Electro Music Ambassador’s French Touch

– By Scott Sayare, for The International Herald Tribune –

Pedro Winter. Photo Credit: Mira Shemeikka

PARIS — Pedro Winter loves electronic music, but perhaps not as much as electronic music loves Pedro Winter.

Mr. Winter, 36, is the gangly and genial godfather of the French electro scene, the manager, producer and D.J. widely credited with the rise and global spread of the eclectic genre known as French Touch. As a manager, Mr. Winter was behind the electro-wizardry of Daft Punk, the duo that brought French house to the mainstream beginning in the late 1990s. More recently he discovered, nurtured and produced Justice, whose heady, rock-inspired nu-disco is wildly popular, and hailed as some of the most inventive and listenable electronic music of the day.

Mr. Winter’s label, Ed Banger Records — as in “head-banger,” pronounced as a Frenchman might — also produces Breakbot, SebastiAn, Uffie and most of the best French Touch acts of the moment, including Mr. Winter himself, under the stage name Busy P. The French press has likened him to Brian Epstein, the manager who ushered The Beatles to fame, and Henri Belolo, the French disco impresario behind The Village People. The unassuming magnate at the core of a small empire of cool, he sees himself as a smiling ambassador of electronic music to the world at large.

“I have absolutely no interest in reaching out only to the insiders and the people who already know electronic music — on the contrary,” Mr. Winter said in an interview in his storefront office in the 18th Arrondissement, a sort of considered catastrophe of Pop Art reproductions, action figures, office supplies, vinyls and cassettes, special edition hats, shoes and skateboards. Standing near the foot of his cluttered desk is a life-size replica of E.T., with big, blue inquisitive eyes.

His office itself seems a fitting symbol of French Touch, a mess of styles new and old thrown together, cut, flipped and rehashed into something original, a sort of finely tuned musical bricolage.

“In France, the lucky thing for our country is that we’re just as influenced by black American music as by dictatorial German music, English rock and our own culture of chanson française,” Mr. Winter said. “Even if we’re obviously not at the center of the world, I have the impression that Paris and France are at the crossroads of all these musical cultures, and we digest them in our own way and spit them out again.”

In 2009, Ed Banger Records and Mr. Winter’s licensing company, Headbangers Publishing, turned €1 million, or $1.3 million, in profit, a notable achievement given the relative obscurity of electronic music, and given that the boutique label represents only about a dozen artists, most of them discovered and cultivated by Mr. Winter.

“It’s really thanks to him that we’re making music today,” said Gaspard Augé, 32, one half of the Justice duo. Mr. Winter met Mr. Augé and his partner in the band, Xavier de Rosnay, at a now-famous raclette dinner at the Paris apartment of Mr. Augé’s mother in 2003. At the time, the two were working as graphic designers, but had mixed a track for a local radio contest — it did not win — and played it after dinner for Mr. Winter. He told them to drop everything to make music. They signed a contract the next day.

That first song, released in 2003 by Ed Banger as “We Are Your Friends,” proved a dance floor phenomenon, and has been called a sort of generational anthem. The label’s second release, the single sold more than 250,000 copies, according to Mr. Winter. Justice’s first full album, “†,” released in 2007, has sold 800,000 copies worldwide, an extraordinary success in the realm of electronic music.

The band’s second album, “Audio, Video, Disco,” was released late last year to wide praise. Mr. Winter effectively serves as a “third member” of Justice, Mr. Augé said, brainstorming musical directions and offering constant encouragement.

Mr. Winter balked when asked — and he is often asked — why he, in particular, has met with such success.

Pedro Winter. Photo Credit: THEfunkyman

“Because I’m the Chosen One!” he joked in French, speaking with the clipped cadence of a lifelong Parisian. “It would be a bit out of place for me to point to some special talent, that’s not me. But what I know, in any case — and I hope you can hear it when I talk and you can see it in my eyes – is the passion with which I do this job. And I love this music.”

Raised in Paris with the name “Pierre” — he adopted “Pedro” in the 1990s — he first discovered electro in 1992, he said, obsessing over Deee-Lite’s track “What Is Love?” in particular.

“I had the good luck to have been blown away by this music,” he said, “and to have never recovered.”

Those comments could perhaps come from any number of devoted producers or media-savvy businessmen. But Mr. Winter’s excitement about music is a matter of renown in Paris, and a valuable commodity in the electro world, where the shy and introverted — Daft Punk and Justice among them — are the norm.

“He’s someone with so much enthusiasm and generosity, who believes so much in his projects that he can get you to sign on even if you’re unconvinced,” said Jean-Daniel Beauvallet, an editor-in-chief at the French musical weekly Les Inrockuptibles, who has known the producer for years. Mr. Winter is critical to his artists, Mr. Beauvallet said, “because he reassures them, he counsels them, he forces them to be more and more bold.”

“You can’t say no to Pedro Winter,” he said.

Mr. Augé of Justice described him as a giddy fan, whose excitement infuses the Ed Banger troupe.

“He’s a sort of eternal adolescent,” he said. “That’s what’s precious.”

For all his childlike exuberance, Mr. Winter is also known as a redoubtable negotiator. At the age of 20, he dropped out of law school to manage Daft Punk, for whom he oversaw collaborations and business dealings, including the group’s 2007 departure from EMI, to whom they owed an additional studio album. In France, he is credited with bringing the attitude and “violence” of hip-hop contract negotiations to the electronic realm, Mr. Beauvallet said. He was known for a time as the “King of ‘No.”’

“He has no hang ups vis-à-vis business, while French managers often have some reticence about talking about money,” Mr. Beauvallet said. Many in the French music business were shocked. “They weren’t expecting a French group to have the nerve, almost the arrogance, to say, ‘Well, it’s this or it’s nothing,”’ he said.

Since those early years, Mr. Winter’s ambitions have broadened, and he now hopes to lead his “kids,” as he calls his listeners, into new musical territory, exposing them bit by bit to sounds they might not otherwise discover or care to explore.

Pedro Winter, behind the scenes. Photo Credit: Guillaume Simon

He listens widely and always. Mr. Winter was weaned on skate culture, the MTV heavy metal show “Headbangers Ball,” the Beastie Boys, Led Zeppelin, Run DMC and The Cure. Lately, he has been drawn to the pop-folk of Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes and Herman Dune. A print of the album cover from “Dark Side of the Moon” hangs on a wall in his office.

“Today you push play on your iPod and you’re listening to EPMD, and a track later you get the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and the track after that you get Michael Jackson, and a track later you get Daft Punk,” Mr. Winter said. “That’s what I want to preach as culture.”

Note: A version of this text originally appeared in The International Herald Tribune on January 27, 2012.

Paris Journal: Long Pursuit of Justice Takes a Father Beyond the Law

– By Scott Sayare, for The New York Times –

In the courtyard of the Palais de Justice in Paris. Photo Credit: Dave Ciskowski

PARIS — In the dark early hours of an October morning in 2009, acting on an anonymous tip, police officers in the French city of Mulhouse picked up an elderly German doctor who had been left — bound, beaten and bleeding — in a street near the municipal courthouse. The man, Dieter Krombach, had been kidnapped outside his home in Germany and secreted across the border into France, where there was a warrant for his arrest in connection with the death of a French girl nearly three decades ago.

Earlier that morning, near Toulouse, André Bamberski lifted a ringing telephone. A voice informed him that the doctor was in Mulhouse. Mr. Bamberski gathered his things and left immediately. He took with him the 20,000 euros (then about $29,800) he had promised the abductors.

Mr. Bamberski, 74, will soon be tried for his involvement in the kidnapping. But the events of that morning were a victory for him, the culmination of nearly 30 years spent in obsessive pursuit of Dr. Krombach, the man who seduced and married his former wife, split his family and, Mr. Bamberski and the French authorities contend, raped and killed his 14-year-old daughter, Kalinka, in 1982.

In the years after the girl’s death, the doctor came to be known in Germany as a sexual predator; in 1997 he was convicted of drugging and raping a teenage patient. Dr. Krombach, now 76, had nonetheless lived largely untroubled in Germany, safe behind a German refusal to extradite him for trial in France.

Now on French soil, however, he is being tried on a murder charge in Paris, where he and his accuser, both weak with age, face each other in a windowless courtroom. Mr. Bamberski, who has joined himself to the state’s case, as is his right under French law, sits before a panel of robed judges, flanked by his lawyers and stacks of bulging files, the accumulation of decades of investigation, occasionally raising a shaky index finger in a request to intervene.

Mr. Bamberski has devoted half a lifetime to seeing Dr. Krombach brought before a court, drawing broad popular admiration in France. In recent years, he made regular visits to Germany to be sure the doctor had not vanished; more than once, he said, he confronted Dr. Krombach at his door, vowing never to leave him in peace.

Mr. Bamberski has believed that the German doctor raped and killed his daughter since first reading an initial autopsy report, in 1982.

“I do not ‘suspect,’ I do not ‘imagine,’ ” Mr. Bamberski, a retired accountant, said in an interview. “I am certain.”

He explained his thinking. “It is not possible that a young girl of less than 15, in excellent health, in great physical shape, and who, in addition, was splendid and very smart, should die, just like that, without anyone knowing about it — that we should forget her,” he said.

On the morning of July 10, 1982, the body of Kalinka Bamberski was found in her bed at the home of her stepfather, Dr. Krombach, in the lakeside town of Lindau, Germany. An initial autopsy established no cause of death.

But investigators found damage to the girl’s vagina, which also contained a whitish substance that was never tested or identified. Examiners noted an injection mark on her right forearm; Dr. Krombach explained that he had injected her with an iron supplement, Kobalt-Ferrlecit, on the evening of her death, to help her tan more quickly in the sun. Only later did he admit to giving the girl a tranquilizer pill, as well. He now says the iron injection was meant to treat an anemic condition.

No blood tests were conducted at the autopsy. And Dr. Krombach, a local notable, was present during the examination, according to the coroner’s report.

Later medical reports found that Kalinka had died after inhaling her own vomit. Mr. Bamberski believes that the iron injection caused a drop in blood pressure and the vomiting that probably killed her.

French judicial investigators summoned Dr. Krombach for questioning in 1984, but he refused to travel to France. A German court ruled in 1987 that there was not sufficient evidence to support charges — which German officials say essentially constitutes an acquittal — and Germany has refused to extradite him, arguing that a European double jeopardy principle precluded a French trial. In 1995, a Paris court convicted Dr. Krombach in absentia on wrongful death charges, though that conviction has since been annulled on procedural grounds.

German diplomats have quietly urged that the current case be thrown out, as well. German officials have declined to assist in locating witnesses for the French trial, and have denied access to some evidence, including medical records for Kalinka.

Mr. Bamberski and his lawyers have sought to cast the German doctor as a sexual deviant, a Lothario who forced himself on young girls after injecting them with Kobalt-Ferrlecit, the iron supplement prescribed for anemia that Dr. Krombach administered to many patients and family members as a restorative.

In the 1997 trial in Germany, Dr. Krombach pleaded guilty to charges that he drugged and raped a 16-year-old patient at his office. He received a two-year suspended sentence and was barred from practicing medicine for two years. Since that trial, several other women have accused Dr. Krombach of similar attacks in the 1980s and ’90s.

Stripped of his medical license, Dr. Krombach nonetheless continued to see patients, according to the German authorities, frequently changing addresses, apparently to avoid detection. He was discovered in 2006 and sentenced to 28 months in prison for fraud and illegal medical practice. He was released in 2008.

“Everything that’s not permitted used to attract him,” said Danièle Gonnin, Mr. Bamberski’s former wife, in court testimony. Ms. Gonnin left Mr. Bamberski for Dr. Krombach in 1975 and would leave the doctor in 1984, exasperated by his infidelities.

In parting, Ms. Gonnin said, Dr. Krombach gave her figurines of the Three Wise Monkeys, symbols of the proverb “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.”

“For 28 years, I would have sworn on my life he was innocent,” Ms. Gonnin said. But she has been shaken by her recent discovery that, during their marriage, Dr. Krombach repeatedly drugged her in order to bring a local teenage girl to their home for sex.

Still a trim, handsome man, Dr. Krombach is, however, diminished mentally, his lawyers say, and he frequently contradicts himself in testimony. His slender hands tremble and he stands shakily. He walks with a cane.

Asked what he might do if released, he told the court he would seek treatment for his eye and knee, both injured during his kidnapping.

“I do not have a wife who is waiting for me,” he added. “That is over with, unfortunately.”

The trial is to close on Friday.

After Mr. Bamberski’s coming trial on kidnapping charges, Mr. Bamberski said, he hopes to take up “a normal life.” Still, he takes pride in his long struggle.

“My life would have been much easier if I had had what I call the cowardice to say, ‘Well, she’s dead,’ and then start over,” he said.

Still, if Dr. Krombach is acquitted, he will not pursue him further, Mr. Bamberski said.

He will return to his home in a small village near Toulouse, to the house he has owned for more than three decades, in which his daughter once slept. She is buried nearby.

Note: A version of this text originally appeared in The New York Times on October 21, 2011.

UPDATE: Father’s Quest for Justice Ends in Paris Guilty Verdict, The New York Times, October 23, 2011.

La Courneuve Journal: Razing a Neighborhood and a Social Engineering Idea

– By Scott Sayare, for The New York Times –

LA COURNEUVE, France — At the foot of the dilapidated Balzac housing tower, an 11-year-old boy bled to death here on a summer afternoon in 2005, stray bullets in his heart and neck. Nicolas Sarkozy, who was interior minister at the time and is now president, arrived the next day in this hard-luck Paris suburb, famously pledging to “clean” the area with a Kärcher, a brand of high-pressure hose.

Six years later, the drugs and violence have not gone from this neighborhood, called the “4000,” a massive gray complex of housing projects that have for decades been an emblem of the troubles of France’s poor suburbs.

The Balzac housing tower, emptied, in 2010. Photo Credit: Petit Louis

Balzac has now been emptied, though, and a spidery mechanical arm tears away at it each day. The towering wall of stained concrete and tile, once 600 feet long and 16 stories high, is to be replaced by a cluster of smaller units, part of a $60 billion nationwide plan to refurbish France’s roughest neighborhoods.

It is hardly the first time such efforts have come to the 4000. Governments have been razing and rebuilding in this neighborhood for 25 years, hopeful that new architecture and new theories about how best to house the poor will solve the problems here. Residents and local officials, though, have few expectations that new walls and fresh pavement, whatever their configuration, can drive a deeper renewal.

“They’re not building shopping centers, they’re not creating jobs for young people,” said Soraya, 42, who was raised in Balzac and now lives nearby, requesting that her last name be withheld for fear of retribution by local thugs. “This will solve none of our problems.”

Balzac will be the fifth tower she has seen fall. Her current residence sits on what was once the site of the Renoir tower, destroyed in 2000. Ravel and Presov came down in 2004. A first tower, Debussy, was dynamited in 1986; the event was broadcast on national television and heralded as the start of a broad urban renewal.

Erected in the 1960s, the 4000 was meant as a utopia, an experiment in social engineering that would rationalize the lives of the immigrant workers it would house.

The theory of the day, drawing on the architectural philosophy of Le Corbusier, held that residential areas ought to remain separate from roads and the workplace, and so the cluster was built as a sort of island; residents trudged across a muddy field to reach the adjacent train station. Each airy apartment was equipped with a bathroom, a relative rarity in Paris at the time. The complex was deemed revolutionary.

A model of the 4000 was exhibited at the Grand Palais in 1961.

Government after government has since pledged to undo the damage they say these structures have done. In 1973, an official directive halted the construction of such housing clusters, deploring their “homogeneity” and “monotony,” and the “social segregation” they imposed.

And yet, while the particular philosophy underlying the 4000 has been disavowed, few French officials have jettisoned a belief in the primacy of architecture in shaping social outcomes, said Marie-Christine Vatov, the editor in chief at Innovapresse, a media group specializing in architecture and urban planning.

“Mixing” and “openness” have replaced “separation” and “uniformity” as the watchwords of the day. But the central lesson of the past decades, Ms. Vatov said, has been the error of such faith in the power of architecture.

“It’s not enough to build in a certain way,” she said, especially without more pointed efforts to improve education and employment.

There are political considerations, too. Buildings, thrown up or torn down, are visible markers of action, Ms. Vatov noted.

Balzac was once a “magnificent” and “convivial” place, said Soraya, the former resident, where neighbors left their doors open and competed to outdo one another with balcony flower arrangements.

But it fell into disrepair within a decade. Built cheaply, the units leaked and crumbled. More recently, the elevators seldom ran. The rats moved in.

The drug trade — mostly hashish and marijuana — arrived in earnest in the 1980s. At Balzac, a string of black arrows ran across the length of the ground floor wall, meant to lead buyers to an entryway widely known as a drug hub and marked plainly with the word “ici”: “here.”

When the building was cordoned off for destruction, the slump-shouldered young men who operated there simply relocated to nearby buildings, residents and local officials say.

La Courneuve, a city of 37,000, counts only 150 permanent police officers. Local dealers, who once kept the drugs at the edges of the neighborhood out of concern for younger siblings, now recruit schoolchildren as lookouts, residents say.

The banks, the shoe stores, the florist, the fishmonger and the cafe all departed as the area declined. Today, there is a discount supermarket, a butcher, a bakery and little else.

In neighborhoods like the 4000, classified as “Sensitive Urban Zones,” youth unemployment hovers near 40 percent, official statistics show, nearly twice the national average.

Parents worry about conditions in local schools, as well. Nora, 46, who grew up in Balzac and now lives in a housing unit nearby, has three children under the age of 14.

“There aren’t enough teachers,” she said, seated in her sparse and tidy four-room apartment. “When they don’t come in, no one fills in for them. There are kids who don’t go to school because there’s no one to look after them, so they hang out in the street. And that’s how it is.”

No more than six toddlers are enrolled in a public early education program in La Courneuve, according to Jean-Luc Vienne, the mayoral chief of staff. There are 185 children on the waiting list. Officials also estimate that as much as 10 percent of the city’s adult population does not speak French.

La Courneuve needs more teachers and police officers, Mr. Vienne said. But because education and law enforcement are essentially the domain of the central government, he argued, the city has little power to direct resources to those areas.

There is money for renovation, though. The work at the 4000 is mostly financed by the state and various regional administrations; begun in 2006, it will cost over $400 million, more than five times the city budget.

“We try to take advantage of the urban renovation to deal with the social question,” Mr. Vienne said. Recent rebuilding at the 4000 has included the construction of a school and a work space for local entrepreneurs, for instance, and the refurbishment of a sports complex. Many of the units that will replace Balzac will be more expensive semiprivate residences, a deliberate effort to change the makeup of the population.

The very choice to demolish Balzac speaks to the failure of earlier demolitions to solve the problems here, officials concede. Original plans did not call for Balzac to be torn down, but the drugs had become unmanageable, said Vanessa Fiévet, the urban planner overseeing the project.

The building is being demolished by crane and not dynamite, she added, in part because the police balked at the notion of bringing high explosives into the neighborhood. They feared they might be stolen.

Note: A version of this text originally appeared in The New York Times on September 7, 2011.

Stuck in Dock, Flotilla Activists See the Hand of Israel

– By Scott Sayare, for The New York Times –

Activists gather near the Israeli port of Ashdod in support of the flotilla, in 2010. Photo Credit: Edo Medicks

ATHENS — With the propeller shafts of two ships mysteriously damaged, the Greek authorities holding other vessels in port on government orders and an American boat turned back by the Greek coast guard on Friday just 20 minutes off the coast, the international flotilla to Gaza has stalled.

Organizers say they see the long arm of Israel behind their improbable woes, and while Israeli officials have dismissed such accusations as so much conspiracy mongering, they have declined to deny them outright.

One year after Israeli commandos killed nine Turkish activists aboard the Mavi Marmara during another flotilla, organizers had hoped once again to challenge the naval blockade of the Gaza Strip off its coast. It appears increasingly unlikely, however, that the eight boats now preparing to sail will ever be able or allowed to leave port.

Echoing a majority view among participants here, Johnny Leo Johansen, a ponytailed Norwegian photographer and activist, put it this way: “It’s like they’ve moved the blockade from Gaza to Greece.” On Friday the coast guard stopped the American boat in the flotilla, The Audacity of Hope, about one mile out to sea, quashing the initial excitement of the passengers, who were surprised to have been allowed to leave the harbor at all.

“We could see the handwriting on the wall, that they were going to try to shut down all the ports across the Mediterranean,” said Ann Wright, the lead organizer of the American boat.

After a complaint about improper documentation filed by an Israeli advocacy group, the boat had been held in port outside Athens on police orders. Inspectors visited it a week ago Friday, but the results of their inspection had yet to be provided. Without them, the ship could not legally set sail.

The Greek Ministry of Citizen Protection decreed Friday that all vessels in Greek ports were prohibited from sailing toward “the maritime area of Gaza.” No explanation was given, and ministry officials could not be reached for further comment.

The Americans decided to leave just the same. After chasing them down, a smiling, youthful coast guard captain leaned out his window and requested the ship’s inspection papers. Passengers leaned over the upper-deck railing of the American boat, chanting, “Let us sail to Gaza!” Others held a cardboard sign asking, “Is it Poseidon or Netanyahu?” (That is, a passenger explained, “Who is the king of the Aegean?”)

“The probability that the Greek government has already made a decision to not let us out of the port is probably quite high, I would think,” Ms. Wright said earlier this week. “It’s not surprising, in a way, that the Greek government has succumbed to the pressure.”

The Israeli government, she noted, has held cabinet meetings on the subject of the flotilla, and several rounds of military exercises have been conducted in preparation for a confrontation. “I’m shocked that they would be spending so much time, money, energy,” Ms. Wright added, but in some ways, she has been pleased by the Israeli attention. “We couldn’t have dreamed for a better thing. Usually, governments don’t cooperate with us this way!”

On Thursday, Irish organizers announced that they had pulled their Turkish-docked ship from the flotilla after the crew discovered damage to the propeller shaft, the result of what they assume to have been sabotage by divers. Organizers said that the damage was discovered on a trial run, but that otherwise the vessel might have sunk at sea.

Activists discovered nearly identical damage to a Greek-Swedish-Norwegian passenger boat this week. That boat is now grounded for repairs.

Three boats with passengers principally from Canada, Spain and the Netherlands were awaiting clearance to sail Friday. All of the ships have ostensibly met the requirements of the Greek authorities, according to Adam Shapiro, a flotilla organizer and spokesman. But on Thursday, harbor officials barred a French boat from refueling, he said, an indication that Greek officials might find justifications for retaining the other ships in port.

As of Friday morning, after more than a week in ports across Greece, not a single ship had explicit clearance from the Greek authorities to set sail, and it remains unclear when more ships might sail, or what an eventual flotilla might resemble. “We’re going to do something,” Mr. Shapiro vowed. Still, he added, “It seems we’re already doing something, given the kind of response we’ve gotten.”

Asked about activists’ suggestions that Israel was behind the apparent sabotage, Mark Regev, a spokesman for the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said, “These activists are not renowned for being an objective source of information.” He added: “These people have a tendency to blame Israel, to see Israel’s hand behind every calamity. And of course that cannot be true.” But when asked to deny their claims more categorically, he declined.

Israeli officials acknowledge that they have been seeking to head off the flotilla, not just because they consider it an attempt to besmirch the country’s name and policies but because they believe the entire endeavor is largely organized and inspired by radical Islamists behind the scenes who are seeking a violent encounter with Israeli forces.

On Thursday, Mr. Netanyahu said in a speech, “Sometimes, we not only need to deflect our enemies’ physical attacks, but also deflect the attack on our right to protect ourselves.” Speaking at the Israeli Air Force flight school graduation ceremony, Mr. Netanyahu thanked world leaders who in recent days had spoken out and acted “against the provocation flotilla.” He commended the Greek prime minister, George Papandreou, who he said had been closely cooperating with Israel in coordinating moves related to the flotilla.

On Friday, the Israeli Army told journalists that Tarek Hamud, 32, a son-in-law of Khaled Meshal, the Damascus-based head of Hamas, was with the flotilla in Athens, playing a leading role in its organization. Mr. Hamud leads the Palestinian Association of Hamas, according to Lt. Col. Avital Leibovich, a military spokeswoman.

Flotilla activists denied any links to radical or terrorist organizations and said they had never even heard of Mr. Hamud. Izzat al-Risheq, a spokesman for Hamas in Damascus, said Mr. Hamud “has nothing to do with the flotilla in any way. He is in his house right now in Damascus. This is a lie by the Israeli Army aimed at getting people to oppose this humane mission.”

Hamas denies having any role in the flotilla.

Ethan Bronner contributed reporting from Jerusalem.

Note: A version of this text originally appeared in The New York Times on July 2, 2011.

Tunisia Is Uneasy Over Party of Islamists

– By Scott Sayare, for The New York Times –

TUNIS — Accused as subversives or terrorists, they bore the repressive brunt of the Tunisian dictator’s reign — two decades of torture, prison or exile.

But since the dictator, President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, fled in January, the Islamists of the once-banned Ennahda Party have emerged from obscurity, returned from abroad and established themselves as perhaps the most powerful political force in post-revolution Tunisia.

Despite repeated assurances of their tolerance and moderation, their rise has touched off frenzied rumors of attacks on unveiled women and artists, of bars and brothels sacked by party goons, of plots to turn the country into a caliphate. With crucial elections scheduled for July 24, Ennahda’s popularity and organizational strength are of growing concern to many activists and politicians, who worry that the secular revolution in this moderate state — the revolt that galvanized the Arab Spring — might see the birth of a conservative Islamic government.

And just as the protests in Tunis heralded the revolt in Cairo, analysts are looking to Tunisia as a bellwether for the more broadly influential developments to come in Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood enjoys similar advantages and has stirred similar misgivings.

“How do you want us to go up against Ennahda?” asked an exasperated strategist for the Republican Alliance, a secular party. “They’re prepared to do anything.”

With years of organizational experience, a vast membership and decades of credibility as a sworn enemy of Mr. Ben Ali, Ennahda has proved to be better-equipped than any other party — most have existed only for a matter of weeks — to step into the political void. The Republican Alliance strategist called for the elections to be delayed.

“July 24 is a favor to Ennahda,” he said, requesting anonymity for fear of attacks by the party’s supporters. “It’s suicide.”

With Ennahda in power, he said, “It would be Iran.”

The party says such fears are unfounded. “We aspire to a free, open, moderate society, where each citizen will have the same rights,” said Abdallah Zouari, a member of Ennahda’s executive committee and a party spokesman, adding that the party called for equal rights for men and women, Muslims and non-Muslims.

“We are not in agreement with the secularists who want to force others to be secular,” he said, “the same way we are against the Salafists who want to force others to be Muslim.”

He spoke with a visitor at a modest new party branch on the third floor of a shabby Tunis office building, the rooms still echoing and empty but for some tables and chairs, the white walls dirty and scuffed.

Mr. Zouari — who bears the dark callus on his forehead caused by frequent bowed prayer, common among the devout — was himself imprisoned for more than a decade as a party member.

“The religious sentiment of the Tunisian people is so deep that certain people cannot understand,” he said.

Polling suggests that Ennahda — the renaissance, in Arabic — enjoys broader support than any of the country’s other 60-odd authorized political parties. The party’s weekly newspaper, The Dawn, resumed publication in April after a 20-year hiatus and now sells about 70,000 copies per week, party officials say.

The July vote will create an assembly assigned the task of rewriting the Constitution. In anticipation of the elections, the party has opened dozens of local offices, and imams are said to be promoting Ennahda in mosques across the country.

But mistrust of the party remains widespread. “They’re doing doublespeak, and everyone knows it,” said Ibrahim Letaief, a radio host at Mosaique FM, a popular station where he offers withering criticism of the Islamists. Ennahda, he said, has only tempered its rhetoric in a bid to win votes, but in power would impose strict Islamic law.

It is a common refrain here, despite having first been popularized by the reviled Mr. Ben Ali. Opponents have made similar claims, anti-Ennahda Facebook groups have drawn tens of thousands of supporters, and protesters have denounced the party throughout Tunisia. Some of the fear seems to stem from uncertainty about who, exactly, will lead the party; the group’s longtime leader, Rachid Ghannouchi, has said he will not seek office.

A democratic Tunisia depends on the banning of Ennahda, Mr. Letaief said, though he acknowledged, “I’m not going to seem democratic, here.” Still, he said, “Islam is very much anchored in society.”

The first article of the now-suspended Tunisian Constitution decreed Islam the national faith, and 98 percent of the country’s 10.6 million inhabitants are Muslim. Public schools dispense religious instruction. Yet religious leaders have never played a role in government.

Habib Bourguiba, the father of Tunisian independence and the country’s first president, was a staunch secularist who banned polygamy, legalized abortion and once sipped orange juice on television during the Ramadan fast in an affront to the faithful.

Ennahda has pledged to maintain Mr. Bourguiba’s social reforms, and voted in favor of a rule requiring equal numbers of men and women on electoral lists in July. Party leaders compare Ennahda to Turkey’s tolerant Islamic ruling party. Other Tunisian Islamist groups have rejected Ennahda as being too secular, and many analysts consider the party to be distinctly moderate.

Still, Ennahda worries that many Tunisians have renounced an “Arab-Muslim identity,” said Mr. Zouari, the party leader, noting that high school math and science are often taught in French, not Arabic. Ennahda would not force women to veil themselves, Mr. Zouari said, nor would it immediately seek to ban alcohol, which Islam forbids. He admitted that a ban might be a goal in years to come. Asked about widespread accusations that Ennahda supporters had attacked unveiled women, he replied hotly: “When? Where? What names?”

Ennahda is strong in the impoverished interior, a reflection of the cultural gulf between the “very Westernized elite” in Tunis and other coastal cities — many of whom lived well under Mr. Ben Ali — and much of the rest of the country, said Kader Abderrahim, a researcher at the Institute of International and Strategic Relations in Paris.

“The question,” Mr. Abderrahim said, is whether the elite “are ready to accept that there is a part of the population that lives in a different way, and that has other convictions.” Political stability “will not happen without the Islamists,” he said.

Nour Ayari, 19, said she would back Ennahda in the elections. Ms. Ayari, who sells traditional silver marriage boxes from her family’s stall at the Blaghjia souk in Tunis, wore a diaphanous white hijab, a veil banned under Mr. Ben Ali but legalized since his departure. Women may now also appear veiled in official identification photographs, she noted.

“It’s thanks to this party,” she said, referring to Ennahda.

She dismissed concerns that the party might be cloaking fundamentalist intentions behind a moderate front. “Why would they change their tune afterward?” she asked. Ennahda’s opponents, she said, still have a “reflex of fear” instilled under Mr. Ben Ali.

Mr. Abderrahim, the researcher, called it “paranoia.”

David D. Kirkpatrick contributed reporting from Cairo.

Note: A version of this text originally appeared in The New York Times on April 29, 2011.