In Tunisia, since mid-October, numerous cases of police violence have aroused the anger of Tunisian youth. This Thursday, justice is expected to announce the verdict in one of them, the case of young football fan Omar Laabidi, who died in 2018. He drowned in a river while trying to escape police officers after a muscular exit from a football stadium. 14 security guards were arrested for failing to assist a person in danger.
On Thursday, October 20, dozens of young people, most of them hooded to avoid being spotted and arrested by the police, gathered in front of the Ben Arous court, in the southern suburbs of Tunis. Four years after the death of Omar Laabidi, 19, they are still awaiting the court’s decision. “The case of Omar Laabidi is not isolated, to date we know that there are nearly 15 other similar cases where young people die in suspicious circumstances. All these court cases have in common the fact that they involve police officers,” explains Ayoub Amara, an activist who is part of the support committee in this case.
Mid-October, nocturnal clashes took place in the working-class neighborhoods of the capital for a week after the death of another young man, Malek Selimi, who died on October 14. He had fallen into a ravine while trying to escape a police patrol and succumbed to his injuries after a month in a coma.
In Hay Etthadamen, in his neighborhood, his uncle Mohamed expresses his dismay at the lack of justice: “We don’t have a problem with the police, we know that there are police who commit abuses and others doing their job properly. What is problematic is that some are above the law, the law does not seem to apply to them and that is a problem”.
“There is no justice for the victims”
On Wednesday, November 2, several dozen activists again demonstrated in front of the Ministry of the Interior against impunity. And in the country, civil society regularly denounces the recurring problems between the police and young people. The Tunisian human rights league has listed nearly twenty cases of young people who died suspiciously after altercations with the police. “The current regime still uses the same practices and policies of repression, which have failed in the past,” commented Oussama Bouhajila, one of the representatives of the World Organization Against Torture in Tunisia.
