Tunisia Raises Stakes Against Islamic Fundamentalists : North Africa: Trials are the biggest legal challenge yet to militants. But the crackdown could spur a backlash.

TUNIS, Tunisia — They sit in scruffy khaki slacks and sandals in the front rows of a military court, encircled by armed soldiers who stand at bored attention, a stern-faced bank of judges and a parade of tired lawyers waving Arabic legal tracts. These defendants are on trial for their lives, for the sake of God and this small Mediterranean country that has become God’s latest battleground.

“With our blood and our souls we will avenge you, Tunisia!” was the chant that boomed through the stuffy court as the first of 279 accused militants went on trial in the most severe legal challenge in recent years to the wave of Islamic fundamentalism that has swept North Africa.

While at least 20,000 Muslims have been arrested over the last year in Tunisia and in clashes with security forces in neighboring Algeria and in Egypt, government prosecutors here raised the stakes against detainees accused of trying to overthrow the government and assassinate President Zine Abidine ben Ali.

On Friday, a military court sentenced 30 leaders of the banned An Nahdha movement to life in prison, including exiled An Nahdha leader Rached Ghannouchi.

The court also handed down lesser sentences to 137 others. Trial of a second contingent of more than 100 defendants accused of forming a group that plotted to assassinate key government leaders was scheduled to conclude this weekend. The government is seeking nine death sentences.

The trial could strike a decisive blow against Islamic activism in the region. But it also could unleash a backlash against a government whose bitter crackdown against the Islamic movement has confounded Ben Ali’s initial moves to introduce a genuine multi-party democracy amid the monarchies and military dictatorships of much of the rest of North Africa.

Ben Ali launched a new era in Tunisia by overthrowing former President Habib Bourguiba in 1987 and pardoning the Islamic activists his predecessor planned to execute. He tried to co-opt the Islamic movement while his neighbors battled it, but has found himself five years later in a position ironically like that of Bourguiba.

This time, the Islamic movement in Tunisia is even stronger. And this time, it may be harder to stop.

“You cannot live in peace with these people,” said Abdallah Kallel, Tunisia’s interior minister, complaining that criticism from Western governments and human rights groups about Tunisia’s brutal crackdown against Muslims is shortsighted. “The West doesn’t want to understand that their action is directed essentially against the free world, against the West, and if Islam succeeds in taking over North Africa, they will next declare jihad (holy war) against the West.”

Some of the Islamic movement’s most articulate and best-known intellectuals, including Ghannouchi, come from Tunisia’s An Nahdha movement. They now are sheltered, to the Tunisian government’s fury, in London and Paris. The problem of how to confront An Nahdha, in the West and in Tunisia, has much to do with the dilemma over how to think about modern-day political Islam--as a terrorist threat or a legitimate voice of political opposition?

“We are against this trial because it is a false process, an injustice, it is part of the repression against us, but at the same time we need this trial to show the world who is the real plotter, who has committed violence and who is against democracy: Is it the Islamic movement, or is it the government?” said Habib Mukni, an An Nahdha leader who was one of the 279 accused but who is now living under political asylum in France.

“It’s true that we decided to fight Ben Ali, because when we held out our hand to talk, to work with him, he refused and he chose instead repression, he arrested our people and he killed our friends under torture,” Mukni said. “We decided to (oppose) him. But how? Politically. Mobilization in the schools, in unions, in the street. This . . . is normal. It isn’t criminal.

“Why would we kill Ben Ali?” he asked. “We want to change the system, and you don’t change the system through violence, you change it by developing a political base.”

Tunisian officials have presented scores of photographs of arms caches allegedly seized from Muslim activists to show that someone was planning something. The photos show dozens of rifles, Molotov cocktails and other small explosives, many reportedly found in a large cache in a mountain cave.

Prosecutors say they have evidence--documents and testimony--to show that exiled An Nahdha chief Ghannouchi, while in Algeria, contracted to acquire a Stinger missile from Muslim rebels in Afghanistan and set in force a plan to haul the weapon across the Tunisian border and launch it at Ben Ali’s plane as it left Tunis-Carthage International Airport.

The government alleges that An Nahdha planned to assassinate other key ministers and put a transitional Islamic government in place headed by the An Nahdha leadership and former Tunisian Prime Minister Mohammed Mzali, also exiled in Paris.

But except for the weapons, which Islamic leaders say were probably stores amassed by earlier violent Islamic groups before the “peaceful” An Nahdha leadership took over, none of this evidence has been made public.

Confessions that appear to corroborate the government’s story were obtained by torture, according to defense lawyers, Islamic leaders and human rights groups, including Amnesty International.

Tunisian officials admit that there have been “isolated” cases of police abuse but say they have moved swiftly to correct it; 47 officers will go on trial in the next few months.

Where did Tunisia’s democratic experiment with Islam go wrong? Islamic leaders say the problem began during legislative elections in 1989, when Islamic candidates, allowed to run as independents, gained between 17% and 33% of the vote, a showing that reportedly alarmed Ben Ali.

The government grew even more wary when An Nahdha sponsored street demonstrations during the Persian Gulf War in 1991, analysts say, and was convinced that the movement had to be halted when the legalized Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria made a huge showing at the polls, prompting a military takeover.

Tunisians like to view their nation as considerably different from Algeria, where huge economic problems, housing shortages and cultural discontent have made the country ripe for fundamentalism. But Tunisia, they say, has a relatively vibrant, agriculture-based economy and has for years been one of the most modern and Westernized lands in the region.

Most Tunisians, government officials say, have become disillusioned with the Islamic movement, especially after an attack by fundamentalists on a ruling party office in which two security guards were burned, one fatally. But the government still seems worried.

“This current is violent, dogmatic, totalitarian, it is taking over the Arab world like a kind of evil disease, and its first inroads are in countries like Tunisia, Egypt and Jordan which have been the first to talk about democracy, liberty and respect for human rights,” government spokesman Slah Maaoui said.