Tunisia’s Biggest Union Urges Gov’t To Quit

Local Editor

Tunisia's largest labor union called Wednesday for the dissolution of the an-Nahda-led government, and the interior minister, a leading independent, said he was ready to resign.

This comes as an-Nahda faced mounting protests since the death in February of a leading opposition politician, whose killing sparked the worst crisis since Tunisia's autocratic leader fell two years ago.

Meanwhile, one of an-Nahda' junior coalition partners, the secular Ettakatol party, threatened to withdraw unless a new unity government were formed, something it said was necessary to end the widespread and increasingly violent protests.

The Tunisian General Labor Union [UGTT] said a technocratic government should replace the one led by An-Nahda, which has defied growing calls to resign by a opposition emboldened by the overthrow of Egypt's President.
The protests in a country that led the first of the "Arab Spring" revolutions grew Tuesday, when gunmen killed eight soldiers near the Algerian border, an area where Tunisia has been hunting for al-Qaeda militants, in one of the bloodiest attacks on Tunisian troops in decades.

"The UGTT calls for dissolving the current government and creating a technocratic government led by an independent figure," general secretary Hussein Abbassi said in a statement. "We consider this government incapable of continuing its work."
Interior Minister Lotfi Ben Jeddou later said he was ready to stand down.

"I have a great wish to resign, and 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."

Tunisians fear the return of political chaos just two years after Ben Ali was forced to flee during an uprising that set off revolts against autocratic rulers across the Middle East.
The opposition, angered by the assassination of leading leftist figures Chokri Belaid in February and Mohamed Brahimi on Thursday, has been emboldened by the Egyptian army's ouster of Mohamed Mursi, and has rejected several concessions and power-sharing proposals from the Ennahda-led coalition in recent days.

Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team