By Thibauld Malterre/ AFP
TUNIS: “The Kasbah is the Bastille of Tunisia, and we are going to bring it down,” says a young demonstrator, among hundreds who spent the night outside the office of the prime minister, demanding he quits.
Wrapped in blankets and fed by locals, the group defied a curfew and the cold to spend the night camped out in the Kasbah government quarter and continue the Jasmine Revolution that has already sent ex-president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali packing.
They vow to “go all the way”, a slogan they chant at the windows of the offices of Prime Minister Mohammed Ghannouchi, like in the storming of the Bastille in 1789 in the French Revolution.
“You cannot believe the solidarity of the people: we eat together, sleep together and will stay until this government resigns and leaves like Ben Ali,” says 31-year-old Raja.
There has been no let-up in protests since the 74-year-old leader escaped to Saudi Arabia on January 14, with many Tunisians angry that Ghannouchi’s transitional administration is heavy with members of the old guard.
There are scuffles between police and the demonstrators, most of them students and unemployed young people, and many from the deprived centre of the country where the bloody Jasmine Revolution began just over a month ago.
“We don’t trust these people, they have allowed the country to be robbed and our friends to be killed. They are trying to buy time so they can escape justice, they want to destroy the archives, the proof of their crimes,” says a young woman.
Security forces string rolls of barbed wire across a main road to block off the Kashbah complex, but newcomers sneak through smaller roads in the souk to join the group that remained overnight.
By midday there are several thousand people.
Suddenly, the crowd stirs and dozens of youths start to run. A group of officials leaves the prime minister’s office protected by police in anti-riot gear. They are booed, things thrown at them. Police fire tear gas.
Soldiers, most of them unarmed, use their bodies to form barriers between the police and protesters. A police vehicle is attacked later, anger still high against a force accused of killing dozens in earlier demonstrations.
“We like the soldiers, we know they are on our side, but we hate the police.
“We have not forgotten that they fired on us with real bullets, that they killed women and children,” says a young man brandishing the portrait of a “martyr” — one of those killed in attempts to crush the uprising.
The police were a pillar of the ex-regime, says Fethi Abado Soumri, an Islamist activist who spent eight years in prison.
“We know what happened in Abu Ghraib, at Guantanamo, but in Tunisia it was even worse. Cells of 50 square meters into which they packed 100 prisoners, the lack of food drove us to eat mice, torture,” he says.
Demonstrators from the provinces, where the unprecedented uprising in tightly controlled Tunisia was unleashed by the suicide of a young man stopped by police from working, say they have suffered.
“The towns in the interior are forgotten and oppressed, because we did not support the (Ben Ali) regime,” says Belkacen Bouazizi, from Kasserine in the centre-west. “We are the living symbol of the poverty in Tunisia.”
Gathered outside the Kasbah, the protesters insist they are politically independent and not manipulated by any force. “We will not sell out the blood of the martyrs,” reads a banner.
“The revolution is above all the parties,” says Mohammed Sala Adouni, a professor in history and geography.
