Under the incredulous eyes of the participants at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis, Tunisia, journalists and human rights defenders were manhandled, insulted, and then beaten, said a press release from the Association for Progressive Communications (APC).
APC is an international network of organisations that was founded in 1990 to provide communications infrastructure, including internet-based applications, to groups and individuals who work for peace, human rights, protection of the environment, and substainability.
At 9.30am on Monday, at the Place d’Afrique in Tunis, more than 30 plainclothes policemen were waiting for international and Tunisian delegates and members of civil society.
Omar Mestiri, director of the online magazine Kalima and a founder member of the National Council for Freedom in Tunisia, was seized as soon as he arrived at the site for the meeting of the coordinating committee of the Citizens’ Summit on the Information Society (CSIS).
Bombarded with blows and insults, Mestiri kept his calm, before he was able to break away from the group of plainclothes policemen, said APC.
”There is democracy in Tunisia, but this is a bad lot”, shouted one of the police officers before beating Mestiri about the head, then on his back.
When members of international NGOs, including APC, Human Rights Watch, the Danish Human Rights Institute and other civil society representatives tried to intervene, the police officers moved away, and manhandled the international delegates in turn.
”They grabbed hold of me and shook me violently as I sought to appeal for calm”, said Anriette Esterhuysen, executive director of APC.
The citizens’ summit is an initiative co-organised by independent Tunisian NGOs, the Tunisian free press, and international NGOs.
Frédéric Dubois, information coordinator for APC, told the Mail & Guardian Online on Tuesday that the Tunisian police had blocked the road to the CSIS conference at the Goethe Institute.
”… I saw that the policemen were pushing and beating journalists; especially the Tunisian journalists. I was followed by the policemen for 200m or 250m while they pushed me around.
”We dispersed in different groups and went back to the WSIS venue later. In the evening a woman told me that they tried to meet again [for the Citizen Summit] but that different venue was also blocked by undercover policemen. Some people have been taken to prison.”
Meanwhile, Tunisian authorities denied on Tuesday that a Belgian television crew reporting on freedom of expression in the country had been harassed and threatened in Tunis.
Belgian television station RTBF said late on Monday that one of its crews had been harassed, with the cameraman forced out of his car and his camera and video cassette confiscated.
Reporter Marianne Klaric was ”threatened” and had ”left the area for fear of being physical attacked”, the station said, adding that the camera had been returned to the crew but not the tape.
”Contrary to the claims of the RTBF journalist, at no time was there any aggression or violence used against the journalist or her team,” an official said, calling the claim ”defamatory”.
”It is a far cry, one could argue, from the duty of impartial and objective information you would expect from public service television,” the official added.
On Friday, a journalist for France’s Liberation newspaper, who was investigating human rights abuses in Tunisia, was gassed, beaten and stabbed near his hotel, his editors said.
The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) is aimed at boosting access to modern telecommunications and the internet in the developing world.
Related links
APC website