Tunisia PM holds emergency meeting over unrest

Tunisia declared a nationwide curfew on Friday after four days of protests and rioting over jobs and economic conditions, the interior ministry said, the largest since the Arab Spring of five years ago.

At least three police stations have been attacked over the last 24 hours and 42 members of the security forces have been wounded, the interior ministry said.

In an echo of the 2010 popular uprising that heralded the start of the Arab Spring, a wave of unrest has rocked the country since the death of a young unemployed man on Sunday.

On Tuesday, when the government first issued a local curfew in Kasserine, police fired tear gas at the protesters, who retaliated with rocks and blocked roads with tires, boulders and trees.

The unrest has echoes of the public anger after the death of a young fruit seller who set himself on fire in Sidi Bouzid in December 2010 in protest at unemployment and police harassment.

The situation in Kasserine was clam mid-morning on Friday with protesters gathering in front of the governor’s office.

Authorities earlier said that a Tunisian was killed in a border skirmish with soldiers, but the infiltrators were identified only as “smugglers”.

Numerous protesters are believed to be university graduates, who make up a third of Tunisia’s unemployed.

“Tunisia has completely changed from a dictatorship to a young democracy”.

Tunisia has been held up as a model for democratic progress since the 2011 revolution that toppled Ben Ali.

The government enacted a curfew in response to large-scale protests around the country over a lack of employment opportunities for recent college graduates.

Tunisian President Beji Caid Essebsi addressed the nation Friday evening, saying he understood the protesters’ motivation but blamed criminals for the violence, including looting of a bank and some stores. “You can’t tell people who are hungry…to be patient”.

After meeting French President Francois Hollande in Paris, Mr Essid was due to return to Tunisia and visit Kasserine on Saturday. That bombing, along with deadly attacks against the Bardo museum in Tunis and the resort of Sousse, were claimed by the Islamic State group. “Unemployment is the key problem which we must confront and one of the priorities of the government”, Essid said Thursday in a speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

“We understand well the demands of protesters and they are legitimate”, government spokesman Khaled Chouket said.