An Online Media Campaign Assists in Releasing a Tunisian Activist From Prison

Posted by Lina Ben Mhenni and Susannah Vila in Advocacy, Africa, Arrest and Harrasment, Build Awareness , Not Free

THE CHALLENGE

On October 22nd, 2009, the Tunisian activist Mohamed Soudani disappeared after meeting with two French journalists. He had talked to the journalists about getting expelled from Tunisian university and barred from continuing his studies due to his involvement with an activist group UGET, or the General Union of Tunisian Students. His interview coincided with the electoral campaign in Tunisia, which meant that the government was already harrassing, arresting, and jailing students, journalists and bloggers, human rights activists, and political dissidents. He said good-bye to the two journalists, boarded a train out of Tunis, and was not heard from for 20 days.

Eventually his family was told that he was being held in a prison in the suburbs of Tunis. According to later interviews with Soudani, he was initially tortured, then dropped off at a hospital where he was X-rayed, treated, and told to return the next day to pick up his medical report. Instead, he was detained again on October 23 and was never able to pick up his medical report. He was placed in solitary confinement until October 25, then appeared before the Court of First Instance in Tunis and was charged with disorderly and immoral public conduct and public drunkenness without the presence of a lawyer. Soudani told Human Rights Watch:

"It was the fastest trial in history. I was in and out within the space of five minutes. They didn’t even question me; they just handed down the sentence and took me straight to jail. No evidence was presented at all; the court only claimed that two passengers on board the train had called the police and complained about my supposed drunkenness. That’s what the entire case was based on. We don’t even know who these people are."

Mohamed’s family had no idea where he was, and some suspected that he had died under torture. He had been sentenced to four months in jail and taken directly to Mornaguia prison. He claims that neither the police nor the court informed him what the charges against him were. It was only during his appeal trial on December 14 that he found out. 

THE PLAYERS

Arrest was not a novelty for the activist—he had been a UGET leader at the University of Tunis, and because of this was harassed by police since his election to the student council on behalf of the UGET in 2006. He told Human Rights Watch:

“I would get phone calls at all hours of the day, sometimes really late at night, threatening me. These ‘unknown’ people were clearly the police; who else would do such a thing? It wears you down after a while. It’s a form of psychological torture. At that point I wasn’t so worried about myself, but it was really scary hearing that your sister or your mother are going to be hurt. But I couldn’t give in; this was a matter of principle and we are in the right....This regime works on intimidation, and we will not be intimidated no matter what they do to us.”

Between 2007 and his 2009 arrest, Mohamed was detained several times. It began when, in alleged collusion with the police, the university’s disciplinary committee expelled him, as well as four other activists, from all public universities in the country. For the ensuing two years the students tried to get their expulsions repealed to no avail. Between 2000 and the beginning of 2009, approximately 50 students were expelled by public universities across the country. On February 11, 2009, UGET’s executive office agreed to support a protest hunger strike at its Tunis headquarters. Mohamed was one of six students who participated in the 59-day event, which was one of the most widely covered student protest thus far. Months later he would be arrested for speaking to foreign media about it. He was therefore well known within his country, making it easier for acivists to rally a constituency to further raise awareness and mobilize on his behalf. 

Activists targeted international NGOs like Human Rights Watch in the hope that these groups would have sufficient power over global public opinion to influence the legal system within Tunisia. 

THE TOOLS AND TACTICS

 They were helped by the fact that the majority of cyber activists and bloggers already knew Mohamed Soudani from the 59-day hunger strike that he had undertaken to claim his right to resume his studies. Because of his notoriety, more people heard about and were shocked by the news of his kidnapping—even people who are not usually involved in the politics and activism part of the campaign. They shared blog posts, photos, videos, and tweets on their private pages and profiles. International NGOs took part in the campaign.

Since the first days of his disappearance, several actions were undertaken -most of them occured online, as Tunisia was at this time a country considered one of the most repressive in the world, and all media, from TV to radios to newspapers and magazines, were controlled by the government, the internet served as a unique—and perhaps the only—space for free expression. A blog, Free Mohamed Soudani, and a Facebook group were created. On Twitter, a special hashtag #FreeMS was used by the majority of people relaying Mohamed Soudani’s case developments. Pictures and videos spread on Facebook and blogs.

THE STUMBLING BLOCKS

Tunisian cyber activists’ choices to launch a support campaign were limited by the severe censorship within the country. Sites like Youtube, Dailymotion, and Flickr are completely blocked. Activists had used blogs, Twitter, and Facebook to their fullest, but these were the only tools available and could have been censored at any time.

As the Open Net Initiative, a website that researches and documents state filtering and censorship practices, wrote about censorship in Tunisia in 2009:

"Tunisia has one of the most developed telecommunications infrastructures in North Africa....Out of a population of 10.2 million inhabitants, nine out of 10 Tunisians own a cell phone. Eighty-four percent of these users access the internet at home, 75.8 percent use the internet at work, and 24 percent use public internet cafés....Tunisia’s government continues to suppress critical speech and oppositional activity, both in real space and in cyberspace. Unlike other states that employ filtering software, Tunisia endeavors to conceal instances of filtering by supplying a fake error page when a blocked site is requested. This makes filtering more opaque and clouds users’ understanding of the boundaries of permissible content. Tunisia maintains a focused, effective system of internet control that blends content filtering with harsh laws to censor objectionable and politically threatening information."

All objectionable content was blocked within the country, as were all sites offering tools for circumventing these blocks. And yet if it was not for internet, cases of oppression and repression in Tunisia would remain unknown. Indeed, Tunisian authorities control all media. Tunisian people, and especially the youth, chose to use the internet to both to obtain and spread information about dictatorship, oppression, repression, torture, and human rights abuses.

THE OUTCOME

On January 1st, 2010, Mohamed Soudani was released conditionally. He had already spent more than half of his sentence in jail. This success was, however, a small one that would soon be dwarfed by the mountain range of challenges facing Soudani, other student activists, and their supporters. 

On February 3, the court summoned Soudani, along with four other student activists, after the authorities decided to reopen a stalled case from 2007. He was charged with breaking into the university where he used to be a student and assaulting a public official with threats and physical violence. Soudani received a suspended two-year prison sentence. The four other defendants each received sentences of one year and eight months. The court has yet to rule on their appeal of this sentence—the next hearing was set for October 21, 2010, but it was again pushed back to January 2011. In the meantime, all five have reported to Human Rights Watch that they are subject to constant police surveillance and harassment. Additionally, Soudani is being refused a new national ID card to replace the one he lost in 2008, and is therefore without any means of identification.

Human Rights Watch received responses to the queries it has addressed to the Tunisian government about its treatment of student activists, all of which deny any wrongdoing. For the details of these queries, read their report, "The Price of Independence." Soudani remained on conditional release, and was still waiting for a final court hearing which to grant him permanent reprieve when the 2011 Tunisian uprising ousted President Ben Ali. 

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