L03-200 FDTL Meeting

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February 5: First major political rally of the Democratic Forum for Labor and Freedoms (FDTL) at the Tunis Convention Center. One of the founding members and Secretary-General of the FDTL is Dr. Mustapha Ben Jaafar. Biography: After attending high school at Collège Sadiki from 1950 to 1956, he joined the ruling Neo-Destour party a few years later; he was also active in the General Union of Tunisian Students while studying medicine in France until 1968.¹ Shocked by the dismissal of Minister Ahmed Ben Salah in 1969 and then by the failure of the ruling party’s congress (which had since become the Destourian Socialist Party) in 1970, Ben Jaafar returned from France and contacted party dissidents, gathered around Ahmed Mestiri, and helped found the weekly newspaper *Erraï* (L’Opinion) and the Council for Freedoms in 1976, the predecessor of the Tunisian Human Rights League (LTDH)¹. A founding member of the Movement of Socialist Democrats in 1978, he simultaneously held a professorship at the Tunis Faculty of Medicine, while serving as head of the radiology department at the Salah-Azaïz Institute and later at La Rabta University Hospital in Tunis beginning in 1981¹. It was in this context that he founded the union of university hospital physicians in 1977. After coming into conflict with the leader of the MDS, Mohamed Moada, Ben Jaafar and other members of the political bureau were expelled from the party at the 1992 congress.¹ Vice President of the LTDH from 1986 to 1994, he founded his own party, the Democratic Forum for Labor and Freedoms (FDTL), in 1994 and helped establish the National Council for Freedoms in Tunisia four years later.¹ After the FDTL was legalized in 2002, he succeeded in organizing the founding convention in 2009, a few months before the presidential election on October 25, 2009, in which he decided to run. Although the incumbent president, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali,

L03-256 · 2011

L03-255 · 2011

L03-254 · 2011

L03-253 · 2011

February 5: First major political rally of the Democratic Forum for Labor and Freedoms (FDTL) at the Tunis Convention Center. One of the founding members and Secretary General of the FDTL is Dr. Mustapha Ben Jaafar, a former founding member of the Movement of Socialist Democrats (MDS). Founder and former Secretary-General of the Union of University Hospital Physicians, affiliated with the General Union of Tunisian Workers (UGTT); Former vice president of the Tunisian League for Human Rights (LTDH), he is also a founding member of the National Council for Freedoms in Tunisia (CNLT).

L03-252 · 2011