1945 -
Tunisian opposition leader, human-rights activist, writer, physician.
Moncef Marzouki, a Tunisian neurological and public-health specialist trained in France (1973), became a human-rights advocate after observing medical experiments on patients. He returned to Tunisia in 1979 and founded the Center for Community Medicine in the slums of Sousse, south of Tunis. Marzouki cofounded the African Network for Prevention of Child Abuse (1981) and joined the Tunisian League for Human Rights (LTDH), becoming its vice president (1987) and president (1989 - 1994).
In 1991 his opposition to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait drew Western praise, but the Tunisian government retaliated by neutering the LTDH in 1992. In 1993 Marzouki and seventeen others launched the National Committee for the Defense of Prisoners of Conscience. They were arrested, and he resigned after it was taken over by supporters of the regime.
In 1994 he ran for the presidency even though there was no provision for unapproved candidates, accusing the regime of human-rights violations and arguing that its experiment with democracy and the anti-Islamist crackdown were excuses for deposing Habib Bourguiba. Without human rights, the ideological vacuum in which secularist and Islamist extremisms flourished would persist. He was imprisoned for propagating false news.
Released after four months, Marzouki was thrice rearrested (in 1996 following a LTDH human-rights report, in 1999 at election time, and in 2000 after allying with exiled Islamists) and twice imprisoned. In 1998 he was founding spokesperson for the National Committee for Liberties (CNLT) and president of the Arab Commission of Human Rights. He subsequently established the Congress for the Republic (CPR), uniting democratic secularists and Islamists against President Ben Ali's "constitutional putsch." From 2002, he ran the CPR from France.
Bibliography
Marzouki, Moncef. Second Independence, or For a DemocraticArab State. Beirut, Lebanon: Dar al-Kunuz alAdabiyah, 1996.
Moncef Marzouki web site. Available from http://www.globalprevention.com/news.htm.
— GEORGE R. WILKES
