Nawaat / Sami Ben Gharbia
Solea V / 07.10 / 13:20
Sami Ben Gharbia is a Tunisian human rights campaigner and blogger who lives in exile in the Netherlands. He is a co-founder of Nawaat.org and was Advocacy Director at Global Voices community.
The goal of Nawaat is to provide a public platform for Tunisian civil voices and debates free of censorship. Nawaat aggregates articles, visual media, and other data from a variety of sources to provide a forum for citizen journalists to express their opinions on current events, and the site does not receive any donations from political parties.
Sami grew up in a country and region where freedom of speech was restricted as it was the biggest threat to despotic regimes, in contradiction to sayings of old Islamic philosophers and logicians who presented Man as a "speaking animal". Blogging gave him back the quintessence of his humanity. In his opinion, freedom of speech and blogging are inextricably intertwined.
In early 1998, he was arrested and interrogated by the Tunisian State Security about his activities and travels. After realizing that this was just the beginning of a cycle of harassment and persecutions, he fled Tunisia. In 2003, Sami started his personal homepage and published the first Tunisian e-book "Borj Erroumi XL."
