Contradictions of the Tunisian State: Women’s Rights and Gendered Repression

Developments since the Arab uprisings have revealed sharp contradictions within the Tunisian state: though the country has historically promoted women’s rights, thousands of women and men have recently come forward to testify about gross human rights violations during 58 years of authoritarian rule.

Tunisia has long been heralded as distinctive in the Arab world. It is widely regarded as having one of the most liberal approaches to family law and women’s rights in the region. First promulgated in the aftermath of independence from colonial rule in 1956 and amended continually since, the Code of Personal Status, often regarded as a model of woman-friendly legislation in the region, has expanded women’s rights in family law as has no other body of legislation in the Arab World [1]. Tunisia further distinguished itself by catalyzing a series of massive protests against decades-long dictatorships across North Africa and the Middle East in 2011, when thousands of Tunisians across the country, beginning in the interior region of Sidi Bouzid, collectively demonstrated until the president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, and his government resigned [2].

Among the countries that experienced an Arab uprising, Tunisia stands alone in attempting a transition from dictatorship to democracy (by contrast, military rule and fractured states are present in Egypt, Libya, Bahrain and Yemen). Tunisia conducted internationally observed democratic elections in which secularists defeated Ennahda, the Islamist party then in power. The country has received international attention due to its liberal and gender-sensitive constitution passed in 2014, which, after much debate between secularists and Islamists, in the end identified women as “equal” rather than “complementary” to men [3].

Against this backdrop, and as part of the country’s transition to democracy, Tunisia in June 2014 launched an up to five-year-long Truth and Dignity Commission (l’Instance Vérité et Dignité) to examine and address past abuses. The commission is charged with collecting testimonies of men and women who have endured forced imprisonment, violence and torture dating to 1955, one year before Tunisian independence from France. The time frame of the commission encompasses the tenure of two regimes, that of Habib Bourguiba (1957-1987) and of the recently ousted Ben Ali (1987-2011). It is reminiscent of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, which considered the effects of apartheid, or the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission organized by Chile to investigate deaths and abuses under Pinochet’s rule. Since December 2014 in Tunisia, over 15,000 testimonies have been collected and include experiences of abuse among men and women, such as “being beaten unconscious, hung upside down, plunged underwater or into buckets of human waste, electrocuted, raped and sodomized” [4].

The Truth and Dignity Commission reveals that, as the regimes of Bourguiba and Ben Ali championed women’s rights in public discourse in national legislation and on the international scene, they nevertheless did not hesitate to abuse women. The torture of women seems to have been so far established clearly for the Ben Ali regime (1987-2011) and we still don’t know much about the issue under Bourguiba’s regime (1956-1987). Women have played key roles in both the development of the Commission and in submitting testimonies. The president of the Commission, Sihem Bensedrine, was herself persecuted and imprisoned by the former regime in Tunisia for her work on behalf of human rights and freedom of the press [5]. Her leadership symbolizes how political violence extended to women in multiple ways. The Commission has made a concerted effort to encourage women in particular to come forward by including them in public campaign posters and publicizing the work of women’s associations that present testimonies. The Tunisian Women’s Association, a grassroots organization founded after the Arab uprisings, submitted over 80 files to the commission [6].

The women who have come forward have attested to systematic sexual violence, torture and intimidation [7]. In particular, government authorities targeted men and women who participated in oppositional politics, especially those organizing under the rubric of Islam. Punishment was often extended to women in order to coerce and intimidate their male partners or family members. This was, for example, the case of Selwa Bejawi, who was arrested at age 16 and subjected to torture and imprisonment for four months because her brother was a member of the Ennahda movement, a group that was inspired by Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and banned in Tunisia prior to the 2011 uprisings. She stated: “We went through the same torture as men,” including beatings and sexual harassment [8]. Another former prisoner, Marzia Albedayad, described her forced miscarriage upon her imprisonment. She reported that one of the prison officers said: “Leave her to me. I will make her lose that baby” [9]. Stories abound of women enduring long periods in prison followed by years of government surveillance and intimidation.

While the Ben Ali regime continued to pride itself for supporting and sometimes expanding women’s rights within the law beyond what the preceding regime had done, women who dared to challenge the politics of the regime were subjected to brutal forms of violence. The work of the Truth and Dignity Commission has just begun and additional information is likely to surface in the future. Even at this early stage, however, the revelations coming to light in the Commission hearings stand in sharp contrast to the legacy of women-friendly policies that came to define the Tunisian state. Like other states, the Tunisian state was fraught with serious internal contradictions, in this case in regard to gender.

[1] Charrad, Mounira M. 2011. “Gender in the Middle East: Islam, States, Agency. ” Annual Review of Sociology. Vol 37: pp. 417-37; see also Charrad, Mounira M. 2001. States and Women’s Rights: The Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. Berkeley: University of California Press.

[2] Achcar, Gilbert (trans. Geoffrey Michael Goshgarian). 2013. The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising. Berkeley: University of California Press.

[3] Charrad, Mounira M. and Amina Zarrugh. 2014. “Equal or Complementary? Women in the New Tunisian Constitution after the Arab Spring,” Journal of North African Studies 19 (2): 230-243.

[4] Gall, Carlotta. 2015. “Torture Claims in Tunisia Await Truth Commission.” New York Times May 19, 2015. Date accessed: July 3, 2015.

[5] Human Rights Watch. 2000. “Tunisia Intensifies Crackdown on Critics, Closes Publishing House.” April 11, 2000. Date accessed: July 9, 2015.

[6] Instance Vérité et Dignité. 2015. “The ‘Tunisian Women’ Association deposits files of over 80 victims to the headquarters of the commission.” Jul 8, 2015. Translated from Arabic by the authors.

[7] Gall, Carlotta. 2015. “Women in Tunisia Tell of Decades of Police Cruelty, Violence and Rape.” New York Times. May 28, 2015. Date accessed: June 23, 2015.

[8] Reidy, Eric. 2015. “Tunisia’s torture victims hope for justice at hearings.” Al Jazeera. June 27, 2015. Date accressed: July 8, 2015.

[9] Elbagir, Nima. 2015. “Tunisians bring dark history to light.” CNN. July 6, 2015. Date accessed: July 9, 2015.

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