Press Release
In Gabès: An Environmental and Humanitarian Disaster... and Collective Punishment for Generations
The city of Gabès is afflicted by a grave disaster, its breaths enveloped in a slow death due to the environmental crisis resulting from the emissions of the industrial chemical complex.
While the residents continue to wait for a ruler who has not come to avert the severe harm that has befallen their lives, they have instead been met with a convoy of security units suppressing the massive peaceful marches of children, women, and the elderly, confronting them with tear gas!
The police also arrested more than 70 people within the late hours of Friday, and the number increased by dawn, with some being taken from their homes, according to Khair El-Din Dabiya, a member of the "Stop Pollution" campaign. Some of them were referred for prosecution, while others were transferred to prison, turning the protesters' demands from stopping pollution to releasing the detainees!
In light of these developments, we in the Media Office of Hizb ut-Tahrir / Wilayah Tunisia affirm the following:
1- The protesters' demands to dismantle and close the polluting industrial units are legitimate demands that the authorities must immediately comply with, especially since the decision to dismantle the units was issued in 2017, and the local council in Gabès had previously warned that these units pose a direct threat to life.
2- The use of violence and arrests will only exacerbate the situation and reveals once again the helplessness of our rulers and their surrender of sovereignty in the face of the simplest duties of care, as they rush to use the stick of authority and deny people's legitimate rights to a decent life.
O People in Green Tunisia:
The filth that fills our environment is a natural product of a greedy capitalist system whose concern is profit and increased production. What is happening today in Gabès is not an exception, but rather a model of what happens from pollution due to fossil gas in Kairouan, nuclear waste in Douz, the garbage problem in Sfax, and green hydrogen projects in the foreseeable future.
The environmental problem cannot be solved radically except under the Rightly Guided Caliphate on the Prophetic method, the state that has its own decision-making power and regulates its actions with the balance of Sharia, so it fears God in the country and the people, and cuts off the hand of colonialism by canceling international agreements that perpetuate dependency and plunder wealth and exploit resources at the expense of our children and our environment.
On the authority of Abu Dharr, may God be pleased with him, that the Prophet ﷺ said: "My nation was presented to me with their deeds, both good and bad. I saw among the good deeds the removal of harm from the road, and among the bad deeds I saw sputum in the mosque that was not buried."
The Media Office of Hizb ut-Tahrir
In Wilayah Tunisia