Tunisian security forces have arrested Jawhar Ben Mbarek, the most prominent opposition figure to be rounded up in an escalating arrest campaign targeting President Kais Saied’s rival.
“Jawhar was arrested last night and we have not seen any charges against him,” his sister Dalila Msaddek, a lawyer, told AFP on Friday.
Ben Mbarek is the latest of dozens of public figures arrested this month, mostly rivals of Saied, who froze parliament and dramatically dismissed the government in July 2021 against the only democracy that emerged from the Arab Spring uprisings.
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Saied later pushed through sweeping changes to the political system of North African countries, concentrating almost-total power in his office.
The leftist Ben Mbarek, formerly a government adviser, is a member of the National Salvation Front (NSF) opposition coalition and the leader of the “Citizens Against the Coup” movement, both formed in response to Saied’s power grab.
Tunisian international relations
NSF chief Ahmed Nejib Chebbi told AFP that five detainees including Ben Mbarek, senior NSF member Chaima Issa and his brother Chebbi Issam, as well as a prominent politician, appeared in handcuffs before prosecutors on Friday morning.
“This treatment and detention shows that the authorities are flailing around and have failed to manage the political, economic and social situation as well as Tunisia’s international relations,” the NSF chief said.
Front includes Ennahdha, the Islamist-leaning party that has dominated Tunisia’s fractious politics since the revolution until Saied’s power grab.
Ennahdha on Friday expressed “solidarity” with Ben Mbarek and said it “strongly condemns the campaign of arbitrary arrests”.
Ben Mbarek’s father wrote on his Facebook account that he was also arrested by the police and interrogated for several hours on Thursday.
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Those arrested this month also include Noureddine Boutar, director of the country’s most popular private radio station Mosaique FM, who has criticized the president as well as successive governments since the revolution.
– The judge was threatened –
Authorities questioned Boutar about the station’s editorial line before charging him with “money laundering and illegal enrichment”, according to lawyers, who said the case was politically motivated.
Saied, who seized control of the court early last year, said earlier this week that those arrested were “terrorists” who were “planning against the security of the country”.
On Wednesday, he threatened the judge handling the case, saying “anyone who dares to release (the arrested) is an accomplice”.
In a televised speech, Saied added that corruption is “a cancer in the body of the state, which must be destroyed by radiotherapy or chemotherapy”.
The President also accused people of being jailed for lack of basic goods from sugar to petrol.
Tunisia, heavily indebted and import-dependent, is grappling with an acute economic crisis that predates Saied’s takeover but has worsened with the fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Ben Mbarek, a constitutional lawyer like Saied, has supported the president during his success in the 2019 elections, but has since become one of his main critics.
Since seizing total executive powers, Saied has neutered parliament and pushed through a new constitution that gives him near-unlimited control and makes it almost impossible to impeach him.
The authorities have since courted some critics, and rights groups say they are reinstalling an authoritarian system more than a decade after dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was ousted.
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Human Rights Watch on Friday said Saied’s public comments undermined the presumption of innocence and attacked the independence of prosecutors and judges.
“After carrying out prosecutions and firing judges on the right and left, President Saied is now following his critics by saying,” said Salsabil Chellali, director of HRW Tunisia.
“Saied called him a terrorist and did not pretend to produce credible evidence.”