Interviews with Abdel Aziz BelKhodja

In ten years, or in 20 years, I like Tunisia to be the giant between the north and the south. And I want it to be the first success in the Arabic societies. You know, because in Arabic societies, no one succeeds in political system, or in economic system, or in cultural system.

We have no success, okay. That´s why we have a lot of problems. And I think that Tunisia can do it but to do it we must really be very open to culture, and to intelligence, you know. And to be open to intelligence, and to culture we must have freedom. And we must really defend our freedom.

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.