Tunisian activist jailed for eight years

Pipsyä, kuten pysy, että joku on kuitenkin järjestelmä. Pipsyä, kuten pysy, että järjestelmä. Pipsyä, että järjestelmä. Slaa, Mosbaa. Her rest was described as a repressiv crackdown on civil society organizations, following escalating violence against migrants, and refugees by Heba Morijef, regional director for the Middle East and North Africa for Amnesty International. Her son was also sentenced to three years in prison. Now what do people in Tunisia think of her sentence in? I asked Alicia Volkman, a journalist based in Tunisia. The sentence saying, "Sadiä Mosbaa, 8 years of jail, has caused quite a lot of anxiety and anger within civil society, within Tunisia, there's anger on several levels. Sadia Mosbaa is an incredibly well respected leader within the human rights and civil society movement that sprung up after the revolution, and she's very well respected because of her work pushing through a bill in 2018 that was the first anti-racism law in the whole of the Arabic region. There's also, I think, a lot of personal anger because she's a very wonderful personable human being. She's somebody that's not just respected from her work, but really liked and well loved within the community. I have interviewed Sadia several times, and she's always been an incredibly radiant and positive person. The other thing is that she's not just suffering a sentencing of eight years. She's been in prison for nearly two years already, and bear in mind that Tunisia and prisons are not very modern. The conditions are really poor, access to health, and doctors is not easy. And many of the political prisoners who have either been released and had to go back into prison or have been in prison for a number of years now are suffering from various long-term health conditions and their relatives are reporting severe deterioration in their health. Civil society, in particular, the Tunisia inform for social and economic rights who have documented migration and also violence within Tunisia for the past 15 years are calling for the immediate release of Sadia Mosbar and other civil society leaders from prison. Many thanks to Alicia Volkman. Here is more of my conversation with Shriyaparik. So Sadia Mosbar was arrested on 6 May 2024 in her house in Tunisia. Just before she was arrested, there had been a massive campaign, like a hit campaign against her, as well as a lot of black Tunisian activists who had and who have been active, not just speaking about the state racism against the black migrant, but they have also been very active in acting, for example. Sadia Mosbar has very actively provided solidarity, both material as well as a symbolic solidarity with black migrants. So this was sort of the context in which her arrest took place. So this was the hate campaign against Sadia Mosbar, for example, was organized primarily online, primarily in social media, on Facebook, on Twitter, WhatsApp groups, on Instagram, basically calling for arrest. The rumors, I mean, the content of the rumors was that she was getting a lot of money from the European Union, as well as international organizations to basically shift the demography of Tunisia, to make it black, to make it African. And so she's been handed down an ATS prison sentence. Can you tell us what the charges levied against her, where? So it's eight years of prison plus around 30,000 pounds of charges, like penalty, like financial penalty as well. This is a sentence that was handed on. So in the Tunisian case, what happens is that this whole judicial system has been extremely non-transparent. So it is very hard to find the exact charges against her, but what we know from the process that has been happening, since 2024 is that the key charges against her, as well as our organization, association on MENTI, that she founded in 2013, so the charges are corruption charges. Right. And while you were on the field work in Tunisia in 2022, you got to know more about Sadia. What kind of person is she, and what is our work exactly focused on? I absolutely got to know her very, very well. I was there between 2020 and 2022. My research work has been about the construction of blackness in Tunisia, so she has been one of the key persons who has been very helpful for me to understand how blackness works in the Tunisian context. So about her work, so she started a civil society organization, which is called the association of MENTI, so MENTI association, the term MENTI, which translates to my dream in Tunisian Arabic, derives itself from, you know, Martin Luther King's very famous speech, I have a dream, where she takes her inspiration from, and her work is fundamentally to fight the anti-black racism that is in the Tunisian society, whatever form that may take, because of the anti-blackness that she has experienced since she was tiny, she also watched her son go through the same violence in the Tunisian society because they categorized this black. So when I was there, for example, I attended her, her workshops where she would speak very openly to these migrants, being like, you know, these are the rights that you have, for example, she, Saddam Husbah was a key person, and the passing of the 2018 law, criminalizing racial discrimination in Tunisia, so she would be like, look, there is this law that gives you all these rights, go to the police station and file a case of racial discrimination, if you feel like you have, you know, undergone racial discrimination. She also was running a small professional skills programs for these migrants, for example, how do you make detergent that you produce that to your home, and then you can sell it on the street? How you can sort of ease your economic integration into the Tunisian society. She was one of the key persons in a very landmark case where a black Tunisian person, Hamden Delhi, from the south of Tunisia, he was able to remove, basically, the trace of slavery that was in his last name. - Sounds as does she's a woman who has her hands full, an activist, trainer, and someone who built a community? Currently, we understand that black Tunisians make up about 15% of the country's population. Now, give us insight into the anti-black racism you speak about and its impact on the black community. - So you have both the interpersonal form of racism as well as the structural forms of racism. So I'll speak about the interpersonal person and the structural. So the interpersonal is more, you know, the stuff that you sort of experience almost every day, you know, people commenting about your skin, like, oh, you're dirty, you smell bad. And so I have an entry crew to you or, oh, I don't want to work with you, I don't want to sit next to you. So these are the kind of experiences that I saw among all black Tunisians as well as black migrants who were in Tunisia, especially black Tunisians who had grown up, including their childhood experiences at school, they would be like, oh, you know, like I didn't have friends because they would make fun of my hair or they would make fun of my skin color and just call me just really bad terms. So these kind of things, they would experience on every day basis, a lot of the terms in Tunisian Arabic and in the Tunisian vernacular that stigmatizes blackness, they carry the weight of slavery. The structural question is that a lot of the black Tunisians, for example, especially in the South, they have grown up in intergenerational poverty. And there's no way for them to get out of this poverty. So it just gets inherited again and again and again. And there's a lot of black activists have, you know, continues to argue that this is linked to how Tunisia sort of became a nation state where their inequalities were never recognized because race was never recognized as an official axis of inequality. And so this inequality was never sort of responded to never addressed. - And she was arrested almost two years ago. Why has it taken so long for her sentencing? Why has the case delayed so long? Only for her to be sentenced the last Thursday? - This is very typical when you start to study cases of political prisoners and this is also the case of, they're most bare because her case is very clearly politically motivated. The state wants to, you know, repress all forms of like civil society activities. So this is a trend that we're seeing in all civil society cases in Tunisia where the state sort of just tries to buy time, you know, and trying to find some form of proof whether fabricated, whether real, whether exaggerated, whatever is what has happened over the last years that the state has been like, oh, we're still investigating, we have found proof, but we do not want to openly declare what the proof is. - Many thanks to Shriya Parik, Associate Research Fellow at Sari Sciences Po in Paris. We asked Tunisia's Justice Department for public information and evidence on the charges against Adya Mosba and were yet to hear feedback from them. This is focus on Africa from the BBC World Service. For decades, scientists have explored space in search of answers about our universe and in the process. They've driven technological innovation here and earth. Space research hasn't just given us rockets and satellites. It's also led to technologies that now appear in everyday life from communication systems to weather forecasting tools. Last year, Africa took a historic step. In that journey with the launch of the African Space Agency, in Cairo, Egypt, bringing together the space ambitions of all 55 members of the African Union. Its mission is to coordinate space programs across the continent and unlock new opportunities, creating jobs, encouraging innovation and helping entrepreneurs use satellite data and space technology to tackle challenges from climate change to communications and connectivity. But how exactly does space technology work? And what could it mean for Africa's future? My colleague, Rudaba Abbas, explains. If you look up at the night sky, the idea of space can seem vast, silent and empty. But right now, thousands of satellites are orbiting our planet while quietly shaping our lives. The spacecraft move along steady orbits held in place by a delicate balance between the Earth's gravity and their speed. Many satellites act like mirrors, receiving signals, amplifying them and sending the data they collect down back to Earth. Others carry cameras and sensors, monitoring climate change and deforestation while helping scientists track extreme weather. Of course, they include Elon Musk's Starlink, the famous network of satellites from SpaceX that provides high-speed internet to some of the world's most remote places. Space data even guides farmers. Kizito Ordiambo is the founder and CEO of AgraBora. He explained how his company works with space. Every five days, we are able to get a satellite image of the locations where our farmers are. And we are able to analyze this satellite data to check their vegetation index, which is able to give us information about their crop strength and give us a yield estimation. Industry leaders are actively encouraging more women into the field. Charlene Segotsky is a geospatial engineer and founder of Women in Space Kenya. She explained what the organization does. What it does is create a platform to enable women to come together and create now-py plans where they can get mentorship programs and they can get access to their skills. And also, careers and trying to see if they can also create business out there due to life in this space technologies. Around 22 African countries currently have space programs. But with 62% of the continent still offline, expanding connectivity could unlock significant opportunities with the African Space Agency coordinating these efforts, analysts say space data could drive homegrown innovation and economic growth for the continent. Many thanks to Rudaba Abbas. Now, let's talk to experts who have been working with the new Africa Space Agency. Temi Dio, a new shoe, is Managing Director of Space in Africa. I asked him why the agency was established in the first place. One of the fundamental reasons why the African Space Agency was established is to create an avenue for African countries to work together, to collaborate on technology development, sheer data, sheer infrastructure, and explore how to benefit from space technologies. Before now, countries were developing national space program. We also had several countries building and investing in similar infrastructure that could provide benefits for multiple countries. But there was no avenue for them to share such infrastructure or such data. Countries can work together, they can share data, they can reduce redundancy, and also reduce duplication of effort. And this would eat a better result for the entire continent. The other reason is that there are multiple countries, but it's only a handful of them that have national space programs. So how do we bring the benefit of space technologies to the countries that do not have national space programs, so that we can bring the benefit of space technologies to the entire continent? Fundamentally, also, if you look at the way Africa collaborates with foreign institutions, whether it's the US, or China, or Russia, or Europe, having a central coordinating point would actually spread all of these efforts continent-wide. Rather than just exploring these collaborations with just one country. Right, and the agency's annual budget, just having a look at it, is relatively small. When you compare it to major space organizations elsewhere in the world, now, given those financial constraints, how much can it realistically achieve? So one of the goals of the agency is how do we maximize what we currently have? So that may not require a lot of budgets. If you look at the continent today, we have countries like Morocco, Nigeria, like Algeria, they have large satellites infrastructures that are providing solid data. And then you have a country like Egypt, that has one of the largest satellites assembling integration and testing facilities in the whole of Africa and the Middle East. Now, that does not really require billions of dollars of budgets. You just need to coordinate properly. And for the first few years, this is the fundamental goal of the agency, is to create that institutional background that would expand the benefit of space technology across the different countries on the continent. Now, Timidaya, another thing that concerns Africans is the fact that so many satellites are built or launched with support from international partners. Now, how dependent is the continent on foreign technology or even companies when it comes to space technology? I think the global satellite market is an open market. And so if you have the money, you cannot acquire technology. And right now, we don't have the capacity to probably build a lot of light satellites commercially. But this particular industry segment is also growing. In fact, about at least 20% of satellites that are been launched globally today, actually have components that originates from Africa. And so even though you know, African countries, or African companies are not currently building full-fledged satellites or assembling and integrating full-fledged satellites, they are still contributing to the global satellite markets. Now, Timidayo, satellites carry very sensitive communications and data as well. Doesn't relying heavily on foreign partners' raised concerns about technology or autonomy, or the sovereignty of these African countries? Yes, it does as we're thinking about sovereignty of the continent, or even individual countries in Africa. This is very fundamental. You can see a sovereign nation if you cannot build your own technology. I mean, imagine a situation where, you know, Africa is under sanctioned, then we would not be able to acquire this technology. So, yes, this is very fundamental. And I think we're not the A/A, but that would be the ultimate goal. What are the risks? Are there risks involved? Well, the world is changing. We can see, you know, what is going on globally with sanctions, with wars and some of these things are also raising the question around technology sovereignty. Presently Africa is not very exposed to all of that, but there is a risk associated with that because if some African countries want to acquire higher resolutions to a light imagery, they cannot do that. So, the sovereignty conversation is very important. Unfortunately, when we're there yet, and in order for us to even dream of getting there, we would need to invest heavily in research and development and, you know, manpower development. I'm personally open to that in the next decade. Maybe we can start having these conversations. Now, supporters often talk about the economic potential of the space sector. One kind of business opportunities could emerge for African entrepreneurs as satellite data and space services become more widely available to them. I think the economy of the industry today currently stands at around 20 billion dollars a year, which when you look at it, it's a lot of money. I think the unfortunate thing is that majority of these economic benefits is actually going to foreign companies because they are the ones that are coming here to sell the product and services and they take the economic benefits away. And so, this provides an opportunity for, you know, African investors or African entrepreneurs to start looking at, you know, how they can actually close some of those gaps. Many thanks to Timidayo or Neoshun, managing director of Space in Africa, a marketing intelligence firm for the continent's space sector. And that's it on focus on Africa today. If you enjoyed listening to the stories we brought you, we would love to hear your feedback. Our WhatsApp number is plus 44, 78, 42, 61, 77, 66 or get in touch via social media at BBC Africa or my handle at I am in Ketjitna and that's with Dublin. You can also email us on focus on Africa at bbc.co.uk. Now this episode was produced by Keganze Shumbha and Daniel Dazie in Nairobi. Belatwini was the senior journalist in charge and Umbarak Abdullah, the technical producer. Our actors are Samo Morunga and Mariam Abdullah. I am in Ketjitna and I will speak to you again soon.