TUNIS: Tunisia’s main opposition party on Tuesday called for protests to continue until the government scraps its “unjust” 2018 budget including price and tax hikes, a day after one demonstrator was killed in clashes.
Protests erupted in more than 10 towns across Tunisia on Monday against the price and tax increases imposed by the government to reduce its ballooning deficit and satisfy its international lenders. One protester was killed in Tebourba, a town 40 km (25 miles) west of the capital Tunis.
On Tuesday, hundreds protested on central Tunis’ Avenue Habib Bourguiba, scene of the mass protests that ousted Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali in 2011, with people chanting: “No fear” and “Prices have shot up.”
There were no clashes in the capital, but a crowd tried to set a police station on fire in the central city of Jelma, the Interior Ministry said.
While Tunisia is widely seen as the only democratic success story among the “Arab Spring” nations where revolts took place in 2011, it has had nine governments since then and none of them have been able to tackle the growing economic problems.
Late last year, the government agreed to a four-year loan program with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) worth about $2.8 billion in return for economic reforms.
Public anger has been building since Jan. 1, when the government raised the prices of petrol and other items and hiked taxes on cars, phone calls, internet usage and hotel accommodation as part of those economic reforms.
“Today, we have a meeting with the opposition parties to coordinate our movements, but we will stay on the street and we will increase the pace of the protests until the unjust financial law is dropped,” Popular Front leader Hamma Hammami told reporters.
He said the government was unfairly targeting the poor and middle classes.
Prime Minister Youssef Chahed called for calm, saying the economy would improve this year. Chahed heads a coalition of Islamist and secular parties but has been under constant pressure from labor unions.
“People have to understand that the situation is extraordinary and their country is having difficulties, but we believe that 2018 will be the last difficult year for the Tunisians,” Chahed said.
The 2011 uprising and two major militant attacks in Tunisia in 2015 damaged foreign investment and tourism, which accounts for 8 percent of its economic activity.
The trade deficit expanded by a quarter in the first 11 months of 2017 to a record $5.8 billion, data showed in December, and the dinar currency weakened to more than 3 per euro for the first time ever on Monday.
Europe is concerned about stability in Tunisia, partly because unemployment there has forced many young Tunisians to go abroad, while the number of boats smuggling migrants to Italy has risen and Tunisia has also produced the largest number of jihadists heading for battlefields in Iraq, Syria and Libya.
Khelifa Chibani, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, said 44 people had been arrested for carrying weapons such as knives, setting government buildings on fire and looting shops.
The demonstrations have so far been much smaller than previous protests since the overthrow of autocrat ruler Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali in 2011.
But those confrontations between the government, labor unions, Islamists and secular forces also started on a small scale before escalating.
Analysts said Chahed could amend some of his reforms to calm social tensions. Under pressure from unions, officials have already agreed to increase public sector salaries this year and to avoid compulsory lay-offs, which could provoke protests.
The government said it wants to cut the public sector wage bill to 12.5 percent of gross domestic product in 2020 from about 15 percent now by offering voluntary redundancies.
But it is also trying to impose higher petrol prices and contributions to social security, which are tough for many people to swallow after years of hardship.
“At the time of Ben Ali, which we did not like, I filled my stand with vegetables, fruits and other items with 10 dinars, and now 50 dinars do not fill this gap. The situation has worsened dramatically,” said Fatma, a market woman in a Tunis district where protests took place on Monday.
“The government is sacrificing the poor and the middle class by raising prices and ignoring tax evaders and businessmen,” she said.
Separately, a judge ordered the arrest of a finance ministry official on suspicion of graft, another judge said on Tuesday, the first such move against a senior official since Chahed announced a crackdown last year.
“The judge... ordered the jailing of the director-general of taxes in the Finance Ministry on suspicion of financial corruption and embezzlement of funds,” Judge Sofian Sliti said, without giving more details.
The country’s anti-corruption committee said graft is widespread. The committee has said it has presented cases against 50 senior state officials believed to be involved in corruption.
Tunisia’s opposition calls for more protests until govt drops austerity measures
Tunisia’s opposition calls for more protests until govt drops austerity measures
Women main victims of Sudan conflict abuses: minister to AFP
- Khalifa said sexual violence has been reported on both sides, but she insisted it is “systematic” among the RSF
- Her ministry has documented more than 1,800 rapes between April 2023 and October 2025
PORT SUDAN: Women are the main victims of abuse in Sudan’s war, facing “the world’s worst” sexual violence and other crimes committed with impunity, a rights activist turned social affairs minister for the army-backed government told AFP.
The Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have been locked in a brutal conflict since April 2023 that has killed tens of thousands of people, displaced around 11 million and been marked by widespread sexual violence.
Sulaima Ishaq Al-Khalifa said abuses against women routinely accompanied looting and attacks, with reports of rape often perpetrated as “the family witnessed” the crime.
“There is no age limit. A woman of 85 could be raped, a child of one year could be raped,” the trained psychologist told AFP at her home in Port Sudan.
The longtime women’s rights activist, recently appointed to the government, said that women were also being subjected to sexual slavery and trafficked to neighboring countries, alongside forced marriages arranged to avoid shame.
Khalifa said sexual violence has been reported on both sides, but she insisted it is “systematic” among the RSF, who she says use it “as a weapon of war” and for the purposes of “ethnic cleansing.”
Her ministry has documented more than 1,800 rapes between April 2023 and October 2025 — a figure that does not include atrocities documented in western Darfur and the neighboring Kordofan region from late October onwards.
“It’s about... humiliating people, forcing them to leave their houses and places and cities. And also breaking... the social fabrics,” Khalifa said.
“When you are using sexual violence as a weapon of war, that means you want to extend... the war forever,” because it feeds a “sense of revenge,” she added.
- ‘War crimes’ -
A report by the SIHA Network, an activist group that documents abuses against women in the Horn of Africa, found that more than three-quarters of recorded cases involved rape, with 87 percent attributed to the RSF.
The United Nations has repeatedly raised alarm over what it describes as targeted attacks on non?Arab communities in Darfur, while the International Criminal Court (ICC) has opened a formal investigation into “war crimes” by both sides.
Briefing the UN Security Council in mid-January, ICC deputy prosecutor Nazhat Shameem Khan said investigators had uncovered evidence of an “organized, calculated campaign” in El-Fasher — the army’s last stronghold in Darfur captured by the RSF in late October.
The campaign, Khan added, involved mass rapes and executions “on a massive scale,” sometimes “filmed and celebrated” by the perpetrators and “fueled by a sense of complete impunity.”
Darfur endured a brutal wave of atrocities in the early 2000s, and a former Janjaweed commander — from the militia structure that later evolved into the RSF — was recently found guilty by the International Criminal Court of multiple war crimes, including rape.
“What’s happening now is much more ugly. Because the mass rape thing is happening and documented,” said Khalifa.
RSF fighters carrying out the assaults “have been very proud about doing this and they don’t see it as a crime,” she added.
“You feel that they have a green light to do whatever they want.”
In Darfur, several survivors said RSF fighters “have been accusing them of being lesser people, like calling them ‘slaves’, and saying that when I’m attacking you, assaulting you sexually, I’m actually ‘honoring’ you, because I am more educated than you, or (of) more pure blood than you.”
- ‘Torture operation’ -
Women in Khartoum and Darfur, including El-Fasher, have described rapes carried out by a range of foreign nationals.
These were “mercenaries from West Africa, speaking French, including from Mali, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Chad, as well as Colombia and Libya” — allegedly fighting alongside the RSF, Khalifa added.
Some victims were abducted and held as sexual slaves, while others were sold through trafficking networks operating across Sudan’s porous borders, said Khalifa.
Many of these cases remain difficult to document because of the collapse of state institutions.
In conservative communities, social stigma also remains a major obstacle to documenting the scale of the abuse.
Families often force victims into marriage to “cover up what happened,” particularly when pregnancies result from rape, according to the minister.
“We call it a torture operation,” she said, describing “frightening” cases in which children and adolescent girls under 18 are forced into marriage.
