Zouhair Yahyaoui ends hunger-strike

Jailed cyber-dissident Zouhair Yahyaoui has ended his hunger-strike, his family said after their weekly visit to him on 24 April. "He was without medical care during the last week of the strike and had to stop it because of severe stomach pains," said Souhayr Belhassen, head of his support committee. "We want him at least to be transferred to another prison and for his appeal to be heard" against his conviction and sentence last July. ___________________________________________________________ 18.04.2003 Jailed cyber-dissident Zouhair Yahyaoui enters fourth week of hunger-strike Reporters Without Borders warned the Tunisian government today that it would bear a "huge responsibility" if anything happened to jailed cyber-dissident Zouhair Yahyaoui, who is entering his fourth week of a hunger-strike in a bid to gain his release. "He seems very determined," said Reporters Without Borders secretary-general Robert Ménard. "We call on President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali to free him immediately and unconditionally, along with journalist Hamadi Jebali, who has been in prison since 1991." Yahyaoui's family said that when they visited him on 10 April at Borj el-Amri prison, 30 km from Tunis, he could not move about normally because he was physically weakened. He was very thin and depressed, they said, and weighed only 50 kg (he is 1.78 metres tall), compared with 70 kg when he was arrested. He began his hunger-strike on 28 March to protest against his worsening treatment in recent weeks, during which guards had served him contaminated food, banned him from reading, seized his letters, stopped his daily exercise periods and threatened him. 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 began a system of sponsorship in which international media were asked to support imprisoned journalists. Some 120 media outlets around the world now sponsor a jailed colleague by regularly calling for their release and publicising their case to ensure they are not forgotten. Yahyaoui is sponsored by the press clubs in Marseilles and the Périgord, Avaldoci, El periodico de Catalunya, Fraternitaire, El Triangle, Le Nouvelliste, liberation.fr, the Maison de la presse in Mons, Radio Populare, RTBF, REE and www.categorynet.com. Jebali is sponsored by the Toulon press club.