TUNISIA’S TURMOIL deepened yesterday when four members of the new unity coalition resigned a day after the cabinet’s formation.
Prime Minister Mohamed Ghannouchi brought opposition leaders into the coalition on Monday after president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia following weeks of street protests.
But the prime minister’s decision to retain ministers from the ruling RCD party in important posts such as interior, defence, finance and foreign affairs has angered political opponents and the protest movement.
As police again fired teargas to disperse demonstrators yesterday morning, three new ministers attached to the main trade union announced their withdrawal after the union refused to recognise an administration with eight ministers from the president’s regime.
A fourth opposition figure, Mustapha Ben Jaafar of the Democratic Forum for Labour and Liberty, said he would not take up his position as health minister.
Attempting to defuse the row, Mr Ghannouchi and the caretaker president, Fouad Mebazza, later quit the RCD party. State television, which reported the news, said the two men hoped to “split the state from the party”.
The immediate response of trade union UGTT was that, while this was positive, it was not enough to reverse the decision to withdraw its three members from the new cabinet.
Tunisia’s transitional government is due to hold elections in the next six months, although no precise dates have been set. Mr Ghannouchi said that he and the others had helped “preserve the national interest” during days of chaos. “They kept their posts because we need them at this time,” he said on French radio station Europe 1. “All of them have clean hands.”
The prime minister is portrayed as a technocrat whose responsibility was confined to economic affairs under Ben Ali, but his admission that he has been in telephone contact with the former president to update him on the situation has added to his opponents’ anger. Ben Ali has been in Saudi Arabia since fleeing Tunisia last Friday.
On a tense day in Tunis, police repeatedly used teargas to disperse protests by hundreds of demonstrators opposed to the RCD retaining a hold on power.
“None of the nominated ministers ... criticised Ben Ali. It’s strange and very dangerous,” said Mourad Ben Cheikh, a film producer. He was also dismayed by the interior minister’s claim that the cost of recent unrest in damage and lost business was $2 billion. “He tells us what the economic losses to the country have been – as if it’s our fault and not theirs.”
As jockeying between political groups intensified, meanwhile, the prime minister announced that the Islamist leader Rached Ghannouchi would be able to return from exile in London once an amnesty law had been approved. The Islamist was sentenced to death in 1992.
Another of Ben Ali’s fiercest critics, Moncef Marzouki, returned to Tunisia yesterday after years of exile in Paris. He said he intended to run in the next presidential election.