Tunisia: students on hunger strike for 45 days

Tunisian students are, since 11 February in a continuous hunger strike to return back to the university from where they had been excluded for their union activities, according to them, for violence, according to the Ministry of Higher Education.

•     Our only demand is to be readmitted to the university, indicated to the press the students repeating visibly weakened: “the studies or death.”
  
      Lying on mattresses on the floor in the small room almost unhealthy of the union, under police control, they say they have “exhausted all calls in vain, hit all the doors,” before starting an unlimited hunger strike.
  
      Aged 23 to 27, these students are four elected members of the union dismissed from their faculties in Tunis and Mahdia (center-west). They were joined on 13 February by a fifth striker, calling for the release of his brother, student, jailed after riots in the region of Gafsa (south west).
  
      Doctors were alarmed for a serious deterioration of health of the strikers, calling for the cessation of the strike and an emergency hospitalization for risk of irreversible complications.
  
      Concerned with that state, the Human Rights League has requested the return of excluded and warned the authorities against the danger of ignoring the case.
  
      The students' union strike, the UGET in conflict with the ministry, will hold its 25th congress, lists 39 excluded and five jailed for union activities.
  
      Their only crime was to have been elected in union, says the union, accusing the Department for organizing arbitrary references by illegal discipline commissions.
  
      The authorities have denied unfounded allegations and stated that the references have been decided by the regular Disciplinary Board excluding the possibility of intervention of the ministry.
  
      These students were banned from university because of verbal and physical abuse, for a Dean hostage and prevented access to classrooms, according to government sources.
  
      They can not rely on their status as union members to engage in illegal and morally unacceptable, they added.
      
      
  Ennaharonline/ M. O.