In the week before World Press Freedom Day the Tunisian weekly opposition newspaper Al-Mawkif is faced with the possibility of having to cease publication after 23 years. Post-publication censorship and charges of spreading false news and defamation have manifested in exorbitant fines and severe financial losses. Managing editor Nejib Chebbi and editor Rachid Khechana, of the Progressive Democratic Party’s (PDP) newspaper, spoke to RAP 21 on the long battle ahead of them.

The Al-Mawkif staff is standing unbowed to the series of obstacles they face; Chebbi is running in near quicksand against incumbent President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in the country’s 2009 elections and Kchechana and his colleague, Mongi Ellouze are on a hunger strike.

Politically motivated steps against the paper have especially heightened since Chebbi’s campaign has recently gained more momentum. Over the past month, Chebbi has been traveling to Europe, meeting members of the European Parliament and visiting with Tunisians abroad for his campaign. In what he considers direct retaliation for those contacts, plainclothes police seized copies of Al-Mawkif, filled with headlines of his campaign, from kiosks around the country over the past month. Tunisian authorities have now prevented the past five issues from being distributed.

“My tours inside the country and abroad had the objective of mobilizing national and international public opinion-it is our only recourse against authoritarianism. We demand international monitoring of the elections in 2009, but the process has to begin today. On Election Day it would be too late and it would only endorse the trick,” said Chebbi.

To mute his campaign, Chebbi said, “the president pushed, in addition, five companies specializing in packaging of cooking oil to file five complaints against us, claiming five hundred thousand Dinars (US 400,000$) in compensation for alleged damage.”

Kchechana agrees that the civil defamation lawsuit is politically motivated. In a 4 April opinion piece, Kchechana asked of the Tunisian government to look into the healthiness of Tunisian cooking oil that was exported to Algeria and found unhealthy.

“I just asked if the oil was healthy and then five companies attack us,” said Kchechana. “The government is pushing companies to sue and get the newspaper sentenced-to make it collapse,” he continued. The newspaper will go to trial next month for this case.

However, the opinion piece, the putative cause for the lawsuits, did not even reach the public as the weekly was taken off the stands.

The prohibition of selling the past five issues has had severe financial implications on the paper. “Our newspaper is prohibited for any form of advertising, it is forced to live on its own sales. It is a de facto ban,” said Chebbi. “Unlike newspapers of so-called opposition parties that are represented in parliament we do not have access to any form of pubic subsidies,” he continued.

The newspaper prints 10,000 copies of each issue with a selling rate of 85 percent, but as a result of this form of censorship sales have indubitably plummeted. “For the past four or five weeks we have been selling 10 percent,” said Kchechana.

“The government is embarrassed by Chebbi’s run for presidency. They are trying to stop his campaign-they don’t say anything about him,” said Kchechana. Chebbi said that the government prefers to use “insidious attacks to suppress freedom of expression.”

“The media is completely monopolized by the government. The opposition has no place,” said Chebbi. Last month Chebbi’s face and voice appeared in a panoply of foreign media outlets. “Last month I was on Al Jazeera, France 24, BBC Arabic, Al Arabia, Radio France Internationale, Radio Europe, TF1, and was interviewed by Le Soir de Bruxelles, Le Monde, and Le Figaro,” said Chebbi. But not once during the past 15 years has he appeared in the national media, “they only remember me to defame me,” he said.

This is a longstanding legacy in Tunisia and throughout Africa. “In the 1994 election period a study showed that the opposition only had five percent of the airtime during the news,” said Chebbi. There are also political and legal barriers in place to dissuade and actually forbid oppositional candidates from rising to the platform.

“In legal terms, one cannot stand for presidency unless they are sponsored by thirty members or mayors. But 100 percent of the mayors belong to the ruling party, the RCD,” said Chebbi. Tunisian law has also been altered numerous times to uphold the ruling party and exclude opponents. In 1994, 1999, and 2000 the constitution was tailored to only support co-opted parties. The rule was repealed this year, however, the President promulgated a new law that raised his status insofar as he can now eliminate any candidature “embarrassing” to his own.

Thus, Chebbi along with other co-party members are flung into a vicious political cycle, perpetually on the edge of political expulsion, without even the power of a free media to enable transparency, balance, and equal representation.

In this hostile context, writing new headlines, campaigning, and organising social awareness events have remained buoyant in the Al-Mawkif newsroom. Chebbi does not see the fight for press freedom as a false hope: “The civil society is waking up,” he said. Though he emphasized that a free press must also reach the political sphere-that is where the battle now lays.

Concurrently, one month after Chebbi and Maya Jribi, secretary-general of the PDP finished their 10-day hunger strike, Kchechana and Ellouze have started another one. “We will stay with the hunger strike until our demands are satisfied-when the judicial harassment stops and when we are allowed to distribute our newspaper,” said Kchechana.