Protesters clashed with police in the Tunisian capital of Tunis on Saturday, October 15, for the second night running.
Riot police fired tear gas to disperse the crowds in the poor Ettadamen and Intilka districts, with the crowds chanting slogans against the police and throwing stones at them.
The fresh protests come as the country suffers an economic and political crisis amid massive fuel and food shortages.
Protesters in central Tunis chanted: ‘Down! down!’, ‘Revolution against Kais!’ and ‘The coup will fall!’
The protests first erupted last Friday (October 14) after the funeral of Malek Selimi, 24, who died after a police chase in August left him with a severe neck injury, his family confirmed on Saturday.
The Interior Ministry has not commented on Selimi’s death.
Tunisia has been battling an intense political crisis since President Kais Saied seized power and dissolved parliament in 2021.
Earlier on Saturday, two rival opposition groups staged one of the biggest days of protest so far against Saied, denouncing his moves to consolidate political power as public anger erupts over fuel and food shortages.
The thousands of Tunisians demonstrating through the capital over the weekend were demanding an end to ‘the coup’ in the North African country, accusing President Kais Saied of dissolving the country’s parliament last year and assuming executive power.
Saturday’s protest was organised by the National Salvation Front, a coalition of five Tunisian parties opposing Saied, including the Islamist-inspired Ennahdha that had dominated Tunisia’s parliament before its dissolution by Saied.
Ali Laarayedh, Tunisia’s former prime minister and a senior Ennahdha official, said that the protest was an expression of ‘anger at the state of affairs under Kais Saied.
‘We are telling him to leave.’
If Saied stays, ‘Tunisia will have no future,’ said Laarayedh, citing growing despair, poverty and unemployment.
The National Salvation Front has announced it will boycott a December vote to elect a new parliament with limited powers.
Ahmed Najib Chebbi, head of the National Salvation Front, told protesters: ‘A year and a half since the coup, Tunisians only saw poverty, unemployment, high cost of living and a shortage of basic commodities.’
Referring to the Tunisian president, he added: ‘The putschist failed and became isolated without any support at home or abroad.’
Meanwhile, hundreds of supporters of the secular Free Destourian Party staged a rally in the capital to call for toppling the Tunisian leader.
Saied ‘is doing nothing, and things are only getting worse’, said Souad, a pensioner in her 60s at the secular party’s demonstration.
Some of the protesters carried empty containers to symbolise the rising cost of water due to inflation, which hit 9.1% in September.
Tunisia has been in the throes of a deep political crisis that aggravated the country’s economic conditions since last year, when Saied ousted the government and dissolved parliament.
While Saied insists that his measures were meant to ‘save’ the country, critics have accused him of orchestrating a coup.
The Interior Ministry claimed that around 1,500 people joined the Ennahdha-led demonstration, while ‘nearly’ 1,000 attended the PDL protest.
In public remarks, Saied has argued he was working to ‘correct’ the economic troubles he had inherited from Tunisia’s post-Ben Ali leadership.
Cash-strapped Tunisia is in talks with the International Monetary Fund for a bailout loan of about $2bn.
Saied, who moved to rule by decree after shutting down parliament last year and expanding his powers with a new constitution passed in a July referendum, has said the measures were needed to save Tunisia from years of crisis.
In a speech last Saturday, Saied demanded ‘all who want to undermine independence’ must go. This was an apparent allusion to his political rivals.
- The Algerian government’s decision to introduce English in a bid to replace the teaching of the French language at primary school level has raised, once again, the long-standing political debates that have marked the territory since its colonisation.
This announcement by President Abdelmadjid Tebboune in June has been said to be a positive step for the country given the universality of the English language.
But the history of Algeria’s languages has always been paved with political agendas, and this time is no different.
The presence of the French language in Algeria is riddled with colonial violence. During 132 years of French colonisation, the indigenous population experienced a constant threat to their lives, languages, culture and religion.
Arabic-language schools that existed prior to European settlement were replaced by a Francophone schooling system which only a small minority of Algerians were able to access.
Not only was the French language therefore imposed by force, but it was also made very exclusive.
Nevertheless, many of the select few who did receive French colonial schooling became nationalist militants, some even leaders of Algeria’s war of independence.
These évolués (evolved Algerians), as they were called by the occupiers, used the French language that was supposed to indoctrinate them in favour of a ‘French-Algeria’, as a weapon against their oppressors.
This arguably made French one of the languages of liberation alongside Arabic, Darija (Algerian dialect), and Tamazight (Berber).
Indeed, the period of French rule marked the Algerian people and defined the official language of the country even after its 1962 independence.
The words of Abdelhamid Ibn Badis, founder of the Association of Algerian Muslim Ulema, that ‘Islam is our religion, Arabic is our language, Algeria is our homeland’ had underlined the character of the nationalist struggle as well as the independent nation.
In an effort to culturally decolonise the country – especially under Houari Boumediene’s rule – Arabisation policies were implemented across the education sector.
The method of linguistic transition was aggressive, not well thought out, and failed to engage the base of academics and workers who were required to implement the switch to Arabic.
Furthermore, whilst Arabic was the linguistic banner under which the nation was being (re)built, Algeria’s ethnically diverse population meant that other languages and dialects were also in existence.
Tamazight was still the mother tongue of many Algerians. Despite also enduring colonial repression, Berber was not officially recognised as a national language during this period.
The Algerian government justified this rejection by claiming that the alternative would result in dividing people amidst a new-found ‘Algerian unity’.
This decision was heavily opposed, and a strike as well as mass demonstrations known as the ‘Berber Spring’ were organised in the 1980s and 1990s.
It took until 2002 for Tamazight to even be recognised as the second ‘national language’ in Algeria, and only since 2016 was it proclaimed an ‘official’ language that could be introduced into education – though this was mainly confined to the Kabyle (Berber) regions.
The communities concerned, activists and intellectuals who defended the struggle for this recognition, considered this a superficial gesture. The fact that the state judged it sufficient to train teachers to teach Tamazight in just two weeks only reinforced this view.
Furthermore, it was understood to be a silencing tool by the Algerian government in order to deter further demands for democratic rights.
The rollercoaster of state-enforced language policies in Algeria continues still. In fact, President Tebboune’s latest campaign is not even an innovative one.
In the 1990s, parents were given the choice of allowing their children to learn English instead of the French language at primary school. The majority opted for French.
The minority who were in favour of English came from poor neighbourhoods that had been influenced by conservative views which associated the French language with anti-Islamic values.
