Mohamed Salah Fliss
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Mohamed Salah Fliss (born in 1946 in Bizerte) is a Tunisian politician. He is the author of Uncle Hamda the docker (Aam Hamda attal in Arabic) which is a testimony on the prison experiences of political activists of the Tunisian left in the 1970s.
Mohamed Salah Fliss was born into a family of modest social condition, living in the port city of Bizerte, north of Tunisia. His father Hamda was a stevedore on the harbors of the commercial port.
Admired by trade union leader Farhat Hached, Hamda participated in the colonial port's social movements. He took an active part in setting up obstacles obstructing the Bizert Canal during the Bizerte crisis. That was when he lost his second son Mekki.
Hamda Fliss's activism encouraged and set off the political future of Mohamed Salah Fliss.[1]
Like most children of his generation, Mohamed Salah Fliss follows a mixed education by studying at the French school, the Franco-Arab school of Bizerte, while pursuing traditional studies in a Koranic school in the medina. Rejected by the "immoral" behavior of a teacher, he leaves Koranic school after a few years of study.[2] He continued his studies at the high school Stephen-Pichon of Bizerte before obtaining his baccalaureate and to leave the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of Tunis. He then joined the student movement led at the time by leftist groups, in particular the Perspectives movement. In 1968, the student movement was severely repressed by the authorities. Mohamed Salah Fliss was one of the victims of this repression.[3]
Imprisonment
Membership in student activism, then leftist politics, got Mohamed Salah Fliss sent repeatedly into prison.
He was arrested with the group of Perspectivist on 4 April 1968 and was sentenced to two years in prison.[4] He first served with his companions in the civil prison of 9-April in Tunis and then he was jailed in prison Borj Erroumi known for the harshness of the conditions of detention. Mohamed Salah was accused of the attempted plot of 1962. He was finally pardoned like the rest of the group of perspectivists in January 1970.[5]
Thanks to the uprising of students that shook Tunisia in 1972, he was arrested on 14 February and transported with other prospects to a villa in Nassen (southern suburbs of Tunis) which turned out to be a torture center. On 21 April, the whole group was transferred to the civil prison of Tunis where they detained until December of the same year.[6]
He was arrested again on 20 March 1975 in Carthage, in the suburbs of Tunis, for his clandestine activities within the renamed prospect group El Amal Ettounsi (L'Ouvrier tunisien). After a ten-hour torture session, he lost the use of his legs for three months. He was kept in Kasserine prison (center-west of Tunisia), then was transferred again to Borj Erroumi after it was decided to regroup political prisoners. He was later pardoned on 3 August 1979. .[7]
Finally, following the events of Gafsa, on 26 January 1980 Fliss was among several former political prisoners arrested for "preventive" measures. He was released on 30 April of the same year.[8]