The Tunisian Parliament rejected on the night of Tuesday to Wednesday a motion which officially asked France to apologize to Tunisia for the crimes committed "during and after colonization" , presented by a small Islamist party. After more than fifteen hours of debate which did little to address the substance of the question, the text garnered 77 votes for and 5 against, far from the 109 votes necessary to be voted.
The motion was presented by the Al Karama coalition, an Islamo-nationalist party with 19 elected representatives out of 217 deputies, who had made an electoral promise during the legislative elections in October 2019. Its elected representatives presented themselves to Parliament by wearing a t-shirt on which was written "murder and torture, the brutality of French colonialism" . The text proposed to demand an apology from the French state as well as compensation for "assassinations" , "rapes" , "forced exiles of opponents" , "looting of natural resources" , and support for the dictatorship. This concerns "all crimes committed since 1881", date of the start of the protectorate, including the support given to the regime of Zine el Abidine Ben Ali when it was hard-pressed in early 2011. The text, presented without prior debate or preparatory work, was unlikely to garner the majority in a very divided Parliament.
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An elected official from Al Karama, Ridha Jaouadi, estimated that "the cultural centers of the French occupation are more dangerous than the military bases" , accusing them of carrying out "a cultural invasion which destroys the morals and the values" of the Tunisians . "They are calling for gay marriage , " accused the former imam, who was sacked in 2015 from the main mosque in Sfax (east) by Tunisian authorities, who called him an extremist and then accused of "collecting money" without authorization.
"This is not a request for reconsideration of Tunisia, but rather a list of political settlements , " lambasted the anti-Islamist elected Abir Moussi. "The risk is that a subject of such great importance becomes a tool for political tactics , " lamented the historian and former politician Adnen Manser.
