TUNIS: Tunisia’s once-feared police who carried out the repressive policies of their now exiled president are joining hands with protesters who brought down the dictator.
Clusters of police guarding the daily protests on the capital’s main avenue are mingling with the crowd. Some non-uniformed officers are wearing red armbands to distinguish themselves from civilians while some 200 uniformed officers are holding signs with their own demands. Officers in cars are honking their horns.
Saturday’s development is significant because, while the army is respected, police were feared during the 23-year reign of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.
Meanwhile, Tunisia’s universities will begin reopening from Tuesday, after being closed amid violent protests in the run-up to Ben Ali’s ouster, the higher education minister said Saturday.
The minister, Ahmed Ibrahim, told reporters in Tunis that universities and higher education schools would reopen on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday.
He said the first classes would hold a minute’s silence for the victims of the popular uprising. They will run between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. due to a curfew that remains in place from 8 p.m. to 5 am.
Many Tunisians are expressing their anger at France — the former overlord of this north African state — for supporting the 23-year regime of Ben Ali.
“We are very angry against France. You abandoned us,” Hedia Khabthani, an inhabitant of La Goulette, a picturesque port north of Tunis, said.
French President “Nicolas Sarkozy should go and join his friend Ben Ali,” she said.
France has been prudent in its official reactions to the events in Tunisia.
It was only on Jan. 13, on the eve of Ben Ali’s downfall, that Prime Minister Francois Fillon condemned a crackdown by security forces — long after human rights groups said dozens of people had been killed.
Foreign Minister Michele Alliot-Marie has been particularly criticized both in France and in Tunisia for offering to help Ben Ali control the protests.
On Tuesday she defended herself after calls for her resignation, saying: “France did not see these events coming, any more than anyone else did.” But Khabthani said: “France is the homeland of human rights and Michele Alliot-Marie wanted to send Ben Ali reinforcements to repress us!” But while there is resentment over the French government’s policies, there has been no sign of popular anger against French people and every day there are long queues every day outside the visa office of the French embassy.
Tunisians are unlikely to forget soon, however, the many French officials who praised Ben Ali’s government over the years.
Tunisia was a French protectorate between 1881 and 1956.
“I remember (former French president Jacques) Chirac’s phrase when he said that in Tunisia bread is more important than liberty. We were disappointed,” he said.
Mustapha Ben Jaafar, leader of the opposition Democratic Forum for Labour and Liberty, spoke of strong “historic, economic and personal links” between the two countries and condemned “the incomprehension of French authorities.” “The revolution is the crowning moment of a struggle carried out for years by various currents in favor of liberty and democracy,” he said.
“But French leaders see us as jokers, disconnected from the country — an attitude essentially motivated by economic and financial interests,” he said.
Some Tunisians have however noticed a change of attitude in Paris, which refused to offer asylum to Ben Ali when he fled on Jan. 14 and has announced it will block any suspicious assets in France.
Meanwhile, a Mauritanian man has died after setting himself on fire in the West African country’s capital, according to a family member.
The 43-year-old Yacoub Ould Dahoud was transferred to a clinic in Morocco after his self-immolation on Jan. 17 in protest of Mauritania’s government.
Family member Mohamed Ould Abdi says the businessman died Saturday because of burns over 90 percent of his body.
This self-immolation was the first act of its type in Mauritania since an unemployed man set himself on fire in Tunisia last month and sparked riots.
Since that time there have been a rash of copycat immolations across the region, though with few fatalities.
A 25-year-old Sudanese man was being treated in hospital for second-degree burns, medics said on Saturday, in the latest instance of self-immolation in the Arab world.
Al-Amin Musa Al-Amin, a laborer from Darfur, poured petrol over himself shortly after Friday prayers and lit it as he stood in Suq Al-Shaabi, a market in Omdurman, Khartoum’s twin city, eye-witnesses said.
They could not speculate on the man’s motive.
The man was rushed to Omdurman hospital’s intensive care unit, medical officials said.
The Sudanese Media Center, which is close to the country’s intelligence services, had earlier quoted one of Musa’s relative as saying he had been drunk when he torched himself.
But the hospital medics said there was no trace of alcohol in his body.
