On the anniversary of Ben Ali’s fall, Tunisia once again stops to listen to the testimonies of State’s victims. The fifth public hearing session of the Transitional Justice Commission was broadcasted live on prime-time television the 14th of January on different national and private channels.
The Truth and Dignity Commission is an independent juridical organ established by law on 2013. It has the task of “dismantling the authoritarian system and to facilitate transition towards the Rule of Law”. It accepted more than five thousands files from dictatorship’s victims. The files mainly denounced violations of human, political and civil rights, with a consistent minority of cases dealing with economic, social and cultural violations. Investigating the crimes of Habib Bourguiba and Zine el Abidine Ben Ali’s regimes , and determining State’s responsibilities, it aims at re-establishing the truth and conferring dignity and rights to the victims. An extremely delicate job, that of combining memory and national reconciliation, and huge, considering that the Commission’s task relates to a wide period, which spans from 1955, the year before independence, to 2013.
On this highly symbolic day, the session is opened by the testimonies of three youth, “blessed of the Revolution” as they are defined: people who remained disabled due to injuries suffered during the protests. People who are the living witnesses that the revolution is still an open wound, left uncured. Some of them still have their eyes loaded with the same rage which led them to take the streets, six years ago, to change the destiny of their country. Some of them carry pain and sorrow in their eyes, but a lot of dignity too. In all cases, they are here to witness: their existence first of all, and that of a “stolen revolution”.
“I saw him the other day, the policeman who shot me. He’s still there doing his job. And we who lost our health for the country, we are left impotent, disabled, without a job, without a future, abandoned by the State”, says Muslim, who spent some days of coma after the blows.
Khaled has spent three entire months at home because he had no one to take him out. He is on the wheelchair and his apartment is on the second floor. His mother is with him, to testify the humiliation and the pain suffered in those days: shot by a policeman, he was left in a hospital without adequate cares for days. He got out after six months, unable to walk, and with no assistance besides his mother’s.
These are youth who were blessed twice: once by a dictatorship in uniform, that shot them while they were disarmed; the second time by a State that forsook the best of its youth. A State that continues to persecute the ones who took part to the revolutionary events. A striking case among many who pass unheard is the case of 11 youth who have been condemned last month to 14 years of prison, for the protests that followed the assassination of Chokri Belaid, in 2013.
The depositions of these youth are a drop in the ocean. An ocean of physical and psychological violence, torture, threat, oppression. Besides the youth of 2011, voice was given to judges and activists, widows and mothers of desaparecidos and martyrs, political opponents who experienced prison and were victims of excruciating tortures. And the latter is maybe the hardest pill to swallow. Many of the political prisoners who suffered torture or disappeared in State’s prisons, were indeed Islamist militants. Nowadays, with the ghost of the “coming back of jihadists” from war zones, and with fresh memory of the period of Ennahda’s government, considered by many the most violent period of the post-revolutionary era, many oppose to give voice to those militants. Ostracism towards the Commission is also coming from the government itself and its press, in fear of the bad influence that these claims could have to foreign investors, and accusing of revanchism the president of the Commission, Sihem Ben Sidrine, herself human rights activist and victim of Ben Ali’s dictatorship, and who doesn’t hesitate to declare that “the old apparatus is still there”.
Even though the investigations proceed, with the approval of the international community praising the “Tunisian exception”, complexities and shadows of the post-revolutionary era are many. The North African country did not get out immune from the so-called “spring”, and besides the evident discontentment due to the economic crises, and the paranoia for internal terrorism and islamisation of the youth, the question of repression is a topic that is mainly, and dangerously, left un-discussed. The “Islamic threat” is one of the key factor which entrap Tunisian people under the yoke of a government which, while showing outwards his face of young and rampant democracy were associations multiplies and freedom of press prospers, on the internal level reproduces the authoritarian methods of the old regime, carrying on the criminalisation of social movements, of the unemployed, of the revolutionaries. And from Kasserine to Gafsa, from Sidi Bouzid to Ben Guardene, streets get on fire, barricades are raised up, also and especially in this day, which is commemorated in a spirit of protest, rather than of celebration.
But hope continues if the youth keep alive the willingness to continue the struggle: “Revolution has started in 2011”, reminds Muslim, underlining its nature of ongoing process, “and our spirit is revolutionary”. Beyond the polemics, the show, the criticism, the internal quarrels, the political divisions, there is one fact of indisputable historic significance: Tunisia is today obliged to (ac)knowledge the violence of dictatorship, to call into question sixty years of its history, which are the sixty years of its entire history as an independent Republic. A dangerous act in a moment like this, in a country with still fragile institutions, in such a potentially explosive political situation, with such a weak economy? Maybe. But also an act of dignity and of courage that could not wait. If the country will get out of it broken, it will not be the fault of those who sought the truth, but of those who for years have tried to conceal it.
