{"id":248,"date":"2005-11-16T03:03:52","date_gmt":"2005-11-16T07:03:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/2005\/11\/16\/smsi-beginning-with-a-bang\/"},"modified":"2005-11-16T03:03:52","modified_gmt":"2005-11-16T07:03:52","slug":"smsi-beginning-with-a-bang","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/2005\/11\/16\/smsi-beginning-with-a-bang\/","title":{"rendered":"`SMSI &#8211; beginning with a bang"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name='a1139'><\/a><\/p>\n<p>First trial : see how many people can fit into 4,000 seats&#8230; the<br \/>\nopening session was quiet, packed, and not at all sensational.&nbsp;<br \/>\nThe audience was too large for them to carry out their desired<br \/>\nbadge-check (getting thousands of people in and out of a two-door<br \/>\nbadge-checking bottleneck in half an hour : difficult in New York with<br \/>\na little planning; impossible in Tunis on a moment&#8217;s notice), so<br \/>\ndespite not having found the place to pick up my pass, I was able to<br \/>\nstay for it.<\/p>\n<p>The<br \/>\npresentation by Tunisia&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Zine_El_Abidine_Ben_Ali\">President Ben Ali<\/a> would be replayed over the<br \/>\ncourse of the week, on national television, and on the TVs embedded in<br \/>\nbuses to and from the Kram Palexpo hosting SMSI\/WSIS, hundreds of<br \/>\ntimes. By the time I had been in Tunis four days, I was so used to the<br \/>\ninclusion of Ben Ali&#8217;s face in every publication and many<br \/>\nestablishments, I no longer noticed it.&nbsp; <\/p>\n<p>The most sensational content was understated and between the lines;<br \/>\npresenters <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">commenting <\/span>on how &#8216;certain countries&#8217; attending the summit<br \/>\ndisrespect the rights of their citizens &#8211; particularly those who disagree with the administration; and on the<br \/>\nholding of strawman<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\"> elections<\/span><br \/>\nin countries where political expression is censored.&nbsp; Noone from<br \/>\nTunisia responded to any of these comments, and it is the kind of<br \/>\nsubject that one enters into with local residents at great social peril<br \/>\n(I feel certain that this is a social nuance exaggerated by <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">proximity <\/span>to<br \/>\ncentral Tunis).&nbsp; I almost ended up at a gathering of the local<br \/>\nhuman rights group today, which would have been fascinating &#8212; if only<br \/>\nbecause I might have gotten sincere responses to simple questions about<br \/>\nlife here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>First trial : see how many people can fit into 4,000 seats&#8230; the opening session was quiet, packed, and not at all sensational.&nbsp; The audience was too large for them to carry out their desired badge-check (getting thousands of people in and out of a two-door badge-checking bottleneck in half an hour : difficult in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":135,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[211],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-international"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/135"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=248"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}