Clashes broke out again, Monday, June 22, in the city of Tataouine, in the south of Tunisia, between police and demonstrators. They demand jobs and the application of a hiring plan promised by the executive in 2017.

"The situation is dangerous, from the window of my house I see the police firing tear gas and chasing young people," Ismail Smida, a resident of Tataouine, told Reuters. Another witness also reported clashes between police and hundreds of protesters throwing stones, blocking roads and claiming their "right to development and employment".

The army was deployed in front of state establishments, the Defense Ministry said.

Call for general strike

Denouncing the use of "excessive and unjustified" force against the demonstrators, the powerful trade union center UGTT called for a general strike on Monday in Tataouine. Shops were open, but public services and state institutions remained closed, according to AFP correspondents.

For several weeks, young and unemployed people from Tataouine, a town 500 km from Tunis, have been watching a sit-in to demand the application of agreements signed in 2017 with the government, promising jobs and investments in this marginalized region. They punctually blocked certain roads in the city and the trucks of the oil and gas companies serving the production site of El Kamour, located 160 kilometers away, in the middle of the desert.

According to the Ministry of Energy, these disturbances had no impact on oil and gas production, unlike 2017, when the protesters had finally blocked the valves of the pipelines. The government had then promised to invest each year 80 million dinars (some 27 million euros) for the development of Tataouine, without this materializing, according to the union UGTT. And only part of the thousands of jobs promised, in oil companies or environmental maintenance structures, have been created.

Tataouine, region most affected by unemployment

Ten years after the revolution, Tataouine, an area in the far south of Tunisia, where most of Tunisia's scarce hydrocarbon resources are located, remains underdeveloped, the NGO Oxfam pointed out in a report published on inequalities on Monday.

In 2019, "a resident of Tataouine, the region most affected by unemployment (28.7%), is four times more likely to be unemployed than a resident of Monastir", an advantaged coastal area, underlines Oxfam. Public health services are also very poorly distributed, with 10.2 intensive care beds per 10,000 inhabitants in Tunis, compared to 0 in Tataouine.

President Kais Saied, who was visiting France on Monday, had met activists from Tataouine in January, inviting them to propose project ideas without waiting for the state.

Government "wants to trample on us"

The Tunisian Minister of Employment, Fethi Belhaj, assured in an interview with a private radio that the government was committed to respecting "all of the agreements" of 2017. "The demands of the protesters are legitimate (...) provided that it does not interfere with state institutions, "he added.

"The government has no intention of keeping its promises, it wants to trample on us," accused Khalifa Bouhaouech, a member of the coordination of the sit-in of El Kamour. "We have been sending letters (...) to state officials for a while but we have not received any response, so the solution is to go back to protest," he said.

With Reuters and AFP

The summary of the France 24 week invites you to come back to the news that marked the week

I subscribe

Take international news everywhere with you! Download the France 24 app

google-play-badge_FR