Tunisia’s main union calls on govt to resign

Tunisian President Mohamed Moncef Marzouki takes part in a commemorative ceremony for eight slain soldiers in the barracks of Kasserine, 280km southeast of Tunis, yesterday. The soldiers were killed in fighting with Islamist radicals near the border with Algeria on Monday.

Agencies/TunisTunisia’s largest labour union called yesterday for the dissolution of the Islamist-led government and the interior minister offered to resign as a political crisis deepened.Softening its rejection of such calls, the Islamist Ennahda party, which rules in coalition with two small secular parties, said it was ready for a new government, but would not disband an elected body that has almost completed a new draft constitution.“We are open to all proposals to reach an agreement, including a salvation or unity government,” Ennahda official Ameur Larayedh said. “But we will not accept dissolving the Constituent Assembly. This is a red line.”Protests against the moderate Islamist Ennahda party surged after last week’s killing of a leftist politician, the second to be slain in six months, disrupting a tense political transition that began when Tunisians toppled an autocratic leader in 2011.The powerful Tunisian General Labour Union (UGTT), which has about 600,000 members in the public and private sectors, said a technocratic government should replace the one led by Ennahda.“We consider this government incapable of continuing its work,” Hussein Abbassi, head of the UGTT, said in a statement.While endorsing demands for the government to fall, the UGTT has also opposed dissolving the assembly - a measure which would throw Tunisia’s fragile transition process into limbo.“We propose maintaining the Constituent Assembly but ... with a time-frame to speed up completion of its work,” said Abbassi, general secretary of the UGTT, which brought much of the country to a halt with a one-day strike on Friday.The secular opposition, energised by the overthrow of Egypt’s freely elected Islamist president this month, has stepped up pressure on the Ennahda-led government to quit.The ruling coalition headed by Prime Minister Ali Larayedh has begun to fray in the last few days as political turmoil and street unrest grip the nation of 11mn.Interior Minister Lotfi Ben Jeddou, a judge and political independent from the Al Qasreen area near where the troops were ambushed by militants, said he was keen to stand down.“I am ready to resign,” he told the local Mosaique radio station. “A salvation government or national unity government must be formed to get Tunisia out of this bottleneck.”On Monday, the secular Ettakatol party threatened to withdraw from the ruling coalition unless a unity government was formed to defuse widespread and often violent protests.While politicians feud, the army is struggling to contain Islamist militants, who killed eight soldiers on Monday in a mountainous region near the Algerian border in one of the bloodiest attacks on Tunisian troops in decades.State television ran pictures of the mutilated corpses of the victims, some of whom had their throats cut and had been stripped of their uniforms and weapons. In a televised address, Marzouki, the secular president who is allied to Ennahda, called for national unity after the soldiers’ deaths as his office announced three days of national mourning. “If we want to face up to this danger we have to face up to it united,” he said. “I call on the political class to return to dialogue because the country, society, is under threat.” Yesterday Marzouki attended a ceremony for the slain soldiers in Kasserine.