sense.

Now the US Gov seems to be obsessed (although surely this will only last for as long as Madame Cheney's attention does) with Democratisation. That does make Tunisia something of a... peculiar choice, given I understand from the diplos that Democracy and Governance are the new obsessions above all else.

Waste of money over all, but there it is.

So, in keeping with US Gov's general incompetence in the MENA region, it occurs to me that actually Tunis is a brilliantly symbolic choice of shambolic misconceptions, clumsy off-base symbolism and general floundering about.