Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security (15 page)

According to Hibou, it was government policy to cordon off the tourist trade this way, to shield foreigners from Tunisian realities, and to reserve the sector for well-connected insiders.
¹¹
The isolation also allowed for another dimension that added to public discomfort with the whole industry: the sanctioned use of some resorts for sex tourism.

At Kelibia’s covered market, a fishmonger swabbing the floor in front of his glistening display had plenty to say about real estate. “Four or five families control most of the land in this town,” he reckoned. “Then there’s the new harbor development, paid for with European funds. They cemented over our old port with it. And half the money was stolen.”

The fishmonger’s complaint highlights the role that international loans and subsidies often play, in Tunisia as elsewhere, in actively feeding kleptocracy. Moroccans complain about an unnecessary high-speed rail line linking their capital to the commercial hub, Casablanca. Their criticisms, like that of the fishmonger, illustrate that it is not just humanitarian aid in crisis or postconflict environments that gets captured as a “rent” by kleptocratic networks. Infrastructure grants—or worse, loans—supposedly provided after unhurried deliberation, serve the same purpose in acutely corrupt countries.

Customs was another favored entry point into the Tunisian economy for the Trabelsi clique: the “juiciest spot,” in the words of Amine Ghali, who reviewed thousands of citizen complaints as part of an anticorruption commission that began work after the 2011 revolution. Interim Transport Minister Yassine Brahim was speechless at the depth and breadth of the corruption at the Port of Tunis when he visited it upon taking up his duties in early 2011.

A former customs official confirmed the allegations of many Tunisian businessmen and observers: that brokers working for the Trabelsi clan had their cargoes systematically whisked through, free of dues. “I
argued with my director general about it,” he told me. “And I got moved to an out-of-the-way border post.”

The anticorruption commission’s Ghali described an altercation he witnessed at the customshouse in the port of Rades: “A new captain was trying to scan a container. The importer made a call on his cell phone, and a Trabelsi cousin arrived, strode up to the customs official, and slapped him in the face, right in front of me. Then he grabbed the scanner out of his hand, and threw it in his car and drove off.”

The result, most Tunisians agree, was a market flooded with cheap imported consumer goods that undermined both local industry and importers not wired into the network. Such distortions fray an economy, exacerbate unemployment, and reduce the resilience of a country like Tunisia to demographic pressures or global downturns.

The aspect of Tunisia’s kleptocracy that struck me the most was the way it made use of the finance ministry. “They would use audits to subjugate people,” said Murad Louhichi, a tax collector who witnessed the goings-on for years. “There’s a lot of complex paperwork and formalities, which can be swept aside—or not.” Tunisians, that is, were openly requesting tax waivers and getting them. However, “assessors would rarely make someone’s file go away completely. They would put it on the bottom of the pile. The permissiveness could always be revoked. Nonpayment of taxes was used as a kind of welfare program to secure obedience. Or to punish someone who was too independent.” A sudden audit and a claim for payment in full could shutter any business whose owner resisted the whim of a Ben Ali relative.

I was floored to learn of this ploy. The Tunisian version of the IRS—the ultimate symbol of a government bureaucracy—had been transformed into a tool in the hands of the kleptocratic network, enforcing its hold over an entire population.

Entrepreneurs across Tunisia confirmed such practices. “Ben Ali was fine,” observed a rug merchant in the historic desert citadel of Kairouane, “only he was addicted to money. All the big businesses had to pay kickbacks to operate. If you hesitated, the son-in-law was sent to attack. He’d demand a share, and if you balked, your business was ruined.”

An agricultural worker from the southern oasis of Tozeur, who used
to grow Tunisia’s highly prized
deglet nour
dates, echoed with a grimace: “The Trabelsis would enter your business. If you refused, they would break you. Any way at all: they’d get your loans called in, cancel your authorization, audit your taxes.”
¹²

In the lush, silent, cathedrallike date plantations in Tozeur and other oases of Tunisia’s deep south, the harvest results from an intimate and age-old symbiosis between men and trees. In early spring leather-skinned cultivators shimmy barefoot up the striated trunks to daub pollen onto the pistils of each flower; in the fall they ascend again to cut the laden branches of fruit. Here government pressure could be even more diabolical—the public water authority controls the flow of the precious liquid through great pipes that traverse the plots. A Trabelsi-linked exporter seeking to increase his margins by way of a discounted wholesale price could twist a grower’s arm by cutting the water to his land.

As in Egypt, corruption was not confined to the top of the Tunisian government—it abounded at subnational levels too. Villagers complained about preferential distribution of government-financed microcredits or subsidized seed and fertilizer. “The local party boss decided who got them,” explained one small farmer, whose sickly calf was being examined by a veterinarian in the northeastern district of Nabeul. “He would give it to people who did things for him: worked on his house, or brought him gifts of honey or eggs”—what John of Salisbury referred to as “services and works that were not otherwise owed.”
¹³

Such “petty corruption” was allowed to flourish on the local level. But in Tunisia, unlike Egypt or Afghanistan, it was no licensed free-for-all. The Ben Ali network kept a close eye on the practices, by way of a fretwork of local ruling party cells.
¹⁴
Infractions were observed and then held over people’s heads—officials and citizens alike—to lock in the loyalty of those who indulged. “The government would turn a blind eye to the petty corruption,” summed up Ghali, of the anticorruption commission, “to ensure that officials followed orders later.”

In other words, state capture in Tunisia was not carried out through a parallel structure that operated alongside an increasingly marginalized
bureaucracy, as in Egypt. Rather, the Tunisian bureaucracy itself was placed in the service of corruption.
^†

As in Egypt, the legalities added up marvelously on paper. “They made villainous laws to circumvent law by law,” the anticorruption activist Taoufiq Chamari exclaimed to me in 2011. Or to put it the way the English churchman did more than 850 years earlier: “Who is more iniquitous than he [who] . . . destroys law by law and is beyond the law, even while he burdens others with the law.”
¹⁵

In Tunisia, the well-oiled, efficient, and obedient bureaucracy, manned by compliant tax collectors or customs agents, implemented those laws—or not—according to the requirements of the kleptocrats in power.

Police helped with enforcement, but according to most Tunisians they were not as consistently brutal as their Egyptian counterparts.
¹⁶
“Ben Ali was too afraid of damaging his international image,” said tax collector Louhichi. “There were lots of other ways to harass people.” The marginalized army played no part in this system at all.

Because the Tunisian dictatorship was able to extort submission with comparatively little recourse to such classic abuses as torture or arbitrary detentions, Tunisian activists have introduced a novel concept into human rights discourse. They favor expanding the understanding of “gross violations” of human rights to include structured economic crime. “The idea is gaining ground among experts from the International Court of Justice and the UN system we discuss it with,” says one of its proponents, the anticorruption commission’s Ghali, who is also deputy director of the Kawakibi Democracy Transition Center. In a global first, “violations of social and economic rights” are covered in the remit of the transitional justice law passed in late 2013.

The idea is catching on with Tunisia’s neighbors too. Drafts of Libya’s law also referred to the Qaddhafi regime’s economic crimes. Ehab el-Khattat, a member of Egypt’s first postrevolution senate, was among several legislators who pushed to launch a transitional justice process there. “If there’s no clear connection to political corruption within transitional
justice procedures, then a separate channel should be devoted just to that,” he told me. “If we don’t do anything about it, we stand accountable before the people—and maybe there will be another revolution, against us.”

Even in famously secular Tunisia, however, some fear a growing radicalization if Ben Ali–era officials and business magnates are not held accountable, and corrupt practices are not reformed. As in Egypt, an Islamist party, Ennahda, won the first postrevolution elections. In the capital, Tunis, the divide between Ennahda and the secular opposition is cast in cultural terms. But farther south, it is an ongoing sense of political and economic exclusion that bolsters Ennahda, as well as resentment of residual Ben Ali–era networks in local government.

In the southern city of Mednine, in early 2014, a cross-section of engaged citizens, including an unemployed blind man, a pharmacist, and two twenty-something youth services department employees, all indicated a preference for Ennahda—not for religious reasons, but as the most credible alternative to the old system. “We don’t trust them,” said Intissar Souidi, a pharmacist at the public hospital, referring to former officials. “They stole, they abused, they imprisoned people. They had their turn at governing, and they failed. At least with Ennahda, we have people who didn’t steal.”

As in Egypt, moreover, a heretofore-invisible Salafi movement emerged after the 2011 revolution. Gloves for women who wear full
niqab
, or head-to-toe veiling—unheard of even in Afghanistan—could be seen hanging up for sale in the Tunis bazaar. The avowed Salafi acolyte Marwan Jedda explains his orientation this way: “People wanted to bring down corruption and repression [in 2011], but neither has fallen yet. Corruption has increased in Tunisia. People demanded work, freedom, and dignity. As an Islamist, I have a solution. The second revolution will be an Islamic revolution.”
¹⁷

One group that Jedda describes as a “rising power” and praises as unequivocally “opposed to this system”—a “competing force in the street and for youth”—is the violent Tunisian jihadi movement Ansar al-Sharia. Accused of orchestrating the assassination of an Afghan resistance leader two days before the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, it is led by a radical Tunisian preacher, Sayf Allah Ibn Hussein,
or Abu Iyadh. On September 14, 2012—after the U.S. ambassador to Libya was killed in Benghazi by the group’s Libyan affiliate—Abu Iyadh orchestrated an unprecedented attack on the U.S. embassy in Tunis. Police surrounded the mosque from which Abu Iyadh encouraged the crowds, but he somehow escaped—and continued to broadcast jihadi exhortations in local media long afterward.

Photojournalist Talel Nacer, who hails from the impoverished inland mining city of Gafsa, and whose own father is a mild-mannered Salafi imam, warns that mainstream politicians “keep ignoring the serious economic issues that matter: I mean social justice and punishment for the people who stole. There are already strains within the Islamists. If things go on this way, the youth will flock to the Salafis.”

*
The use of the civil service in Tunisia as an instrument of kleptocratic rule, which seemed so dramatically novel to me from the perspective of Afghanistan, turns out to be common to kleptocracies with more developed institutional architectures. This pattern characterizes all the examples in these chapters, to a certain degree. Still, Tunisia stands out as one of the more comprehensive versions, and one of the better mannered.

†
For a version of the state capture diagram tailored to Tunisia, please see the
Appendix
.

CHAPTER NINE

Variation 3: The Post-Soviet Kleptocratic Autocracy

Uzbekistan, ca. 2013

“T
he
first
violation of human rights is corruption!” Uzbek activist Elena Urlaeva nearly hugs me when I try out the “Tunisian novelty” on her: the notion that acute, structured state corruption might constitute a human rights issue.

Her hair a wispy blond, her skin gone soft, Urlaeva looks at least sixty. She is a mainstay of the Uzbek human rights community, a veteran of legal challenges to arbitrary detentions—and of a few stints behind bars herself—of solitary vigils, in front-and-back poster-board panels that spell out in urgent Magic Marker the details of the abuse she’s protesting.

“We talk about child labor, and torture, and religious freedom. We talk about them separately from corruption. But corruption is the reason for everything, the means of existence of the whole system.”

Urlaeva is among a handful of crusty human rights activists who are called upon periodically by the U.S. embassy in Tashkent to speak to visitors. That is where I meet her, in a clean, windowless conference room. Observers suggest that the dictatorship of Islam Karimov, who has ruled Uzbekistan since 1990, tolerates them grudgingly, perhaps because it is not afraid of them: they don’t have much of a following.

“There are fewer and fewer activists,” Urlaeva’s colleague Surat
Ikramov, of the Initiative Group of Independent Human Rights Defenders, concedes bitterly. “We’re all fifty-plus years old.”

What the regime
is
afraid of, says Masha Lisitsyna, Central Asia program director at the Open Society Foundations, is anyone digging into corruption. “If you do general human rights work, you may suffer,” she says. “But investigating economic abuses—you can get killed for that, because it touches the system.”

The other activity the Karimov government fears is the open practice of Islam. Neighborhood mosques are fitted with video cameras. Imams are vetted by the ministry of religious affairs. “Eleven thousand believers are in prison today,” estimates Ikramov, who monitors court cases. “There are more than seven hundred in jail on terrorism charges, but the prosecutor doesn’t have any real evidence.”