Hamma Hammami's recent trial offers hope for Tunisia's democracymovement, writes Enda O'Doherty
Hamma Hammami makes the best couscous in Tunisia, or so his wife says. It is still not that usual, in this rather traditional society, to find a man in the kitchen, but Hamma's wife, Radhia Nasraoui, is a busy lawyer, while Hamma, an intellectual and writer, has often had considerable time on his hands.
Hamma's culinary expertise was a happy by-product of the situation in which he found himself after 1998 - on the run from a formidable police force and facing a prison sentence of nine years and three months, imposed in his absence on a variety of charges, including contempt of the judiciary, publication of false information, holding unauthorised meetings and, perhaps most significantly, membership of a banned organisation, the Tunisian Communist Workers' Party (PCOT).
After four years of clandestinity, Hamma Hammami emerged to face the music. An initial court hearing in February this year, which simply confirmed the sentences, was followed by two appeal hearings, on March 9th and March 30th, the second of which I attended as an observer for the Irish human rights organisation, Front Line.
I have no specialist knowledge of North Africa, my human rights activism has never extended much beyond buying Amnesty Christmas cards, and 50-odd years of blameless living have ensured that the trial of Hamma Hammami was the first judicial proceeding of any kind I had attended.
The wood-panelled setting looked familiar and the legal teams, though unwigged, were dressed in robes and white cravates in the French style. The language of proceedings, however, was Arabic, translation being offered informally in French or English whispers by friends of the accused.
On the bench sat the court president, Judge Tahar Sliti, flanked by two assessors (both women), a court clerk and the prosecutor, apparently a non-speaking role in Tunisian procedure. Given the somewhat intimidating effect of the police presence, I had expected to witness a certain self-importance, sternness, bullying even, from the bench. But no, Judge Sliti, a small, smiling man was the soul of good humour.
Hamma Hammami, asked to answer the charges, kicked into a short history of modern Tunisia and the role of the PCOT in fighting for democratic change. His party had worked for equality between men and women; it had never encouraged or approved of violence or terrorism, but Tunisia was a dictatorship. Justice, furthermore, was not independent - judges winked at ill-treatment and torture and were forced to be compliant for the sake of their careers.
How wise was this, I wondered. How many such insults would the judge stand for? But Judge Sliti remained unperturbed, merely asking Hamma not to make a political speech. But why not? Staring at a nine-year sentence, he seemed unlikely to get such an audience again for some time.
The defence barristers rose one by one. A rumour of a lunch-break at 2 p.m. proved unfounded. Eventually it came, just after three.
After the break, the barristers - there were now some 60 present - were getting skittish and there was laughter in court. Judge Sliti was laughing too. Perhaps it was just that they all - defendants, barristers and judge - knew that what they were participating in was simply a legal farce whose outcome would be, or indeed already had been, determined elsewhere, in the Ministry of Justice or even the presidential palace.
I left the court some time after 7 p.m. and didn't learn until the next morning that, in a judgment delivered at 2.30 a.m. - after a session of 16 hours - Hamma Hammami's sentence was reduced to three years and two months, and those of his comrades proportionately.
Tunisia perhaps does not quite fit the image we in western Europe might have of it. Certainly, it is not rich, but it boasts an equal GDP per head and a higher life expectancy than Bulgaria and Romania, countries which expect EU membership in the next five to 10 years. The economy too is chugging along, but unemployment is high and corruption is both a source of popular grievance and a serious brake on development.
It has been called a "soft dictatorship" - which is to say it is not Iraq - but there is nothing soft about the conditions of its roughly 1,000 political prisoners (according to Amnesty International estimates). However, it enjoys a level of equality between men and women seen nowhere else in the Arab world, the legacy of the "Father of the Nation", Habib Bourguiba, who ruled from shortly after independence in 1957 until 1987.
His replacement, President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali's version of democracy and pluralism is a Soviet-style sham: the legal opposition failed to garner 1 per cent in the 1999 election. The president's portrait is displayed everywhere and the press is so servile as to be virtually unreadable. Ben Ali is seeking, in a referendum next month, to change the constitution to extend his rule to 2009.
The regime justifies its repression by the need to combat Islamism and terror. But there is in fact no history of violent opposition to the government - the unprecedented attack on a synagogue on the tourist island of Djerba on April 11th, in which 17 people died, smacks of an imported terrorist act. Yet Ben Ali's denial of democracy and human rights to his people remains largely unimpeded by the West. He enjoys warm relations with Jacques Chirac and, as for the US, one is reminded of Roosevelt's remark about the Nicaraguan dictator, Somoza: "He may be a sonofabitch, but he's our sonofabitch."
It is impossible not to admire the courage of Tunisia's strengthening democratic opposition, of people such as Radhia Nasraoui, who continues her work despite constant police harassment. Admirable too is the self-sacrifice of her husband, Hamma Hammami, who quotes the Turkish poet, Nazim Hikmat: "If I do not burn/ If you do not burn/ If we do not burn/ Who will light the way?"
Yet perhaps one can still hope that no one will have to burn, that this dictatorship will instead wither away in the manner of the "Papa knows best" regimes of eastern Europe it so closely resembles. Then, finally, it will be possible for Hamma Hammami, who has been in prison, in exile or on the run for all his adult life, to return peacefully to his family - and his kitchen.