A quick update. Al-Jazeera and AFP are reporting that at least 20 people have died in the clashes in two Tunisian cities during the last 24 hours.
Citing trade union sources, al-Jazeera says six were killed in Thala and a further 14 elsewhere in the Kasserine region...
Blog archive: Tunisia
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9th January 2011
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8th January 2011Yesterday – day 22 of the Tunisian uprising – the US State Department made its first public comment on events in Tunisia and neighbouring Algeria. A senior official said: We’re certainly watching what’s happening both in Tunisia and Algeria with a great deal of interest. We did call in...
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7th January 2011It is three weeks today since Mohamed Bouazizi lit the flame in Tunisia. How are we to regard the events since then? How should we characterise them? Writing for the Guardian last week, I used the word "uprising", though I can't say I gave it a lot of thought at the time. Based on...
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5th January 2011Where freedom of speech is not allowed, people still find ways to express their message. Students at an engineering institute in Tunis arranged themselves to spell out the words "tunus hurra" (Free Tunisia) on Monday. Schools and colleges in the capital had been surrounded...
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4th January 2011As the Tunisian uprising continues on the ground with no sign of abating, the battle over information is intensifying on the internet. Yesterday there were numerous reports of Tunisians' Facebook pages and email accounts being hacked – presumably by the regime – with Yahoo users...
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3rd January 2011Mohamed Bouazizi, the jobless young man who set fire to himselfin Tunisia last month triggering a wave of anti-government demonstrations across the country, died of his injuries last night, according to a report on the nawaat website. Bouazizi, 26, was selling fruit and vegetables...
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2nd January 2011There are calls for a general strike in Tunisia tomorrow (Monday), according to various posts on Twitter. Meanwhile, more and more videos are appearing on the nawaat blog showing protests around the country. I was particularly fascinated by one video showing a small but...
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1st January 2011The Tunisian regime seems to be clutching at straws. Yesterday, the official news agency reported that six local organisations, including the Road Traffic Association and the Professional Association of Banks, have congratulated President Ben Ali on hisrecent speech. They allegedly...
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31st December 2010"If it was happening in Iran instead of Tunisia, it would be on the front pages of all the newspapers." Complaints of this kind about coverage of the Tunisian uprising keep appearing on the internet – many of them suggesting that editors around the world are protecting Ben Ali's regime from...
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28th December 2010Tunisian demonstrators confront the police by singing the national anthem With the disturbances in Tunisia showing no sign of abating, President Ben Ali decided to address his people on television last night. But his seven-minute speech, also relayed to the wider Arab world...
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27th December 2010Demonstrations continued in Tunisia over the weekend and have now entered their second week – an extraordinary development in Ben Ali's police state. Here is a YouTube video showing protests outside a government building in Kairouan, 120km north-west of Sid Bouzid, and here isanother...
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26th December 2010Protests in Tunisia spread to the capital, Tunis, yesterday when human rights activists, trade unionists and students held a demonstration in the Place Mohamed Ali in solidarity with the people of Sid Bouzid. The nawaat.org website has videos and photographs....
