Headlines, Human Rights, Middle East & North Africa, North America

TUNISIA: Longtime Political Prisoners Freed, Many Still Languish

Zainab Mineeia

WASHINGTON, Nov 6 2008 (IPS) - On the heels of the release of 21 prominent political prisoners in Tunisia, a human rights group urged the government there to free all persons held for nonviolent activities and to stop the harassment of former political prisoners.

Tunisian authorities released 21 prominent political prisoners belonging to an-Nahdha, a banned Islamist movement, who had been in jail since 1990, said Human Rights Watch (HRW) in a statement released Thursday.

However, the group said hundreds of Tunisians remain in detention as political prisoners.

“Tunisia’s release of the political prisoners is good news,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director at HRW, in a statement. “But a truly historic change would be general amnesty for people convicted for their nonviolent political beliefs and activities, and an end to the harassment of former political prisoners.”

Once freed, former political prisoners in Tunisia continue to routinely face years of harassment by the authorities, including intensive police surveillance, restrictions on their movement within the country and a refusal to issue them passports.

Authorities conditionally released all 21 remaining members of the banned Islamist movement al-Nahdha who were convicted of plotting to overthrow the state in military court trials, though a spokesman for the group said that some members may still be behind bars.

“It’s too early to say if all Nahdha members were pardoned,” a Nahdha spokesman, Ali Laaraydh, told the Reuters news agency. “We have to await the coming hours to know if there are some exceptions.”

Nahdha was formed in the 1980’s and is not recognised as a legal political party.

The release of the prisoners came just ahead of the Nov. 7 anniversary of Tunisian President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali’s rise to power in 1987, which the authorities call “The Change”. The anniversary has become a frequent occasion for freeing prisoners.

This year, 21 prisoners were released to coincide with the 21 years of Ben Ali’s presidency, a government source told Reuters.

Ben Ali, who ascended to the presidency in 1987, cracked down on Nahdha in 1990, when more than 1,000 of its members were arrested.

Tunisian authorities maintain that Nahdha is an extremist movement that seeks to establish a fundamentalist state.

Tunisia does, indeed, have some violent Islamic extremists, including a North African franchise of al Qaeda, known as al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which last week released two Austrian hikers taken hostage for 252 days after a they were kidnapped in southern Tunisia.

The government denies that the country has political prisoners, claiming that all prisoners, including those who acted out of political motives, have been tried and fairly convicted for criminal offences.

However, human rights activists who attended the 1992 Nahdha trials, including HRW, criticised them as unfair and concluded that the charges of a coup plot had not been proven. The courts did not convict any of the defendants of carrying out acts of violence. Since that time, Nahdha’s leaders have repeatedly stated that they oppose violence and the movement has not been linked to any violent activities.

“Human Rights Watch was in the military court back in 1992 and saw how the judges convicted these men and their co-defendants in mass trials on the basis of dubious evidence,” Whitson said in the statement.

The courts had initially sentenced several of the Nadha prisoners to life terms, which were later commuted to periods of up to 30 years.

Before the releases on Nov. 5, most of the 265 Nahdha members and sympathisers convicted after the two trials in military courts in 1992 had already left prison. They had either served their full terms or been freed by previous pardons.

Tunisian authorities also said they have in recent days freed another 23 persons convicted of crimes for their roles in protests during 2008. Those protests cantered around social and economic conditions in a mining region in the Gafsa governorate.

Among those released in early November in connection with the events in Gafsa governorate is Zakia Dhifaoui, a schoolteacher from the city of Kairouan, who was sentenced to four-and-a-half months in prison for participating in a peaceful demonstration in July in solidarity with prisoners from the area.

Tunisian human rights activists have so far confirmed the release of 13 other prisoners convicted in relation to the 2008 protests on such charges as disturbing the order in a public place, insulting a public official, and disturbing the property of others in the context of the protests in the mining region

In Tunisia, the president, along with his family, enjoys complete control of the economic and political life in the country. When then-Prime Minister Ben Ali deposed former Tunisian president Habib Bourguiba in 1987 and took office himself, Tunisians felt a sense of optimism as political prisoners were freed and elections were promised.

Those who remain imprisoned for politically motivated offences, said the HRW statement, were convicted in trials that lacked basic guarantees, such as credible investigations into allegations by defendants that their interrogators had tortured them to force them to sign false confessions.

In late September, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a New York-based watchdog group, criticised the Tunisian authorities for their role in imposing extensive restrictions on journalists’ coverage of news that it considers offensive to the president.

The government also bans and tightly regulates the licensing of print and broadcast media for those who are not considered allies to Ben Ali’s government, explained the 10-page report authored by Middle East and North Africa Programme Coordinator Joel Campagna.

The report said that journalists and human rights activists in Tunisia are regularly imprisoned and harassed for criticising Ben Ali’s government.