Interviews with Abdel Aziz BelKhodja

My name is Abdel Aziz BelKhodja. I´m Tunisian born in Carthage. The big Carthage of history. [Carthage was an ancient civilization located in what is now Tunisia from 650 BC to 146 BC, when it was conquered by the Roman Empire. Carthage controlled much of the Mediterranean.] And I´m a publisher and a writer. It´s more easy to publish himself. And since the revolution, I´m the– how do you say?

I am the leader of Republican Party. And we are in coalition in the Pole with some parties and some independent people and some organizations. [The Democratic Modernist Pole was a coalition of four political parties and several civic initiatives that formed for Tunisia’s constituent assembly elections in October 2011.] The Pole is a political organization, and in the Pole, we find four parties, and a lot of associations, and independent personalities, Tunisian independent, big personalities.

Abdel Aziz Belkhodja is a Tunisian writer, publisher, and democracy advocate. In 2003, he penned a satirical novel called The Return of the Elephant in which he criticized the authoritarian regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Belkhodja’s narrative is set 100 years in the future where Tunisia has become an influential, democratic nation pitted against a tyrannical United States. This fanciful portrayal of the United States worked to spotlight the repressive policies being practiced by Ben Ali’s government.

Beyond his literary criticism of the Tunisian government, Belkhodja challenged the regime more directly via the Internet. In the midst of the country’s 2010-2011 revolution, he appealed to army, police, and government officials to abandon Ben Ali.

After the fall of Ben Ali, Belkhodja helped found the Tunisian Republican Party and served as its leader. The Republican Party joined the Democratic Modernist Pole, a coalition of four political parties and several civic initiatives, which ran in Tunisia’s constituent assembly elections in October 2011. He has since left politics to focus on his writing.

Belkhodja is the author of several novels and histories of Carthage including The Ashes of Carthage, The Stars of Anger, Love Mosaic, The Sign of Tanit, and Hannibal, the True Story.