U.S.-Backed Tunisia Isolating Political Prisoners - Report

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jul 7 (IPS) - The North African nation of Tunisia is holding in isolation as many as 40 leaders of a moderate Islamist movement, who are among 500 political prisoners in the country chosen by U.S. President George W Bush as the base for his plan to democratise the Middle East, says a new report by Human Rights Watch (HRW).

The detentions in solitary confinement violate both Tunisian and international laws, adds the 33-page report, 'Tunisia: Long-Term Solitary Confinement of Political Prisoners'.

HRW found that all of the prisoners in prolonged isolation are Islamists, most of them leaders of the moderate Nahdha movement banned by the government of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, in 1990 after the authorities accused it of plotting to overthrow his regime.

While the prisoners, who have been permitted occasional 15-20-minute closely monitored visits with family members, have never been told why they are in solitary confinement, HRW believes it is due to the government's fear that their ideas could sway many in the country's general prisoner population. Their correspondence is censored; they have been refused permission to receive books and journals; and their access to writing materials is restricted, according to the report.

”Tunisia is using long-term solitary confinement to crush political prisoners and the ideas they represent,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of HRW's Middle East and North Africa Division. ”This inhumane policy does not serve any legitimate penal objective.”

The report comes five months after Bush himself hosted Ben Ali -- who has long been close to the United States -- at the White House, where he was described as among the moderate of Arab leaders and a dependable friend of the West. As a result, the administration chose Tunis as the regional centre for its Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI), a new programme designed to promote democracy and political reforms throughout the Arab world.

The choice was widely denounced by human rights activists, especially in the Arab world, where Ben Ali's reputation as an ”unreconstructed autocrat who runs one of the most repressive police states in the Arab world” -- as one veteran campaigner, Neil Hicks of Human Rights First (HRF), described him -- is well established. At the time, Ben Ali had just pushed through a constitutional reform that will allow him to remain in office through 2014.