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Tunisia -

The families of political detainees in Tunisia are experiencing great anxiety, which increased in intensity after 6 of the detainees went on a hunger strike to protest the one-year anniversary of their arrest due to their opposition to the course of July 25, 2021 imposed by President Kais Saied.

As she reads his first letter and looks at their souvenir photos, Monia Ibrahim tells Al Jazeera Net her suffering since the arrest of her husband, the former leader of the Ennahda movement, Abdel Hamid Al-Jalasi.

She says that her psychological state is very bad because she has been living alone in her home for a year, and her anxiety has increased even more because her husband has been on a hunger strike for more than 10 days, and he suffers from 3 diseases of varying severity, including cancer and diabetes, which he recently contracted in prison. , according to her.

With tears suffocating her, Munya says that she spends the holidays in the cemetery near her parents or alone in her house, and that occasions and holidays no longer have meaning, and the days of the week are reduced to only two days: the day she shops to prepare meals for her husband and the day she visits him in prison.

My only brother and friend

In turn, lawyer Dalila bin Mubarak Mosaddeq announced that she had entered into a hunger strike yesterday evening, Saturday, in protest against the issuance of a 6-month prison sentence in absentia against her brother and her client, the political prisoner Jawhar bin Mubarak, a member of the National Salvation Front, who has been on a hunger strike for days in protest against the intimidation of opponents.

In an interview with Al Jazeera Net, Dalila described the extent of the suffering her family has been experiencing since the arrest of her only brother, especially after his hunger strike, weight loss, and the physical pain he suffers because of that.

She said that the health of detainees on hunger strike is deteriorating day by day, especially since most of them are over 60 years old.

With great emotion on her face, Dalila recounts the details of her relationship with her brother, saying, “He is my only brother and my friend. He consults me on matters big and small, and we lived exactly like twins from childhood until today. He left a big void in my life.”

Open sit

For his part, Dalila’s father, the opposition figure Ezzedine bin Mubarak Al-Hazqi, expressed his deep concern and sadness over the “injustice” to which his son was subjected due to his political stances. He said that he no longer enjoyed eating due to Jawhar’s hunger strike, but at the same time he was happy with his struggle for democracy. According to his expression.

Al-Hazqi described the political arrests during Saied’s era as “irresponsible and barbaric,” and said that Tunisia had never experienced such detention methods, even during the harshest dictatorships of Habib Bourguiba and Ben Ali, he said.

In a new protest movement, the families of political detainees in Tunisia entered into an open sit-in in solidarity with them, during which they expressed their great dissatisfaction with the neglect of the file of their detained relatives for a full year, in addition to the lack of proof of the charges against them, according to a statement by defense team member Dalila bin Mubarak Mosaddeq to Al Jazeera. net.

Source: Al Jazeera