Jailed cyber-dissident Zouhair Yahyaoui begins new hunger strike

Reporters Without Borders today repeated its call for the immediate release of jailed cyber-dissident Zouhair Yahyaoui, who began a new hunger-strike a few days ago to protest against recent ill-treatment. "We are not surprised the Tunisian regime is taking advantage of the international media focus on Iraq to step up pressure on political prisoners such as Yahyaoui," said Reporters Without Borders secretary-general Robert Ménard. "This is disgraceful and we call on the president to free him at once, along with another journalist, Hamadi Jebali, who has been in jail since 1991." Yahyaoui's family said that when they visited him on 3 April at Borj el-Amri prison, 30 km from Tunis, he could not move about normally because he was physically weakened. He told them he had begun a new hunger-strike. In recent weeks, he said, guards had served him countermined food, banned him from reading, seized his letters, stopped his daily exercise periods and threatened him. He said he had also been placed in solitary confinement for two days with only stale bread to eat after being accused of inciting prisoners to go on hunger-strike. His family said he was very thin and depressed. He had staged an earlier hunger-strike from 17 to 30 January to protest against prison conditions and demand his release. Yahyaoui, founder of the website TUNeZINE, was jailed on 4 June last year after being arrested by plainclothes police in a Tunis cybercafé. He was sentenced to two years in prison for "spreading false news" by the appeals court in Tunis on 10 July. During his interrogation, he was tortured with three sessions of being made to hang by his arms with feet barely touching the ground. Using the pseudonym "Ettounsi" (Arabic for "Tunisian"), he set up his website in July 2001 to put out news about the fight for democracy and freedom in Tunisia. He published opposition material on it and was the first to publish a letter from his uncle, Judge Mokhtar Yahyaoui, to President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali criticising the country's legal system. Jebali, publisher of the weekly Al Fajr, organ of the An Nahada Islamist militant movement, has been held since 1991 and was sentenced in 1992 by the Tunis military court to 16 years in prison for "aggressively seeking to change the nature of the state" and "belonging to an illegal organisation." The previous year, he had been given a one-year sentence for publishing an article criticising the system of military courts. He went on hunger-strike from mid-January to mid-February this year in protest against jail conditions and to demand his freedom. In mid-March, he was moved from Bizerte prison to one in Sfax. _________________________________________________________ Over 13 years ago, Reporters without Borders created its "Sponsorship Programme" and called upon the international media to select and support an imprisoned journalist. One hundred and twenty news staffs around the globe are thus sponsoring colleagues by regularly petitioning authorities for their release and by publicising their situations so that their cases will not be forgotten. Currently, Zouhair Yahyaoui is sponsored by Avaldoci, Club de la presse Marseille, Club de la presse du Périgord , El periodico de Catalunya, El Triangle, Fraternitaire, Le Nouvelliste, liberation.fr, Maison de la presse - Mons, REE, Radio Populare, RTBF, www.categorynet.com. Currently, Hamadi Jebali is sponsored by Club de la presse de Toulon.