TUNIS: Protesters threw stones at polices officers who repelled them with teargas in northern Tunisia yesterday after a peaceful rally to demand more jobs turned violent.
Two years after the revolution that toppled Zine Al-Abidine Ben Ali and inspired protests across the Arab world, increasing numbers of Tunisians are taking to the streets to demand economic development, disillusioned that their uprising has yet to provide prosperity and security.
The Islamist-led government that was elected after the veteran ruler fled has sought to revive the economy in the face of a decline in trade with the crisis-hit euro zone.
Witnesses said the marchers had tried to attack the police station in El Kef when the clashes broke out.
“Police fired teargas everywhere and beat protesters with sticks ... There are many cases of people suffering from the gas,” A resident from El Kef, told Reuters.
Another witness said there were violent clashes and teargas cloaked the town.
The farming town of about 45,000 people, about 180 km (110 miles) north of Tunis, has only a small number of factories and is keen for the government to invest in the area and create jobs. While the government forecasts 4.5 percent growth this year, up from an estimated 3.5 percent in 2012, unemployment has reached 17 percent.
Protests have started to gather pace in Tunisia again since November — the run up to December’s second anniversary of when a street peddler burned himself to death in despair at the confiscation of his fruit cart in the poor town of Sidi Bouzid.
Police fire teargas to disperse Tunisia protesters
Police fire teargas to disperse Tunisia protesters
Macron, Iraqi Kurdish leader urge ‘de-escalation’ in Syria
- The Islamist-led authorities in Damascus are seeking to extend their control over all of Syria, after toppling former president Bashar Assad a little over a year ago
PARIS, France: France’s President Emmanuel Macron and the president of Iraqi Kurdistan, Nechirvan Barzani, in telephone talks on Saturday urged a cessation of fighting in Syria, the French presidency said.
They “called on all parties for an immediate de-escalation and a permanent ceasefire,” it said, after fighting in recent days between the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and government troops in the country’s north.
The SDF control swathes of Syria’s oil-rich north and northeast, much of which they captured during the civil war and the battle against the Daesh group.
The Islamist-led authorities in Damascus are seeking to extend their control over all of Syria, after toppling former president Bashar Assad a little over a year ago.
Both sides signed a deal in March last year to merge the semi-autonomous Syrian Kurdish administration and its forces into the new government, but implementation has largely stalled.
Macron and Barzani said they backed “the immediate resumption of talks on integrating the SDF into the Syrian state,” the French presidency added.
