TUNIS, Jan 18, (Agencies): Tunisian police used teargas on Tuesday to break up a protest against a new coalition government that includes allies of ousted leader Zine bin Abidine Ben Ali.
Prime Minister Mohamed Ghannouchi brought opposition leaders into a coalition on Monday after the president fled to Saudi Arabia following weeks of violent street protests. But key ‘old guard’ figures kept their jobs, angering many.
Tunisian state television denied Arabic satellite news reports that said opposition parties had quit the coalition.

In central Tunis, several hundred opposition party supporters and trade unionists protested peacefully before their demonstration was broken up by police.
“The new government is a sham. It’s an insult to the revolution that claimed lives and blood,” said student Ahmed al-Haji.
“The problem with the interim government is it has a number of ministers from the old government,” protester Sami bin Hassan said.
Ghannouchi defended his government, saying some ministers had been kept on because they were needed in the run-up to elections, expected in the next two months.
“We have tried to put together a mix that takes into account the different forces in the country to create the conditions to be able to start reforms,” Ghannouchi told Europe 1 radio.
Ghannouchi rejected suggestions that the Ben Ali “dictatorship” would continue under a new guise.
“That is completely unfair. Today there is an era of liberty which is showing itself on the television, on the street,” he said.
His foreign minister, Kamel Morjane, said during a visit to Egypt that the interim government would respond to issues that had angered protesters, such as corruption, and would be preparing for new elections. “It may be possible that the next government will not have any member of the former government,” he said.
The weeks of protests against poverty and unemployment in Tunisia which forced Ben Ali from office prompted fears across the Arab world that similarly repressive governments might also face popular unrest.

In Tunis on Tuesday, people in several parts of the city reported hearing sporadic gunfire overnight but there was significantly less gunfire than on previous nights.
On Bourguiba Avenue, the tree-lined main street in the capital, kerb-side cafes were putting out their tables for the first time since last week, and shops were re-opening.
The avenue had been the scene of protests against the government and there was a police and military presence.
A Reuters photographer in the Ariana suburb of Tunis said local people were organising neighbourhood groups to clean up the damage left by several days of lawlessness.
Interior Minister Ahmed Friaa told state television on Monday that at least 78 people had been killed in the unrest, and the cost so far in damage and lost business was 3 billion dinars ($2 billion).
Ghannouchi promised to release all political prisoners and to investigate those suspected of corruption, and those behind the killing of demonstrators would face justice.
“All those who are behind this massacre, this carnage, will be accountable to the justice system.”
The wave of protests has hit stock and currency markets from Jordan to Morocco amid fears that the Tunisian unrest would spread abroad.
The prime minister said the ministers of defence, interior, finance and foreign affairs under Ben Ali would keep their jobs in the new government.
Among opposition figures, Najib Chebbi, founder of the Progressive Democratic Party (PDP), was named minister of regional development, Ettajdid party leader Ahmed Ibrahim higher education minister and Mustafa Ben Jaafar, head of the Union of Freedom and Labour, health minister.
In Algeria, President Abdelaziz Bouteflika told three governors whose provinces have borders with Tunisia to offer hospitality and support to Tunisians if they request it, a government source told Reuters.

Fire
One of two Egyptians who set themselves on fire on Tuesday died after an apparent bid matched by several other people across the Arab world to copy a Tunisian whose self-immolation sparked a revolution.
Ahmed Hashem al-Sayyed, a 25-year-old who had turned himself into a human fireball on the roof of his house, succumbed in hospital, according a hospital official.
An Egyptian security official said earlier that Sayyed, an unemployed man who had mental problems, suffered third-degree burns.
He was one of three cases of people setting themselves on fire in Egypt, and 10 in the Arab world, including the young Tunisian man whose action sparked the apparent copycat cases.
Another man said to be a lawyer in his 40s set himself alight outside government headquarters in Cairo, an official reported. He was slightly injured and taken to hospital.
The incidents follow a similar one in Cairo on Monday in which a man poured fuel on himself and set himself on fire on a busy street in front of the People’s Assembly.
He was hospitalised but expected to be released in a day or two, officials said.
Egyptian police said they also arrested a man who was carrying two jerry cans of petrol near parliament in Cairo on the presumption that he was going to set himself on fire.

The Tunisian uprising, the first of its kind in the Arab world, has emboldened marginalised Arab dissidents and raised fears among the region’s governments that their rule could also be at risk.
It has also overshadowed preparations for an Arab League economic summit on Wednesday in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.
“The Arab world is witnessing today unprecedented political developments and real challenges in the sphere of Arab national security,” Kuwait’s Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammad Al-Sabah said on Tuesday.
An analyst at the Beirut-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Amr Hamzawi, said the replica immolations were evidence of the inability of Arab governments to address the “total despair” of their people.
Amr al-Shobaki of the Al-Ahram Centre for Strategic Studies said: “There have been cases of suicide motivated by protests in Egypt, but this is the first time we have seen such sacrifices.”
Since Bouazizi’s self-immolation, there have been nine other such incidents, believed to be copycat suicide bids.
Five of the later protests took place in Algeria which had also been the scene of violent protests over rising prices, twinned with unemployment.
In the latest in the north African country, a 36-year-old soaked himself in petrol before setting light to himself outside a departmental assembly in the El Oued region after demanding a job and housing.

Inevitable
A regime change in Egypt is “inevitable” following the popular uprising in Tunisia, Egyptian opposition figure Mohamed ElBaradei said Tuesday.
“It is inevitable. Change must come,” ElBaradei told the Austrian news agency APA in an interview.
ElBaradei — former head of the UN atomic watchdog — suggested Egypt’s long-standing presisdent Hosni Mubarak will soon find himself in a similar position unless political reforms are made.
The diplomat, who headed the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency for 12 years and even won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 for his work there, called for a boycott of Egypt’s presidential elections in September, saying the regime in his home country should be brought to its knees via peaceful demonstrations.
“We’re trying with peaceful means,” he said in comments reproduced in German.
He and his supporters had already collected one million signatures for a petition calling for the democratisation of Egypt.
If more people signed up “then we will have the legitimacy to speak for everyone who has signed,” ElBaradei said.
ElBaradei said he hoped the regime would change before this year’s presidential elections.
“If that isn’t the case, then I’ll call for a boycott so that the regime can be exposed for what it is: a one-party regime.”

Arrested
Sudanese security officers arrested Islamist opposition leader Hassan al-Turabi from his Khartoum home early on Tuesday just hours after he warned in an AFP interview of a Tunisia-style uprising.
Turabi’s detention shortly before 1:00 am (2200 GMT Monday) was part of a wave of arrests against members of his Popular Congress Party (PCP), his son Siddig al-Turabi said, as Sudan stands at a crossroads following a landmark southern independence vote expected to lead to the partition of Africa’s largest nation.
The Sudan Media Centre, a news agency close to the Khartoum security services, said that Turabi’s latest arrest followed the “confessions” of senior leaders of the rebel Justice and Equality Movement, captured in the western region of Darfur, that he “guided and financed” them.
A spokesman for the Islamist JEM, the most heavily armed of the Darfur rebel groups fighting government troops and allied militias for the past eight years, described the accusation as a “total fabrication”.
A Turabi aide said the longtime kingpin turned bitter critic of President Omar al-Bashir’s regime had been detained at his home in the Sudanese capital. “It is true,” Siddig said, adding: “They never tell you why people are arrested.
“It may be because of the opposition press conference,” he said, referring to a forum on Sunday at which opposition leaders joined in congratulating the Tunisian people on seeing off veteran strongman Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and calling for Bashir to heed popular demands to share power.
“He was arrested normally,” Siddig said, meaning his 78-year-old father had sustained no injuries during his detention.

“We have other people arrested in the party. This is a big wave of arrests.”
In the interview with AFP hours before his arrest, Turabi had said that a Tunisia-style revolt was likely in the north as Sudan faces the prospect of partition.
“This country has known popular uprisings before,” Turabi had told AFP, referring to popular revolts which toppled military regimes in 1964 and 1985.
“What happened in Tunisia is a reminder. This is likely to happen in Sudan,” he said, referring to the month-long deadly protests that prompted Ben Ali to take refuge in Saudi Arabia after 23 years of iron-fisted rule.
“If it doesn’t, then there will be a lot of bloodshed.”
Top Bashir aide Nafie Ali Nafie went on state television to reject Turabi’s comments.
“We in Sudan do not fear a repeat of the Tunisian experience, because we have been through the election process,” he said in the interview late on Monday that was carried on the front pages of the main Khartoum dailies.

Support
Lawmakers from Iran’s conservative parliament voiced their support on Tuesday for what they said is the “revolutionary movement” of the Tunisian people, the Fars news agency reported.
“The parliament of the great Iranian nation strongly supports the revolutionary movement of the brave Tunisian people ... and wishes success to them,” a statement signed by 228 members of the 290-strong parliament said.
“The freedom-seeking scream of the people of Tunisia ended the tyranny and atrocity and put a smile on the face of the oppressed people of Tunisia,” said the statement.
The lawmakers said the current situation was created because of the “black report card of colonialist countries in Africa and the long, historical struggles of the people with tyranny on one hand, and the disinterest towards the country’s needs on the other.”
Parliament speaker Ali Larijani himself issued a call to the Muslim world.
“The Muslim world must listen to the cry of the Tunisian people ... The cry is clear that they are unhappy with the long years of dictatorship and pressures,” he was quoted on state television’s website as saying.

On Sunday, Larijiani had blamed the “United States and some Western countries” for the woes of Tunisians and branded their reaction to the unrest as “very funny.”
Tunisian opposition leader Moncef Marzouki returned from exile on Tuesday following the ouster of strongman Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the official TAP news agency reported.
“The opposition leader Moncef Marzouki, head of the banned Congress for the Republic (CPR) party, returned to Tunisia after years of exile in Paris,” the report said.
He called on Saudi Arabia to give Ben Ali up and said the president’s RCD party should be broken up, the report added.
He also said he wanted to travel immediately to Sidi Bouzid - the city in central Tunisia where protests against Ben Ali’s regime kicked off last month.
Marzouki has said he wants to run in a planned presidential election.

Criticism
The French foreign minister Tuesday fended off criticism of France’s reaction to the popular uprising that ousted Ben Ali.
Opponents of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s government had criticised its silence at the height of the protests against Ben Ali in the former French colony, in which scores died amid a fierce crackdown by security forces.
“France did not see these events coming, any more than anyone else did,” Foreign Minister Michele Alliot-Marie said of the uprising that finally forced Ben Ali into exile.
Alliot-Marie defended her statement at the height of the protests that France could offer know-how to the hated Tunisian security forces.
Critics had interpreted that as endorsing a violent crackdown on the protests, and some had called for her resignation.
“I am scandalised that certain people have tried to distort my comments,” she told lawmakers at a hearing, insisting on her “sensitivity to the suffering of the Tunisian people.”
“I was distressed by the firing of live rounds on a number of protestors and the casualties this caused.”
Despite concerns about Ben Ali’s human rights record in its north African former colony, French leaders during his rule praised Tunisia’s economic development and saw him as a bulwark against Islamist extremism.

Assets
Switzerland is examining allegations that former Tunisian president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, his family and close associates stashed illicit funds in the country, the federal prosecutor’s office said on Tuesday.
Under Swiss law, Tunisia’s new unity government would have to launch its own criminal investigation and request judicial assistance for Switzerland to cooperate, Swiss officials say.
Although Tunisian authorities had not asked their Swiss counterparts to freeze any accounts for now, the Conseil Federal (federal cabinet) could decide to do so at its weekly meeting on Wednesday to prevent funds leaving the country.
In recent years, Switzerland has worked hard to improve its image as a haven for ill-gotten assets.
The cabinet has taken unilateral measures to block funds in Swiss accounts held by deposed dictators including Ferdinand Marcos, Nigeria’s Sani Abacha and Haiti’s Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, buying time for foreign prosecutors to build a case for restitution of funds.
The Berne-based prosecutor’s office “received two criminal complaints on Jan 17 related to the freezing of Tunisian assets which might have been deposited in Switzerland by the family or close associates of President Ben Ali”, the federal prosecutor’s spokeswoman Walburga Bur said.
“We are examining the complaints,” she said by email.
Another spokeswoman, Jeannette Balmer, said that there was no formal legal investigation at this point, but the allegations were being examined. She declined to provide any details.