On a chilly day last December, three trucks nosed through the streets of the Tunisian capital, heading for the presidential palace. In command was Sihem Bensedrine, a veteran human rights campaigner and head of the country’s newly created Truth and Dignity commission, charged with investigating crimes of the former dictatorship swept away by revolution four years before.

Her mission was to hoover up the presidential archive, a political goldmine detailing six decades of corruption and oppression. But, as they turned off the coastal highway to the gates of the sprawling compound, a stone’s throw from the ruins of ancient Carthage, the vehicles were confronted by a line of armed police. Bensedrine, 64, leapt down from the first truck brandishing papers that theoretically gave her carte blanche to take the archive. The police refused to budge.

Tunisia might now be a democracy but – as Bensedrine was reminded that day – some things have not changed. The confrontation outside the palace was a sign of just how tough her job was going to be. “Truth commissions around the world, the state is on their side,” she says. “We are maybe the one case where the state is going against us; it is a paradox.”

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Facebook Twitter Pinterest A woman votes in Tunisia’s first democratic presidential election in 2014. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Eight months on, Bensedrine’s commission is in crisis mode, with resignations, attacks from sections of the media, and the government planning new rules that may scupper part of its work. Those new rules, embodied in a proposed ‘reconciliation law’, will offer amnesty to the corrupt elite who allegedly stole fortunes under the former dictatorship of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. With mass protests planned this weekend, police reinforcements have been drafted into downtown Tunis.

Based on South Africa’s pioneering Truth and Reconciliation commission, Tunisia’s equivalent body was set up in the first flush of freedom after Tunisia overthrew Ben Ali’s corrupt regime in 2011. While fellow Arab spring states have since fallen back into war or dictatorship, Tunisia has kept the banner of democracy flying, with the commission – tasked with bringing justice to the oppressed and opening the books on former abuses – at its heart.

“Our aim is to reveal the truth, how this desperate machine [was] working by a process of saying the truth,” says Bensedrine.

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The plan is for the worst cases to be tried before special courts, while lesser offenders are to get amnesty if they confess their crimes. The commission made a bright start, collecting testimony from 16,000 victims and discovering along the way the staggering extent of sexual abuse by the former security forces. For years, women enduring rape and torture in police cells assumed they suffered alone, but as testimonials piled up, it became clear the abuse was systematic.

Among those giving testimony is Hamida Ajengui. She was arrested, aged 21, for the “crime” of wearing a headscarf, banned by the dictatorship, and for helping families of the thousands of Islamists, trades unionists and liberals incarcerated by the regime. Ajengui was kept in a cell in the notorious interior ministry headquarters, a grey concrete slab at the end of the capital’s main Bourguiba avenue.

She was suspended from an iron bar in an agonising torture position and guards beat her, touched her and threatened her with rape. Her chief tormentor was a female guard, and Ajengui, now 46, says she craves not retribution, but a chance to see her face to face. “I just want to meet the woman,” she says. “I want to ask her, ‘why did you behave this way, why were you so merciless?’”

As the commission’s case files grew, however, so resistance to the commission has mounted. Much of Tunisia’s media remains in the hands of those who owned it under the dictatorship, and Bensedrine is subjected to daily press attacks accusing her variously of being a prostitute, a thief and a spy. Some attacks verge on the comic. One recent newspaper cartoon depicted her face superimposed on Picasso’s Lady in Blue, a copy of which hangs on the wall of her Tunis office. But in place of the orange the woman holds, the caricature has placed an apple, inferring Bensedrine is Eve offering tainted fruit to Tunisia.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A protester displays a defaced portrait of ousted president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali outside the prime minister’s office in January 2011. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

In the face of the smears, she remains stoic, attributing the attacks to the “deep state”, a network of corrupt politicians, businesspeople, officials and security officers determined to keep their privileges. “They don’t want to be accountable for their actions,” she says. “Democracy is not only elections, it is about the legality of all acts, and we don’t have that.”

The commission has other problems. Seventy MPs have signed a petition demanding Bensedrine be investigated for corruption, despite her insistence that the commission’s audit in April was clean. Disputes among the 15 commissioners have seen four resign and, in the confusion, promised public hearings have been put back from June to next month at the earliest. More seriously, say some, the commission has failed to mark the line between those whose crimes warrant trials, and lesser offences that can be forgiven in return for confessions. Without that line, they say, the entire bureaucracy feels threatened, including those police guarding the presidential palace.

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The commission’s most serious challenge, though, is the reconciliation law. Designed by president Beji Caid Essibsi, a former interior minister under Tunisia’s first dictator, Habib Bourguiba, it focuses not on human rights abuses but economic crimes. A system of secret hearings will offer the chance to clear corrupt business leaders who return a portion of their ill-gotten gains, and it is expected be passed by Essibsi’s centre-right Nidaa Tounes party, which won last year’s elections.

As it stands, the law would prevent Bensedrine investigating Tunisia’s financial elite. “The main business of this draft law is to protect the machinery of the deep state,” she says.

At the presidential palace, officials disagree, insisting the new law will help Bensedrine, speeding the process of clearing business leaders who can then stimulate a sagging economy. They point out, also, that the parliament that will consider it was fairly elected. “All the (business) people feel like the Sword of Damocles is hanging over them,” said presidential spokesman Moez Sinaoui. “The president says we will make a quick law, more rapid.”

But concern about the reconciliation law is growing. “The new law should ensure a transparent process aimed at unravelling the machinery of oppression,” said Amna Guellali, Tunisia director of Human Rights Watch. “If not, it will be a whitewash.”