Prime Minister Claims Power in Tunisia as President Flees
Chaos spread in the Tunisian capital on Friday as protesters clashed with government forces.
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
Published: January 14, 2011
TUNIS — President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia has left the country amid growing chaos in the streets, French diplomats say, and the prime minister went on state television Friday night to say he is in charge.
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Christophe Ena/Associated Press
Protesters gathered with signs reading phrases like “Ben Ali Get Out” in Tunis, Friday.
Fethi Belaid/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Protesters held up their hands as if they were handcuffed, at a rally in front of the interior ministry in Tunis on Friday.
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A French Foreign Ministry official said authorities did not know where the president had gone, and representatives of the president were not immediately available to confirm the report.
There were also unconfirmed reports that the country’s airspace had been closed.
Mr. Ben Ali had dismissed his cabinet in the afternoon and called for new legislative elections to be held in six months.
The announcement followed an extraordinary back-and-forth between the government and protestors. After the president tried to placate the protestors Thursday with promises of more freedoms, including a right to demonstrate, tens of thousands rushed into the streets of downtown Tunis Friday to take advantage of his pledge by calling for his ouster
But when the protestors led a funeral procession for a recently killed protestor through the streets, the police finally moved to disperse the crowds, brutally beating demonstrators and raining tear gas on Tunis’s Bourguiba Boulevard. It is unclear if any demonstrators were shot Friday.
The government announced the Cabinet dismissal and offered early elections soon after police moved in on the crowds, but news agencies said it also declared a state of emergency forbidding new demonstrations and warning that those who disobeyed would be shot. There were reports of gunfire downtown in the capital early Friday night, The Associated Press reported.
The reports that the president had left surfaced soon after that, as did the announcement by Prime Minister Mohamed Ghannouchi.
Tunisia is a close United States ally in the fight against terrorism.
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The anti-government protests began a month ago when a college- educated street vendor burned himself to death in protest of his dismal prospects amid Tunisia’s poverty.
But the mounting protests quickly evolved from demands for more jobs to demands for political reforms, focusing mainly on the perceived corruption of the government and the self-enrichment of the ruling family. The protests were accelerated by the heavy use of social-media web sites like Facebook and Twitter by Tunisia’s large cohort of educated young people, who used the Internet to call for demonstrations and to circulate videos of each successive clash.
Some demonstrators also cited the evidence of cables from the United States Embassy in Tunisia that were released by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks providing vividly detailed accounts of the first family’s self-enrichment and opulent lifestyle.
Before the president announced legislative elections, the crowd that gathered in the streets Friday morning on Avenue Bourguiba was celebrating its confidence that change was at hand. “Victory, victory, until the government falls,” protestors chanted.
“Bouazizi you are a hero,” they shouted, referring to the vendor who died. “The people of Tunisia have won.”
It was unclear if the latest offers of change will satisfy the protesters. So far, the president has not offered to resign as many critics demand, though he did suggest Thursday that he would not seek re-election in 2014.
Tunisia has not seen demonstrations like this since President Ben Ali came to power 23 years ago in a bloodless coup. Tunisians have been accustomed to living under a police state that countered unauthorized public gatherings with arrests and possible torture. Dozens have died over the last week as security forces — including snipers, witnesses say — fired on protesters.
The crowd was notably middle-class, including young doctors and lawyers and other professionals. Some identified themselves as the “Bourguiba generation” — young people who benefited from free higher education and other social welfare policies instituted under Tunisia’s first post-independence president, Habib Bourguiba.
Some critics stressed that because of Tunisia’s broad middle class, relatively secular culture and large number of educated young people with high expectations of their government, the Tunisian uprising was fundamentally different from the kinds of unrest found in neighboring countries, where popular discontent is often expressed in the language of Islam. But some demonstrators said they hoped that other Arab countries would follow their example.
Zied Mhirsi, a 33-year-old doctor carried a sign that said, in English, “Yes We Can,” a reference to President Barack Obama, above “#sidibouzid,” the name of an online Twitter feed that has provided a forum for rallying protesters. On the other side his sign said, “Thank you Al-Jazeera,” in reference to the Arab news network’s month of extensive coverage.
For the first time in the month of protests, the demonstration on Friday also included large numbers of women — almost none wearing veils — and many snapping cellphone pictures of the crowd to post on the Internet.
At least one American has been injured in the violence. Stephen Chmelewski, a 50-year-old English teacher who lives in the Lafayette neighborhood of downtown Tunis, said he saw police “corralling” residents into certain streets and protestors setting debris fires, so he went out to take pictures of the events.
He said he saw police snipers firing down on the crowds from rooftops, and one evidently struck him with a bullet that passed through his left leg and lodged in his right one. “I had protestors behind me and the police in front,” he said, “and then all of a sudden I got hit from behind by a bullet.”
He was let out of the Charles Nicole hospital Thursday night, he said, because more wounded were flooding in with gunshot wounds from riots around Tunis. “All the emergency room beds were filled up,” he said.
The French government and the United States State Department cautioned against all non-essential travel to the North African country.
Prime Minister Claims Power in Tunisia as President Flees - NYTimes.com
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