If you ask Sharifa about the elections that will take place in less than a month in Tunisia, she will look at you in surprise, as if she doesn’t even know the meaning of the word. She might also bend her head, trying to recall any similar words she knows – as if looking for a meaning for this strange term.

If you ask Sharifa about the elections that will take place in less than a month in Tunisia, she will look at you in surprise, as if she doesn’t even know the meaning of the word. She might also bend her head, trying to recall any similar words she knows – as if looking for a meaning for this strange term.

Sharifa doesn’t know the words “democracy” or “political party” either. She understands nothing about politics, but not because she lacks the mental capacity, rather because she has no legal documents to prove she exists – not even an identity card. She has never participated in elections, and never will, because, like 300,000 other Tunisian women, she has been deprived of her citizenship.

This reality came as a shock to human rights activists in Tunisia when Shafik Sarsar, president of the Independent High Authority for the Elections (ISIE), publicly admitted it on September 12, on the sidelines of a conference held by the Arab Institute for Human Rights entitled “Tunisian Women are National Assets.” It is a great title for an event, but it hardly reflects the desperate conditions that thousands of Tunisian women live in.

Sharifa does not know that she has been automatically classified with all the other unregistered Tunisian women. They are second-class people, who enjoy no civil rights and live on the margins of events in remote and forgotten areas in the mountains and rural border areas west of Tunisia.

A primitive life

Sharifa, a woman in her sixties, lives in one of the isolated villages among the highest mountains of Ain Draham. She rarely smiles and there seems to be a deep sorrow drawn on her face, a sadness hidden between the wrinkles etched on her forehead and cheeks.

She lives together with her son Ali, who is in his late thirties and suffers multiple physical and mental disabilities. With a lot of patience and passion, she takes care of him, although she barely has anything to offer him. She even made a special wheelchair that allows him to use simple tools.

Ali also guards her sheep and cows, which constitute Sharifa’s only wealth and give her milk, meat, leather, and enough blankets to keep her and her son warm during the winter season. In the evening, Sharifa returns to the cottage where she lives, pushing Ali’s adapted wheelchair through the valley, while her animals, who know the road, walk ahead.

There is no radio or TV in her hut, and she is completely isolated from the outside world. She prepares her own bread, eats, and feeds her son from the garden. She never gets any food from the small grocery shops.

Sharifa isolated herself from other people when her husband left her. He married another woman, taking advantage of Tunisia’s traditional marriage contract, which, like many such contracts, was never registered in the civil records created after independence in 1956, when the government tried to formalize the status of Tunisia’s old oral and traditional marriage contracts.

Who to blame?

When the State Office for Women and Family Affairs announced in late June the launch of its campaign to encourage rural women to register to vote, it was well aware that 300,000 of them did not have ID numbers.

Even after Sarsar’s announcement that ISIE has developed a plan to solve the problem in coordination with the Social Affairs and Interior Ministries, the situation did not improve because most people without ID cards lived so remotely that it proved impossible to reach them.

But still, when you ask Sharifa about politics, she shakes her head indifferently. Likewise, the political parties – otherwise racing to mobilize voters by any means they can – do not care about the thousands of women who share her circumstances. To date, none of Tunisia’s political parties have issued a statement condemning the state’s failure to help the 300,000 women who remain unregistered.

Even those parties filling their programmes with slogans on citizenship and rights have not come up with any comprehensive way to end the isolation of remote border areas, where thousands of people live their lives.

Local human rights organizations say it is a scandal for a state like Tunisia – which claims to have granted women their rights at the end of the 1950s – to be leaving 300,000 women with no citizenship in 2014.

Even parties who believe in extending the electoral lists have not come up with solutions to the status of thousands of rural women like Sharifa. There is nothing that binds these women to Tunisia, other than the fact that they occupy a piece of its land. They are people outside history and state protection.