New wave of arrests in Tunisia against profiles of opponents of Kais Saied
"The situation here is very tense and no one knows who will be next on their list", Tunisians report with concern. In the last 48 hours, the police have launched an apparently coordinated operation that has resulted in the arrest of five profiles related to the judiciary, traditional political parties and the business sector. The link that unites them is their outright rejection of Kais Saied, although the charges against them vary. Early indications point to a new campaign by the president against the opposition following the establishment of his new constitutional architecture, which some observers describe as déjà vu of the Ben Ali years.
The former prosecutor of the Republic's Court of First Instance, Bashir Akremi, was one of those arrested as part of the operation. He had been under house arrest since 31 July. The committee for the defence of martyrs Chokri Belaïd and Mohamed Brahmi accuses him of concealing evidence to obstruct the case investigating the deaths of these two prominent left-wing activists, militants of the Unified Party of Democratic Patriots and the Echaab Movement respectively, and staunch opponents of the then ruling Ennahda. Their assassinations shocked the country barely two years into the revolution, but they were never brought to trial.
Akremi, one of the 57 judges dismissed in June by presidential decree, was linked in office to the Islamist Ennahda party. Until his definitive disqualification, he sat on a court with national jurisdiction over economic, financial and anti-terrorist matters, from where he allegedly favoured the interests of the party still led by Rachid Ghanuchi, which dominated the post-revolutionary political chessboard until the emergence of Saied. The current president garnered popular support precisely by denouncing widespread institutional corruption. Saied campaigned against the collusion between institutions and Islamist conservatism.
The former prosecutor, for his part, has denounced through a statement issued by the NGO Alkarama that Saied's entourage tried to "influence the investigation of the case to implicate and accuse, even in the absence of evidence, the political and ideological leaders of Ennahda". The Islamist formation has also flatly rejected the accusations. However, Akremi's recent arrest is linked to the case of Chokri Belaïd and Mohamed Brahmi, reports local radio station Mosaique FM.
Akremi was not the only judge arrested in recent hours. Police raided the home of Taieb Rached, the former first president of the Court of Cassation, on Sunday. The raid resulted in the arrest of the judge and the subsequent seizure of several documents that could prove his involvement in a case of financial corruption. Rached, another of the judges relieved in June by Saied, was also a member of the Supreme Council of the Judiciary (CSM), the former judges' body that was also dismantled by the president.
Hours earlier, on Saturday night, seven police officers raided the home of Abdelhamid Jelassi, the historic leader of Ennahda. In the raid, he was arrested and "taken to an unknown destination", according to a brief message posted by his daughter on his Facebook page. The authorities accuse him of "conspiring against state security" but give no further details. Jelassi had left the organisation before the 2019 elections and since then had devoted himself "to publicly criticising the experience of the Islamist movement in Tunisia", recalls political scientist Mohamed-Dhia Hammami.
Lawyer and political activist Khayam Turki, 58, the son of Tunisia's former ambassador to France, was the first to disappear early on Saturday. Neither he nor his lawyers knew he was under the radar of the authorities. He experienced the same modus operandi as the rest of the detainees: search and seizure of electronic devices. In his case, his computer, his wife's computer and his mobile phone. Turki was until recently a prominent leader of Ettakatol, the social democratic party that was part of the coalition government with Ennahda between 2011 and 2014 before joining the opposition. Although his name had been mentioned as a possible candidate for prime minister in 2020, following the resignation of Elies Fajfaj.
Kamel Eltaïef is the latest name on the list of those arrested for conspiring against the state. The 68-year-old tycoon has influenced Tunisia's political reality over the past decades and is perceived as one of the leading exponents of the endemic corruption plaguing the country. Eltaïef participated in the palace coup that dethroned Habib Bourguiba for medical reasons, becoming one of former dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali's most trusted men until he lost his backing in the early 1990s. After the Arab Spring, he was able to place himself in the orbit of successive coalition governments in which Ennahda was present.
"That the Turki, Eltaïef, Jelassi or others could discuss, on any occasion, for example over dinner, possible means of changing the political situation in Tunisia or even finding a replacement for Kais Saied, is quite possible and even highly probable, because they have been involved in the political life of the country. But for such a fact, if proven, to fuel a charge of conspiracy against state security, it would have to prove the existence of material preparations for an illegal or violent seizure of power," writes journalist Ridha Kéfi in the pages of the Tunisian daily Kapitalis.
The latest arrests of Saied's opponents follow the arrests in December of former prime minister Ali Laarayedh, vice-president of Ennahda, and former Justice Minister Noureddine Bhiri, a member of the Islamist formation, both of whom are charged in a judicial process investigating the sending of Islamist militants to fight in Syria. The opposition and several human rights groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have spoken out against what they describe as arbitrary arrests.
It is a mechanism used assiduously by Saied since he invoked article 80 of the old constitution in July 2021 to concentrate all powers. The prerogatives gave him full power to dismantle the constitutional architecture and draft a new Magna Carta in its place, tailor-made for him, which was approved by referendum in July last year. Since then, however, the president has suffered a significant loss of support, which materialised in worrying turnout figures in the legislative elections, due to the low turnout at the polls.
While Saied suffers a bloodletting on the streets and fails to reverse the crisis, the opposition remains sharply divided. On the one hand, there are the Islamists of Ennahda and their radical partners in the Coalition for Dignity, together with the militants of Citizens Against the Coup and independent profiles of the former parliament, who want to regain lost space. On the other hand, there are the smaller circles and platforms that are forming around Abir Moussi's Free Destourian Party, which seeks to restore Ben Ali's pre-revolutionary regime.