Reports reveal state massacre of Tunisian protesters

[Hannah Bell]

A series of reports emerged yesterday of large-scale killings by Tunisian security forces of protesters rioting against joblessness and poor social conditions under the dictatorial regime of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

Riots have shaken Tunisia after Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian university graduate working as a street vendor, killed himself last month to protest police confiscation of his entire stock of fruits and vegetables.

Though the official death toll in Tunisia stood at 18 yesterday, reports have emerged of dozens of protesters killed in the city of Kasserine alone. Sadok Mahmoudi, a member of the regional offices of the UGTT (General Union of Tunisian Workers) union, told AFP: “It’s chaos in Kasserine after a night of violence, sniper fire, and looting and raiding of businesses and homes by police in civilian clothing who have since retreated.”

Mahmoudi said the number of dead was at least 50, citing contacts at the Kasserine regional hospital. AFP noted that its other sources in the area backed up Mahmoudi’s account.

Medical personnel at the Kasserine hospital struck for one hour in protest, according to a local official who spoke to AFP on condition of anonymity. He confirmed that police were targeting victims with lethal violence, saying that large numbers of people were arriving at the hospital morgue with “their stomachs torn out and their brains exploded.”

Mokhter Triffi of Tunisia’s League for Human Rights said: “A commando operation was mounted last night to pillage the city and lend credence to the government’s conspiracy theories.” Triffi noted that Tunisian authorities had “blamed this weekend’s riots on looters in the population.”

A UGTT official in the nearby city of Thala told the BBC that police were warning residents not to gather in groups, even of two. He said the town was running out of food and heating oil...

In the United States, Time magazine noted a “wave of protests and violence against two US-friendly authoritarian regimes in North Africa.” It explained that Washington had not objected to their practices so far, “not least because the authoritarian governments of Algeria and Tunisia are allies in the fight against Islamist terrorism.”

Time added that if these regimes failed to line up with the requirements of the US “war on terror,” Washington might consider replacing them with other, pro-US figures it thinks are more able to keep their populations in line: “The social instability their policies have provoked can actually work to the advantage of regional extremists. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, on a visit to the Gulf states this week, plans to call publicly for political reform in the Arab world.”

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/jan2011/tuni-j12.shtml


Note that speculative increases in the price of basic foodstuffs have already hit the developing world. This isn't the first report of protests over rising food prices.

[midnight]

1. Intersting.... And their former colonial owners seem willing

to help them keep protests will policed.... Money trumps peace.....

"More brazenly, Michèle Alliot-Marie—the foreign minister of France, the former colonial power in Tunisia—proposed that the French police might share its “French know-how” with the Tunisian security forces. She explained: “We are indeed proposing that our two countries could, in the context of the cooperation that exists between them, act so that the right to demonstrate would go together with the assurance of security.”