By Tarek Amara and Sonia Ounissi
Tunisian technician Momo Battar says he has dated many women but that, without the Internet, he would never have found the woman of his dreams.
"She has her own particular enchantment and has found the way to my heart," the 32-year-old says. "We will set up home and start a family soon."
Battar's story is no longer a rare exception in Tunisian society, where love was once considered taboo among the young, and picking husbands and wives was the privilege of parents.
Improvements in living standards, advances in women's rights and the influence of Western culture have prompted many young Tunisians to look beyond their immediate environment for fulfillment.
Thousands have taken to the Internet to strike up relationships with people in the next village or on another continent.
Some say it is cheaper than meeting in a cafe, others that the anonymity of the Internet allows them to overcome shyness.
For 27-year-old barman Adnen, it offered him a ticket to Belgium, where his new e-girlfriend awaits as he prepares the immigration papers.
FOUR HOURS A DAY
When Tunisia hosted an international conference on the Internet last November, it pledged to create a cybercafe in each village and an e-mail address for each person by 2009.
According to official figures, a tenth of Tunisia's 10 million people are already Internet subscribers and 30 percent of citizens have an electronic address.
About a quarter of the 20,000 users of popular French language chat room
"I spend four hours daily chatting. It's not shameful to get to know other people and form a relationship through the Internet," said Imen, a university student.
"Technology was made to benefit from and that's what we're doing," she says.
Mimi, 28, said the Internet had removed borders and smoothed over cultural and religious differences, giving her a wider choice in her search for the ideal man.
"Tunisia's young are so open to different cultures with various norms that relationships through the Net have become a fact of life," said Mehdi Mabrouk, a sociologist at Tunisia's Universite Des Sciences Humaines de 9 Avril.
He said some young people seek love on the Internet as they don't want to unveil the hidden parts of their personalities.
"We must not forget that the Internet is a kind of mask, which encourages a fair number of youths and adults to have such experiences (of love) without fear of the results."
STIFLING DEBATE
But even as love blossoms in cyberspace, critics of the government say the authorities are muzzling other forms of Internet debate as never before.
U.S.-based Human Rights Watch said last year that Tunisia has been restricting access to parts of the Web and jailing citizens for expressing their opinions on the Internet.
The government dismissed the report. "The access to the Internet is free in the country. About 1 million users benefit from the services of the World Wide Web," an official said.
Researchers from the group and the university-based Open Net initiative tested access to 1,947 sites from around the world last September and found that 182 of them were blocked to readers in Tunisia.
One cybercafe owner, who asked not to be named, said state repression had played a part in the rise of dating chat rooms because the forced closure of many news and information sites means love is one of the few topics that can still be discussed.
In a sign the government had stepped up monitoring of the Web, six people from the eastern town of Jerjis were jailed in late 2004 for using the Internet for "terrorist" crimes. They were freed in February under an amnesty for 1,600 detainees.
One year ago, a Tunisian court imprisoned lawyer Mohamed Abbou for
3-1/2 years for publishing controversial articles on the Internet, according to lawyers and human right activists.The government said Abbou was jailed for inciting the population to break the law and violence against a female lawyer.
Copyright 2006 Reuters Limited.
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