The New York Times published on Thursday May 28 an article on the torture of women in Tunisia under Ben Ali. The article includes several Tunisian testimony tortured by the police under the dictatorship. Trauma that they revealed after the 2011 revolution, but which find it difficult to be taken seriously.
Arrested in 1990, 1991 and 1995, the four women who testify in the article speak of physical torture and humiliations caused during their arrests.
Hamida Ajengui was arrested at the age of 21 for raising money to help families of prisoners. Disabling, hanged by the feet, threatened with rape by the police, she denounced what happened to her twenty-five years ago. “He leaves you completely naked,” she adds to his testimony.
Destroy the honor of women
“Women were tortured as brutally as men,” writes the newspaper. But rapes, sexual abuses, humiliations also destroyed the honor of women outside of prisons.
Hamida Ajengui describes her horror night in prison, suspended from a bar for sixteen hours, police threatened to rape her, and subjected her to touch. And yet, everything she thought was her honor, she reports to the New York Times:
(quote_box_center) At that time I thought I was going to lose my honor forever. (/quote_box_center)
Another woman tortured in 1991 is still in a state of psychiatric disorder and is interned in hospital. She will never have had the chance to be able to rebuild herself after being raped, leaving behind a husband and children.
12,000 complaints since the revolution
12,000 people said they had been torture since the Revolution. Among them, the number of women surprised human rights activists.
Meherzia Belabed, arrested in 1991 to be an opposition activist, also suffered torture. Pregnant with her third child, something she had told the police during her interrogation, she made a miscarriage during her police custody after the police had strokes in the belly.
Another testimony, that of Fatma Akaichi, arrested in 1995 for having participated in a student demonstration, highlights the incomprehension of the outside world which judges women who have made prison.
(quote_box_center) For a woman, it’s a great shame. (/quote_box_center)
After the revolution
After the revolution, these women who testify to the torture they have suffered are not always taken seriously. There is almost no document, no evidence of what they have suffered and no recognition.
Several cases of rape by police have been reported since 2011. Amnesty International had denounced the case of Meriem, the girl raped by police officers, in her car in 2012.
Other cases of torture in 2015, on men, were revealed by the organization against torture in Tunisia.
Elodie potte
