Mukhtar Lamushi, an MP respresenting Ennahda in the National Constituent Assembly (NCA) , was sitting on a sofa next to the independent NCA member Mohamed Najib Hosni and NCA member of the Reform and Development Party Mohamed Naji Gharsli.

At first, this scene seems plausible enough, since they are all political Islamists. Yet their pasts are linked in an unlikely twist of fate. One was once the victim of the second and the third was a witness to the crime.

Mukhtar Lamushi, an MP respresenting Ennahda in the National Constituent Assembly (NCA) , was sitting on a sofa next to the independent NCA member Mohamed Najib Hosni and NCA member of the Reform and Development Party Mohamed Naji Gharsli.

At first, this scene seems plausible enough, since they are all political Islamists. Yet their pasts are linked in an unlikely twist of fate. One was once the victim of the second and the third was a witness to the crime.

Gharsli was the judge who sentenced Lamushi to imprisonment when he was 18 years old and thus changed the path of the latter’s life. Hosni was one of the judges who refused to take part in the trial. Instead, Hosni quit and went on to become a lawyer.

A dissident student

Lamushi was arrested in 1981 after announcing the birth of the Islamic Direction Movement, which later became Ennahda Movement, under the Tunisian President Habib Bourguiba.

That period was marked by political confusion with Tunisia on the verge of a deep social and economic crisis.  At the time, the movement’s leaders decided to run in the elections publicly so they applied to license their party. As a result all the Islamic leaders—at the central and governorate level— were arrested and put on trial.

Lamushi was 18 at the time, the youngest person and the only student to be arrested and sentenced to six months in prison. During the trial, he stood in front of two young judges: Najib Hosni and Naji Gharsli.

Taking a stand

Hosni quit his position and refused to take part in the trial of Lamushi and his other Islamic colleagues. “I only got to know him during the trial and when I became a lawyer, I defended him along with a large group of detainees. Afterwards, Lamushi became a close friend when Ben Ali’s regime tightened its grip over the Islamists,” he said describing his relationship with Lamushi.

After Lamushi was released from prison, he was expelled from secondary school and lost every hope of ever completing his studies. He tried his best to finish school in 1983 but in vain as all the private institutes refused to enroll him.

“The worst thing the dissolved regime ever did to me and hundreds of my generation was depriving us of an education and preventing us from travelling to pursue our studies. I could not get a passport for over 30 years,” Lamushi explained.

The second generation

The Islamic Direction’s senior leaders including Rashid Ghannouchi, Abdulfateh Moro and Saleh Karkar were put on trial in 1981 and received harsh sentences. After he was released, Lamushi found himself one of the movement’s second row leaders or what the Islamists label as the ‘second-founding’ generation.

Lamushi along with Abdullatif, Ajami Warimi and Abdulkarim Harouni were the leaders of the secret organization at the time and currently Ennahda’s top ranking members.

Lamushi has not had a moment of peace since he was imprisoned. He spent his life either imprisoned, being a fugitive or closely watched. His only peaceful moment was when he was sent to the western countryside as a primary school teacher. He spent two years there before the authorities became aware of his file and pursued him again.

The movement experienced a relatively calm period in 1985 and 1986, during which time Lamushi and his colleagues began applying the principles of their ideology and vision and, consequently, became more public.

However, the calm did not last for long. The regime resumed targeting the Islamists and arrested the movement’s leader in the spring of 1987. Confrontations in the streets continued for more than eight months until the fall of Boureguiba’s regime.

Abdulnur on the run

When he was a fugitive, Lamushi disguised and disappeared in the Baja Governorate (northwest of Tunisia) under the fake name of Abdulnur where he bought a bookshop at the city’s entrance.

When Lamushi or Abdulnur turned 25, he moved to Tunis permanently and worked as a ticket inspector after managing to forge the needed documents and the necessary uniform so that the political police would not recognize him. In the meantime, he continued his activities in the movement.

Caught

Lamushi was arrested in the zenith of tension between Bourguiba’s regime and the Islamists. He was put on trial in September 1987 and was sentenced to 37 years in prison. He received most of these sentences while absent by court-martial and civil courts. However, all of these verdicts were dropped after Ben Ali took over and he was released on November 7, 1987.

A huge sector of the Tunisian people were optimistic about Ben Ali, but Lamushi was cautious of the new ruler as Bourguiba’s Prime Minister and Minister of Interior. While the movement’s leaders were open to Ben Ali, Lamushi insisted that Ben Ali was more dangerous than Bourguiba.

Soon the prophecy of Lamushi was fulfilled and the pursuit of  Islamists resumed after the movement clashed with the regime in October 1990.

This stage on the run was different for Lamushi, who got married and whose disguise became more difficult with his new wife, a teacher. He was arrested in June 1991 and transferred to the ‘Boshosha’ detention center in Tunis and the journey of torture started.

Lamushi was put on trial in 1992 by a court-martial in Bab Sadoun. He was unable to move due to torture. He was sentenced to five years in prison. When his release date approached in 1996, the security apparatus decided that Lamushi would be dangerous to the regime so it fabricated other charges and involved Najib Hosni who was a lawyer in the Kaf Governorate. As a result, he was sentenced to eight more years in prison.

A living martyr

Lamushi went on a hunger strike inside the prison for 113 days. He was admitted to four major hospitals in Tunis, unconscious and under tight security measures.

Lamushi does not remember much about that period except what the family and friends told him.  He was released in 1997 under presidential amnesty. He had been so emaciated that his fellow inmates thought he was no longer in prison because he had died.

Ben Ali’s amnesty put an end to the fabricated sentences on Lamushi. The ‘living martyr’ was put under intensified medical care for about a year before his recovery. Then, he was put again under tight supervision. He was isolated from the world and thus life, he said, “Became a huge prison.”

Torture and sexual abuse

Lamushi related sadly the torture stories inside the prisons of Bourguiba and Ben Ali. “The torture was systematic and horrible. The political detainees, especially the Islamists, were subjected to the worst torture ever,” he said.

He was once tied on a chair in the detention center’s corridor for about a month with no contact to other people. He was beaten, kicked burned with cigarettes on sensitive body parts, copies of the Quran were taken away from him and Islamists were not allowed to speak to one other. Islamists were also not allowed to read newspapers or follow the news.

During visiting hours the prison forced prisoners meet their families naked. They were ordered bend over and guards inserted sticks in their anuses. When the prisoners staged a protest to oppose this humiliation, they were deprived of family visits.

A thing of the past

Lamushi spoke sadly about his colleagues, the Islamists, who were abused and sexually harassed in front of their wives and husbands. “Some pregnant prisoners lost their babies after being kicked in the belly,” he said.

“No one knows the true meaning of torture except for those who experience it and we can only understand the meaning of freedom when we lose it,” he said.

“If Islamists had wanted to seek revenge, they would have done so in the period of emptiness and chaos which Tunisia went through after the revolution. The regime’s supporters and jailers were exposed, but we have opted for peace, reconciliation and the transitional justice which we believe in,” he stressed.

Gharsli, the former judge who sentenced Lamushi to imprisonment and who now sits next to him in the NCA, refused to admit his guilt. “What happened was something of the past. I do not want to talk about it again,” he explained.

Gharsli added that at the time of the trial, he was one of the youngest judges with very little experience.  He claims he did not know Lamushi was accused of formulating an unlicensed society, distributing publications and establishing unlicensed headquarters.

The former judge believes that despite his young age at the time, he had the honor of mitigating Lamushi’s sentences stressing that he had not been a tool in the hands of the regime. “I was only trying to enforce the law and pass sentences in light of the available pieces of evidence and Lamushi should thank me for it.”