#7: Bleak October
Five months after his arrest, the journalist is presented with a 'discrete' solution that feels mostly like an insult. Meanwhile, the stakes are raised as a French PhD student is thrown in jail...
NOTE: This is a continuation of a previous episode. For full context, please find the previous episodes here. If you’re reading the School of Tunisia for the first time, you can find an introduction to the page here.
Love and hate are two sides of the same coin. It’s the type of thing you often hear people say. You might even declare your agreement. But do you feel it?
I don’t think I really did until October 2024.
Around the elections on October 6th, there was a lot of chaos in Tunis - demonstrations and protests, arrests and interrogations. A few of the higher-profile incidents made news headlines, but most went under the radar. Not for my lawyer, though, who was on call for several of them. It made it really difficult for him to find the time to regularly check on the status of my S08 judicial travel ban at the court in Sfax.
I did not want to admit it to myself yet in early October, but I was beginning to get quite concerned about one specific thing. From December 20th to 22nd, my girlfriend and I were invited to the wedding of two of my closest friends from college in Nepal.
During the summer, that wedding was something I’d look forward to, telling myself:
“Everything may be awful right now, but at least I can look forward to the wedding.”
Now, I was starting to fear we wouldn’t make that either.
From the start, moving to Tunisia to attempt to freelance full-time was a sacrifice. I knew I’d be making little money - and even that there was a risk I wouldn’t make any and would return to Denmark to start over. I also knew I wouldn’t be seeing friends and family often, that working conditions might be tough, and so on.
The arrest in May added several factors. My girlfriend and my family were now emotionally affected by my choices. Finances were tight, and there were no immediate prospects for improvement. Our social circle in Tunis was disappearing, and there was just no way to revive it.
We’d go out to meet new people and introduce ourselves to someone.
“Don’t you just love being in Tunisia?” they’d ask, leaving you with a choice: Do we lie and pretend everything is fine, and never establish an honest relation? Or do we spend the next hour explaining that it’s actually not that fun to be in Tunisia when you’re subject to a criminal investigation and a travel ban, and chase them away?
And lastly, my name had come on the Ministry of Interior radar, which probably meant that even once everything was sorted, I wouldn’t be able to interview anyone who wasn’t already on the established roster of media talking heads. If I interviewed someone involved in something controversial or illegal, I’d now be risking their safety too.
In other news, I understood that the case had pretty severely added to the limitations on my work, and thereby also to the sacrifices I needed to make for it to work out.
But as we were making our way into October, the sacrifices were piling up so high that they were beginning to be impossible to justify. October 2024 became the month that I came to terms with leaving Tunisia for good.
Because simultaneously, I was realizing that love was becoming hatred. Many of the things that made me want to adopt Tunisia as my second home had flipped. People’s friendliness and hospitality no longer made me feel welcomed. Now, it felt intrusive and suspicious. The hustle of everyday life - going to the market, taking public transportation etc. - no longer felt like a fun opportunity to chat with people, but had become a source of stress and inconvenience. Even the food was losing its appeal. My girlfriend put it best, I think, when she said it was as if I had “lost my spark.”
It was odd. For several years, I had chased a dream of being in Tunisia. And at this point, I was having conversations with myself in my head gradually coming to the conclusion that I really was beginning to hate it there.
The feeling of hate is a strong one, and I really did not want to harbor it. But it was not up to me. I wanted to get out before the hatred threw a lasting filter over the many beautiful moments I have had in Tunisia over the years.
The ‘discrete’ solution
Beyond the presidential elections, whose finalization seemed to really have no effect on my case in the end, a few major developments took place in October.
After a meeting with my lawyer on October 10th, I sent an email to the team at the Danish embassy in Algiers. Two days earlier, my lawyer had successfully submitted my ‘request for suspension of execution’ of the S17 ‘border consultation’ at the Administrative Court, so I sent them an update with the case number and recent information. The email also served as a pretext to ask the Danes if the Tunisian Foreign Ministry ever followed up on their meeting in late September.
They responded on October 14th, confirming that they had not heard anything, but that they’d send a follow-up. In part in light of my family’s skepticism toward the degree to which the embassy dealt with my situation with sufficient seriousness, I wrote in my notes that day:
“I'm beginning to feel a bit like they should be fighting harder for me, but I guess I don't know what's going on behind the scenes.”
In our meeting in late September, the team from the embassy had given me the contact of an individual working for an NGO in Tunis that they thought might be worth speaking to. I was not really sure at the time what this person could do for me, but I reached out to him, and we chatted a bit back and forth about the case over the following two weeks.
He was able to reach a few contacts within the Mininstry of Interior to ask some questions about the situation, he told me.
On October 17th, I hopped on my bicycle and went to his office for a meeting. The meeting prompted a lot of reflection for me and became very important - that is why it made it into this episode. I am, however, keeping some details vague for the sake of confidentiality.
This person had met with his contacts who had asked him many questions about my case. A primariy question was whether an S17 actually existed. It could be, he told me, that a cop had just made it up because they were too lazy to do their job.
I found it, and still find it, improbable that there is no S17, given that I was clearly flagged in the airport (both in May and, as we will see in a future episode, in December), but he still seemed to think it was a possibility.
He told me that the idea would be to try to solve the case discretely. We could play on the fact that they’d have no interest in this being publicly known, and I’d be able to use the case at the Administrative Court as leverage - basically in return for making everything go away, I would drop the lawsuit. He told me that such a lawsuit is something that angers the officials at the Ministry.
Sitting in a comfortable chair in this person’s office, coffee in hand and hearing the words, “solving the case discretely,” I seethed. The thought of a ‘discrete’ solution was difficult to take seriously at this point.
“Quite frankly, I too am angry,” I told him, “and I have to put some serious thought into whether a discrete solution is even something I want at this point.”
I told him about the timeline for the wedding, and I floated November 22nd - conveniently a month before the wedding and also exactly six months after my arrest - as my red line. I told him that this discrete solution would have to imply a resolution by then, and I added that I’m not interested in any discrete ‘solution’ that just allows me to come back to Tunisia to hang out as a tourist, but does not allow me to continue my work. That simply would not be a solution for me.
Of course, somewhere in my mind I could already tell how unrealistic this solution would be to reach. I added that he was welcome to forward the somewhat threatening message to the officials at the Ministry of Interior that I’m a journalist, and I will be blasting them publicly if they don’t solve this quickly. That is, if, I told him, he thought it would be useful.
When I updated my notes from the meeting that evening, I wrote as follows:
So in conclusion of the meeting, [the person I met with] seems to think he might be able to figure something out here with people in the ministry, but a major contention for me is the timeline of it, being that 1) at this point it has been almost FIVE MONTHS and honestly I feel like if we figure out a 'discrete' solution now, everyone will be winning except for me, which I'm extremely hesitant to accept, and 2) this is off the table entirely if they don't move their asses on it ASAP as come wedding-time, or come month 6 on November 22nd, I am done with this bullshit.
And for the record, my respect and gratitude goes out to this person I was meeting with - he was the messenger, and he told me the lay of the land as it was.
Things take a turn
In the evening of October 21st, I received a message on Signal from a contact. It was a link to an article from the Tunisian media outlet Business News with very scant information about a French PhD student named Victor Dupont who had apparently been imprisoned in Tunisia.
I had never heard of him before, so I searched around and found a description of his PhD research on the website of his university. He was apparently doing fieldwork in North-West Tunisia about the relationship of unemployed university graduates to politics and the 2011 revolution, under the supervision of Amine Allal, a well-known academic on Tunisia whose research I’ve been reading and referencing for years.
The news made me anxious. First of all, I immediately recognized his line of academic inquiry - it was not far from my own research interests and worldview. Though I didn’t know Victor Dupont personally, I immediately recognized and understood him as a peer. In a different life, I would be doing what he was doing.
Secondly, and more pressingly, the case showed that the Tunisian authorities were not unwilling to put European citizens in jail.
And my previous calculations had all been based on exactly that: the worst thing they can do to me is to deport me. They would never dare jail a European journalist for doing their work - it would look too bad, I thought. But here we were.
The stakes had been raised. I became much less certain about the leverage I thought I had from the threat of bringing my case to the attention of the public. Now, bringing attention to the case seemed to carry a real risk of placing me in a prison cell.
The day after, on October 22nd, I spoke with a friend who runs in the same circles as people who know Victor Dupont. She confirmed that everyone was shocked by what had happened. His case would later make it onto the front pages of both French and American news media. Even the New Arab wrote about it…
In the evening, I sent an email to the embassy, linking the article and explaining its contents, since it was in Arabic. I suggested they get in touch with their French counterparts to see if they had anything helpful to say. On the 24th, a staffer responded, thanked me for the information and called it “very worrying.”
The following days, I was feeling overwhelmed by the culmination of a lot of thoughts and new pieces of information. The intense anger of being faced with the idea of a ‘discrete’ solution - the solution I had hoped for back in June - was followed by an explosion of fear with the Dupont-case. I was also trying to mentally prepare to take a stand and set a ‘red line’ date for going public. Simultaneously, my lawyer still hadn’t found the time to go to Sfax to check on the travel ban for two weeks because of other urgent legal matters, and because a rain storm had shut the roads in and out of Sfax that week. I really felt like I was losing my mind.
A few days later - on Monday October 28th - we spoke again, and my lawyer told me he was planning to go on Wednesday the 30th. I also told my lawyer that I was frustrated with my embassy. As the coverage of the Dupont-case was running, and the French were getting heavily involved, I was coming to the conclusion that the Danes were not doing enough. As I told my lawyer, when the French get this PhD student out, maybe I could use it as an example to tell the Danes to get more aggressive.
I felt like I needed to convey to the team at the Danish embassy how poorly I was feeling about everything. So that afternoon, I spent several hours drafting a long email that I planned to send to them. They were several hours of quite intense emotional labor. As I wrote in my notes:
I had to take several breaks in the writing, as well as accept that at times, it was as if my whole body was seething with various emotions, including anger, hopelessness, sadness and anxiety.
Its primary purpose was to announce to the Danes my intention to lay everything out openly on November 22nd if things had not been solved by then, and its secondary purpose was to convey to them how close I was to the edge.
I kept it as a draft until the evening when I had a chance to translate it into English while going through it with my girlfriend. The email draft was really long, and, in hindsight, a bit unhinged, so I will not be posting it directly here. However, I still have it and am willing to share it privately.
The email draft was quite intense, announcing among other things my intention to leave the country in time for the wedding no matter what it would take. I mentioned directly that I’d be publishing everything on social media and sending press releases to Danish and international media. I even said I would be going to the airport on a daily basis while live-streaming my attempts to travel.
I also added that I felt uncomfortable with the fact that the Danes seemingly would not make demands of the Tunisians, but insisted on attempting to leverage the positive Danish-Tunisian relationship, which I saw as a strategy that had already proven its futility.
My girlfriend’s reaction upon hearing the wording of the email was that I should revise parts that sounded like a threat to the Tunisian authorities, because she feared it could result in an immediate arrest. She also pointed out that my mental health was difficult to evaluate from the email. I wanted to make it clear that while I was still sane, my mental health was severely strained, and I could not guarantee my sanity if this continued for several more months.
Finally, my girlfriend suggested that it might be better to have this exchange on a call instead of via email, as it would leave no written trace, and as I would get a chance to gauge the Danes’ immediate reaction before putting it all out there. I’m glad I took her advice.
Finally, an update!
On Wednesday evening, October 30th, my girlfriend and I were invited to dinner at an old friend’s house. He was now a PhD student in Tunisia starting his fieldwork on a project about migration. Two other PhD students whom I did not previously know joined as well: one was also beginning his fieldwork on migration, and the other worked on a different topic. It was a wonderful dinner, centered around chicken thighs, a grapefruit salad and people who did not awkwardly excuse themselves when they learned that we were not there to circlejerk over how wonderful it was to be in Tunisia.
The three PhD students had gotten their information about the Victor Dupont-situation from other sources, but had not found his PhD description like I had. Somehow they had gotten the impression that he was working on migration, which I was able to dispel. Nevertheless, they were all trying to scope out the risks of their fieldwork by seeking information about his case - and mine.
One - the host - ended up being told by his university a few weeks later, after he told them about my case, that he was not allowed to do his fieldwork in Tunisia. The other two kept working on theirs despite the risks.
The following morning, I finally got a response from my lawyer who had made it to Sfax. On this Thursday morning - the last morning of October 2024 - an update came.
In the court in Sfax, the person responsible for the file was out of office that week. “Come back next week!” they told my lawyer.
I wrote in my notes:
It is absolutely ridiculous to me that they have a travel ban that was supposed to have gone away in JULY still linger now, and they cannot give information on it because one person is out of the office.
That feeling has not changed since.
In the next episode of the School of Tunisia, I have a call with the Danish ambassador about the state of things, and my lawyer goes to Sfax once again. Meanwhile, my feature documentary film has a discrete premiere that I’m too scared to publicize for fear of repercussions. Will my situation ever be resolved?
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