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A protest against police violence in Tunisia
Ahmed Ben Ammar’s family and neighbours protest against police violence with a banner reading ‘truth and justice’ in Sidi Hassine, Tunis. Photograph: Mohamed Messara/EPA
Ahmed Ben Ammar’s family and neighbours protest against police violence with a banner reading ‘truth and justice’ in Sidi Hassine, Tunis. Photograph: Mohamed Messara/EPA

‘They beat him’: fear and anger at latest police killing in Tunis

This article is more than 2 years old

Protests erupt again in Tunisian capital after man ‘beaten to death’ amid claims of police impunity

Almost everyone in the streets around Ahmed Ben Ammar’s house in the Tunis district of Sidi Hassine claims to have known him or his family. Nearly everyone also has a slightly different account of his death in police custody on Tuesday. Details vary but all agree that the 32-year-old was beaten to death by police this week.

Sidi Hassine is to the west of Tunisia’s capital, on the far side of the Sebkha Sijoumi wetlands and the hulking landfill at Borj Chakir, already years past its scheduled closure date. The smell and the mosquitoes fill the air. At one end of the road is a thriving market, at the other – near where Ben Ammar lived – cafes and shops line the dusty street.

“He was a good guy. He just wanted to work. He’d originally been a metalworker,” his friend Marwen says, describing the “clean” guy he remembered. “He was walking with his fiancee when the police stopped him, suspecting drugs. He refused to go with them, so they beat him.”

No one here is surprised by the behaviour of the police, only its ferocity.

“This is how they police working-class neighbourhoods,” Marwen says. “When you tell people you’re from Sidi Hassine they stand back, like you’re a criminal.

“Some people from here do get good jobs,” he says, although stressing that it remains the exception rather than the rule. For many young people in Sidi Hassine, illegal migration to Europe is the best option.

Protests followed Ben Ammar’s death. The following evening, a teenaged boy was filmed being stripped naked and brutally beaten in the street by police. Outrage and unrest spread, with protests erupting in the similarly marginalised neighbourhoods of Ettadhamen and Intilaka and spreading to the city centre.

“Most of those people involved in the protests will have been marked by the police. The next time they go into the station to get their paperwork renewed, they’ll be waiting for them,” Marwen says. Once they have a criminal record, few will find employment.

Politicians have denounced what they said was “isolated” police violence against the two men, promising a full investigation. However, Sidi Hassine residents point to an endemic culture of violence, corruption and impunity, untouched by past promises of reform.

“These aren’t individual acts,” says Arbi, 34. “They happen all the time. They happened yesterday, they’re happening today and they’ll happen tomorrow.”

He recalls the time he bought a few items of clothing to sell during Ramadan, only to have them confiscated by police, leaving him struggling to support his baby daughter. Unemployment across Tunisia averages 16%. Among 15- to 24-year-olds, more than a third remain jobless. Nobody knows how the Covid pandemic and the collapse of Tunisia’s tourism industry, plus related businesses, may affect those numbers.

Police violence is far from a new phenomenon in Tunisia. In January, demonstrations against police violence saw 2,000 predominantly young people from Tunis’s poorer neighbourhoods arrested, their identities now imprinted upon the long memory of Tunisia’s state bureaucracy. Many of them, including children, reported being beaten or maltreated in detention.

While nearly all strands of Tunisian public life have undergone reform since the 2011 revolution, police violence and impunity – safeguarded by a burgeoning network of police unions – appears only to have flourished.

Abderazzak, 31, sits outside a Sidi Hassine cafe. He’s never known a steady job, relying instead on precarious work as a day labourer to support his wife and baby son. Like many, he is not surprised at the fate of Ben Ammar and worries about his own future.

As a queue forms outside the bakery opposite, he says it should not be trading, as bakeries are on strike over delays in government subsidies intended to keep down the price of bread.

“They’re going to put the price of bread up shortly,” Abderazzak says. “How can I afford that? My son didn’t even have dinner last night.”

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