(Tunis) More than twenty Tunisian NGOs on Saturday denounced police “repression” and “barbaric” attacks against journalists and demonstrators during the protests organized on Friday against President Kais Saied.
Posted at 2:19 p.m.
Demonstrations took place in Tunis against the Tunisian President’s July 25 coup by which he assumed full powers and to mark the 11and anniversary of the fall of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, January 14, 2011. These gatherings had been banned by the authorities for health reasons in the face of a resurgence of the COVID-19 epidemic.
In scenes of violence that had not been seen in the capital for 10 years, the police charged the demonstrators with large reinforcements of water cannons, tear gas and made dozens of muscular arrests.
Twenty NGOs, including the Tunisian League for the Defense of Human Rights and Lawyers Without Borders, called in a press release on the judicial authorities to “assume their responsibilities and to open an investigation into the repressive security practices against hundreds” of people.
The daily correspondent Release, Jeune Afrique and RFI was brutalized by the police and prevented from covering this demonstration, denounced Release, RFI and the Association of Foreign Correspondents in North Africa (NAFCC).
“While covering a demonstration against President Kais Saied on Friday, our correspondent Mathieu Galtier was violently beaten by several police officers. The newspaper’s management strongly condemns this attack,” said Release on his site.
The National Union of Tunisian Journalists (SNJT) denounced “strongly the barbaric violence” of the police against several journalists who were on the ground.
The SNJT deplored more than 20 police attacks against journalists, “targeted while they wore their distinctive vests and reported their status as journalists”.
These attacks, also against demonstrators, “establish the state of police repression instead of the state of republican security”, estimated the SNJT.
According to Release, the journalist “Mathieu Galtier was filming the muscular arrest of a demonstrator with his mobile phone when he was attacked by a uniformed policeman”. Despite the fact that he had identified himself as a journalist in French and Arabic, he was then “lifted up and dragged between two vans”.
“They started hitting me all over the place, I was on the ground, curled up in a fetal position. One of them sprayed me with gas at close range. They kicked me. Finally, they took my phone, my press card and they left me there,” he said in Release.
Once treated by the firefighters, his belongings were returned to him, with the exception of his phone’s memory card on which his images and videos were recorded.
The journalist, who has been living in Tunisia for six years and who had bruises and a “10-centimetre scratch on the forehead” noted by a doctor, was prescribed “fifteen days’ rest”.
The NAFCC condemned, in a press release, “the violence exerted by the security forces on the journalists who covered the mobilizations” in Tunis where “a level of violence never known since the creation of NAFCC in 2014” was reached.
“A photographer was notably clubbed and a video journalist jostled and prevented from filming”, added the association which also requested the opening of an investigation “without delay”.