Forty-nine policemen were injured in clashes with demonstrators protesting against the reopening of a garbage dump on Tunisia’s tourist island of Djerba on Saturday, an interior ministry spokesman said.
“A large number of protesters in the center of Guellala attacked a police post with rocks and petrol bombs,” Tunisian Interior Ministry spokesman Khaled Tarrouche said. “There were 49 police injured, with fractures and other injuries caused by rocks and petrol bombs.”
He said six police vehicles were burned, no arrests were made and two demonstrators hurt, “which shows the violence came from the protesters, not the police.”
Photo: Reuters
Tarrouche said reinforcements have been sent from the capital to Guellala, a town of about 13,000 people in southern Djerba.
The spokesman said the trouble was sparked when the local authorities decided to reopen a garbage dump until next year.
In the morning, about 40 protesters blocked access to the site, and after negotiations with the authorities failed, security forces fired tear gas to disperse them.
During the afternoon, a larger crowd took to the streets in the center of Guellala, where they attacked the police, Tarrouche said.
Since last year’s revolution ousted former Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Djerba has been spared the violence afflicting other parts of Tunisia, where clashes between police and protesters are common.
On Friday in the central town of Sidi Bouzid, police fired rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse hundreds of protesters who tried to break into the regional government headquarters.
Such protests have multiplied in recent weeks, amid rising discontent over poor living conditions, including unemployment, regular water cuts and the state’s failure to collect rubbish, as well as other social grievances.
Sidi Bouzid is where Tunisia’s mass uprising first began that touched off the Arab Spring. Poor living conditions were a driving factor behind the revolution.
The Islamist-led government, despite coming to power just a year ago after the first free elections in decades, is frequently accused of having failed to improve the living standards of ordinary Tunisians.
As the authorities have acknowledged, improved security is critical to the revival of the tourism sector, a key driver of the economy, contributing around 7 percent of GDP and employing 400,000 people.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion