In the reigns of the late two presidents Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Habib Bourguiba, the Tunisian authorities arrested hundreds of students of different intellectual currents, and drove them to exile in a remote area in the recruitment of a punitive military (camp), with the aim of suppressing increased student protests.
In his new novel, The Tunisian novelist and poet Ammar Al-Jumai, reviewed the path to the Rajaim Maatouq camp, published by the Tunisian publishing house "Waraqa", the journey of suffering in the remote prison and the harsh punitive recruitment in the far south of the Tunisian desert in the late era of Habib Bourguiba (ruling from 1956-1987). .
"Rajim Maatouq" is located 120 kilometers from the city of Kebli, near the Algerian border, and a military barracks were held in it, where hundreds of students were arrested by the Tunisian regime during the rule of Bourguiba and Ben Ali in the eighties of the last century.
Time of tyranny
Ammar Al-Jumai - the author of the novel and one of its heroes at the same time - was forcibly recruited in 1987, when he was a student in the second year of the university level in the field of Arabic literature, to punish him against the background of a speech he delivered in the Manouba University Square in the capital, in which he criticized the regime of Bourguiba, and described it " Oppressive and oppressor. "
The group found in the university a relatively open and free atmosphere, which encouraged him to seek emancipation from the dictatorship to pay the price of that difficult months of his life spent in forced exile.
And the novel explored the depths of the detention experience that initially started with the author’s imprisonment in the basements of the Ministry of the Interior in the center of the capital and his torture, passing through his stage in the military reformatory in the “Qar'a Boufalija” area in the desert of Qebli Governorate (south), where he received a severe "training", until he was transferred to a prison The diet of Maatouq Al-Sahrawi, where the suffering started
The novel documented the suffering of the collective and others like him, and chronicled a period of Tunisian history after independence (1956), and before the 2011 revolution.
The author says in a post that he published at the end of last year that he decided to write the novel when he acquired a number of a magazine issued by the University of Manouba and found errors in what happened.
The group adds on its Facebook page that he was bothered by the political employment of a painful experience known only to those who lived it and the tenth of its owners and witnessed the moments of their weakness, and the author decided at that time to tell details that were kept secret for 26 years.
Between two systems
The arrested narrator entered the spring of 1987, months before Ben Ali's coup against Nizam Bourguiba (November 7), and he was released from it in the middle of the same month after receiving a special amnesty.
He described the arrested novelist as "the desert exile from which all the elements of humanity were absent."
According to the account, the camp was divided according to ideology, as there are tents that bring together students belonging to Islamic thought (the movement of Islamic direction that turned into the Renaissance movement later), and other tents that bring together leftists (different Marxist currents), and some nationalists (Arab progressive students and unionists and Nasserists), and between these Ideological groupings There were neutral or independent, unaffiliated, such as storytellers.
The detainee formed a diversified mixture and mosaic of thought in a generation that tried to inherit Bourguiba through conflicting concepts, but it is consistent with the goal of overthrowing it.
The author was not affiliated with any political trend, but he was against the dictatorship, and the collective descendent from the Hama region of Gabes Governorate (southeast of the country) was opposed to the contempt of the ruling regime of the people of southern Tunisia and their marginalization.
According to the text of the novel, the collective was searching for his "southernism" that rejected the authority that starved his family, marginalized his country's history, and classified it since the Buraqibi and Yusufi conflict (in favor of Ben Youssef), at the end of the fifties and beginning of the sixties, until the conflict of the left and the Islamists with Bourguiba (in the seventies and eighties) He considered that "the south was despised by Bourguiba."
Military students
The novel not only narrated the narrator's narration of his experience, but also touched on his human and personal relationship with some of the students who were his comrades in the struggle, and they are now prominent politicians, such as Shukri Belaid, the leftist leader who was assassinated in 2013. Salem Al-Abiad, a member of the "People" Movement (Nationalism) Nasiriyah). Mohsen Marzouk, head of the "Tunis Project" (liberal social) party.
By talking about his experience, the narrator wanted to honor his comrades who had been neglected in history, such as Hammadi Hobeik (the Islamic trend at the time, Al-Nahda later), who he described as a "martyr of the student movement", where he died of thirst in the desert while trying to escape from the prison at the time.
The novel pushes Tunisian collective consciousness to evoke chapters close to its history that mix political, social and cultural times in the era of the dictatorial dictatorship.