Twenty-eight year-old Lamia al-Sharif’s face is still pale, her expression fatigued; signs from the 55-day  strike she has just endured. She hardly speaks but she never fails to come to the office and contribute to the newspaper.

Al-Sharif has been working in the national events department of the ‘Dar Assabah’ state-owned media institution for the last eight years. She considers this place her home. “My life would be meaningless if the institution was brought back to chains,” she says.

Twenty-eight year-old Lamia al-Sharif’s face is still pale, her expression fatigued; signs from the 55-day  strike she has just endured. She hardly speaks but she never fails to come to the office and contribute to the newspaper.

Al-Sharif has been working in the national events department of the ‘Dar Assabah’ state-owned media institution for the last eight years. She considers this place her home. “My life would be meaningless if the institution was brought back to chains,” she says.

She is referring to what she and her colleagues regard as governmental control of the institution’s editorial leadership.  The appointment of a director general Lotfi Touati, whom Al-Sharif describes as incompetent, set off the employees’ first wave of hunger strikes on October 1st. “It’s illogical,” Al-Sharif insists, “to appoint a policeman in the top office of Dar Assabah.”   According to the journalists, Touati attempted to interfere in the editorial line of the newspapers issued by the institution. 

Death strike

Due to the failure of negotiations and the assertion of the journalists of ‘Dar Assabah’ that the government was not serious about the dialogue with the syndicate to reach a solution to the crisis that lasted for two months, another group of journalists went on hunger strike, indifferent to its dangers to their lives; Lamia was one of them.

Seven days into the hunger strike, Lamia’s condition became so serious, she was hospitalized. There, her friends were told that she was on the verge of falling into a coma, if not losing her life.  

“On the seventh day of the hunger strike”, recalls Lamia, “my health deteriorated. A doctor found that the level of my blood sugar dropped to 0.4, affirming that my condition was serious and that I was about to fall into a coma. I was promptly transferred to the ICU where I spent 24 hours and then I reluctantly accepted to suspend the hunger strike.”  When Al-Sharif ended her strike, the general strike also ended once the government announced talks.

The government accused the ‘Dar Assabah’ journalists on hunger strike that they were hampering its work and were only seeking to settle their social status.

 “It’s not the social status that has made me and my colleagues go on hunger strike,” Al-Sharif objected, “it’s rather the appointments forced by a higher authority.”  The manager appointed by the Ennahda government, for example, used to work in security under Ben Ali, before joining journalism.

Support

The ‘Dar Assabah’ struggle attracted the support of media professionals and even people from other sectors, including politicians, intellectuals and syndicate members.

Sami Tahri, the assistant secretary general of the Tunisian General Labour Union, was amongst those who went on an open hunger strike in solidarity with the striking journalists of ‘Dar Assabah.’ Tahri said that going on hunger strike was the only choice after the failure of all other struggling means and that “under no circumstances are they going to waive the most important achievement of the revolution, the freedom of media.”

“In short,” Al-Sharif says, “our lives are in one hand and freedom is on the other.”

On October 30th, Al-Sharif and her colleagues accomplished their goal, Touati stepped down from his post.