The Case for The Times of Tunis
When the world wants to understand Tunisia, it usually waits for a crisis. A boat goes down off Sfax. A president suspends a parliament. A young vendor in a town most foreign editors could not place on a map sets himself alight, and within weeks the word Tunisia carries the weight of a whole region's hopes. The satellite trucks arrive. Then they leave. And the country goes back to explaining itself to itself, in Arabic and in French, for an audience of roughly twelve million.
Most of the world meets Tunisia through that narrow opening, at its worst moments and on someone else's schedule. The rest of the time the country goes largely unread abroad, and so does much of the region. Its economy, its courts, its long argument over how it should be governed, the daily choices of twelve million people: all of it is more complicated, and more interesting, than the headlines have room for. A country known only by its emergencies is easy to pity and easy to dismiss. It is harder to understand, and understanding is what this paper is for.
We begin at a difficult time. Across the world, the politics of suspicion is winning arguments. The claim that peoples are split by faith and culture into blocs destined to collide has moved from the fringe into serious rooms, and it now shapes how governments treat one another and how citizens treat their neighbors. It is a convenient idea, and it grows wherever people know little about each other. Most Tunisians, like most people anywhere, want reasonable things: work, safety, a fair hearing, a decent future for their children. The distance between what they want and what others assume about them is exactly the space a newspaper can close.
Tunisia already speaks to itself, and to the Arab and Francophone worlds, through a press that has done serious work for generations in Arabic and in French. This paper adds English, for a practical reason. English is the working language of the wider world: of the institutions that lend, the companies that invest, the diplomats who report home, and the readers from Lagos to Washington who will never follow a story told in the other two. To be understood by them, the country has to speak in a language they share. We write that language from inside Tunisia, by people who live here and report what they see.
The same holds for the diaspora, and it matters more than the country tends to admit. More than a million Tunisians live abroad, a growing number of them working and raising families in English, across Europe, the Gulf, and North America. They are among Tunisia's best educated and best connected citizens, and most of them want to stay close to home. A serious paper they can actually read keeps that connection alive, and that connection is an asset the country cannot afford to waste.
We make no grand claims for ourselves. We are a new and modest paper, we will get things wrong, and we will correct them in the open. Our purpose is plain: to show this country and this region at their best, to report their problems honestly, and to give outsiders a place they can trust to understand both. We want to open doors, for those who come to Tunisia and for Tunisians reaching out to the world.
In a time when it has become easy to turn other people into strangers, the work of explaining one place clearly to another is worth doing, and it carries real weight. Tunisia has always sat where Africa, Europe, and the Arab world meet, and it has a good deal to say about how they can live alongside one another. We intend to help it say so.
Welcome to The Times of Tunis.