Smoked poured out of a supermarket near Tunis. Power changed hands for the second time in 24 hours on Saturday morning.
NEW YORK TIMES
TUNIS — Tanks, police officers and gangs of newly deputized young men wielding guns held the deserted streets of Tunis Saturday night after a day of sporadic rioting and gunfire. Power changed hands for the second time in 24 hours, and the swift turnabout raised new questions about what kind of government might emerge from the chaos engulfing Tunisia.
The interim government named Friday had hoped that the toppling of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, who fled the country, would satisfy protesters, but continued unrest Saturday made clear that they were determined to chase his allies from power as well.
Bursts of gunfire rang out through the capital all day Saturday, and a patient discharged from a major hospital here reported that the emergency room was packed with people suffering gunshot wounds.
After a hail of machine-gun fire in the late afternoon in downtown Tunis, snipers were visible on the rooftop of the Interior Ministry, aiming down at the Boulevard Bourguiba. Human rights groups said that they had confirmed dozens of deaths at the hands of security forces even before the biggest street battle began Friday, and on Saturday residents huddled in their homes for fear of the police.
The tumbling political succession started Friday when Prime Minister Mohamed Ghannouchi announced on state television that the president was gone and that he was taking over. Then, on Saturday morning, Mr. Ghannouchi, an ally of Mr. Ben Ali, abruptly announced that he was surrendering the reins of government to the speaker of Parliament, complying with succession rules spelled out in the Tunisian Constitution. Now the speaker, Fouad Mebazaa, is expected to hold elections to form a new government within 60 days.
The shake-up underscored the power vacuum left here after the end of Mr. Ben Ali’s 23 years of authoritarian rule — a transition of dizzying speed that Tunisians view with both hope and fear.
With Tunisia’s relatively large middle class, high level of education and secular culture, some here argue that their country is poised to become the first true Arab democracy. And commentators around the Middle East pondered the potential regional implications of the success of Tunisia’s protests; Mr. Ben Ali’s fall marked the first time that street demonstrations had overcome an Arab autocrat. “Will Tunisia be the first domino to fall?” asked a headline on the Web site of the news channel Al Jazeera.
But others at home and abroad worried that Tunisia could slide into chaos, laying the groundwork for a new strongman to emerge. Mr. Ben Ali was viewed in the West as a reliable ally in the fight against the Islamic extremism flourishing in other parts of North Africa, and in Washington, national security experts said extremist groups like Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb could capitalize on the disorder to find a new foothold.
For now, though, the political field remains conspicuously empty. Mr. Ben Ali’s pervasive network of secret police had succeeded in effectively eliminating or co-opting any truly viable opposition or political institution. The former president also long ago wiped away the Islamist groups that form the main grass-roots opposition in most Arab countries.
“There are very few players to keep track of,” said Michael Koplow, an expert on Tunisia who has written about the uprising for Foreign Policy magazine. “If there were new free elections, it is unclear whether there is anyone qualified to run who the people would accept. It is wide open.”
There is also no apparent leader or spokesman for the four-week-old protest against joblessness and government corruption that forced Mr. Ben Ali from power. The protests erupted spontaneously after the Dec. 17 suicide by self-immolation of a college-educated street vendor in the Western city of Sidi Bouzid frustrated by the lack of opportunity (the police had confiscated his wares because he did not have a permit). They spread through online social networks like Facebook and Twitter. And they accelerated as demonstrators shared homemade digital videos of each confrontation with the police.
“There are no leaders, that is the good thing,” one protester declared Friday as thousands crowded around the Interior Ministry just before the police imposed martial law and Mr. Ben Ali left the country.
Protesters immediately turned against the unconstitutional ascension of Mr. Ghannouchi, arguing that he was a crony of Mr. Ben Ali who came from the same hometown of Sousse. It remains unclear if critics will be satisfied with the switch in power to Mr. Mebazaa, who has presided over a Parliament dominated exclusively by Mr. Ben Ali’s ruling party and like almost every other Tunisian elected official, owes his career to the former president.
There were reports in Arabic news outlets this weekend that it was the Tunisian military that finally triggered the unwinding of Mr. Ben Ali’s government. As the demonstrations escalated on Thursday afternoon, the country’s top military official, Gen. Rachid Ammar, is said to have refused to shoot protesters.
That afternoon, the military began pulling its tanks and personnel out of downtown Tunis, leaving the police and other security forces loyal to the ruling party to take their place as President Ben Ali delivered his final speech pleading, in effect, for another chance. The tanks returned after Mr. Ben Ali left the country.
On Saturday afternoon, there were some signs that General Ammar himself may now have an eye on politics. On Facebook, a staging ground of the street revolt, almost 1,700 people had clicked that they “like” a Web page named “General Rachid Ammar President” and emblazoned with his official photographs.
Still, the Tunisian military is relatively small compared with the armies of most countries in the region and is far less pervasive here than internal security forces, and so far neither General Ammar nor any other military figure has publicly stepped forward to try to lead the country.
Meanwhile, Tunisians abroad and exiled opposition leaders reveled in the chance for a change. Several thousand Tunisians demonstrated in Paris on Saturday at the Place de la République calling for real democracy and celebrating Mr. Ben Ali’s downfall.
Exiled opposition leaders, many of whom have lived abroad for decades in France or Britain, prepared to return in the hope of rekindling their movements. Perhaps foremost among them was Rachid al-Ghannouchi, a progressive Islamic leader who founded the Hizb al-Nahdah, or Renaissance Party. He was imprisoned twice in the 1980s and granted asylum in Britain in 1993.
“The dictatorship has fallen,” Mr. Ghannouchi told Reuters. “There is nothing to stop me returning to my country after 22 years of exile.”
In Egypt, critics of President Hosni Mubarak rushed to embrace the Tunisian example, noting that their country shared the combination of an autocratic ruler, rampant corruption and a large population of frustrated youth. Egyptians traded phone messages like “Mubarak, oh, Mubarak, your plane is waiting for you!” and posted images of the Tunisian flag to their Facebook pages. A major opposition group, led by Mohamed El Baradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, merged the Egyptian and Tunisian flags into one on its Web site.
One group of young Egyptians set up a Facebook page calling on their fellow citizens to make January 25 “The day of revolution against torture, poverty, corruption and unemployment.”
“If you care about Egypt, if you want your rights, join us and participate and enough silence,” the page said.
Still, many commentators around the Arab world wondered if it might be too soon to celebrate, given the continuing violence in Tunisia and the lack of an obvious leader. “We don’t know if the Tunisia of yesterday has opened up, or is about to plunge into a deep sea of the unknown and be added to the series of Arab disasters that don’t end,” Tarek al-Hamid wrote in Asharq al-Awsat, a paper with a Saudi owner. “No one will cry over Ben Ali, but the prayer is for Tunisia not to fall into a quagmire of crises with a bleak future.”
Saudi Arabia said Saturday that it had welcomed Mr. Ben Ali and his family. France, the former colonial power in Tunisia, made it clear that it did not want to risk inflaming its large Tunisian immigrant population by accepting the former president. And on Saturday, the French government said that members of Mr. Ben Ali’s family who had taken refuge at a hotel at Disneyland Paris were not welcome either.
“Ben Ali’s family members on French soil have no reason to stay,” a government spokesman said. “They are going to leave it.” French media said the family members were later seen leaving the hotel.
Meanwhile, reports of unrest continued Saturday in Tunisia, with the Arab news media reporting that hundreds of prisoners were freed after a jailhouse riot in a resort town and that more than 40 were killed in a fire at another prison set by an inmate hoping to escape amid the country’s chaos.
But the Tunisian airport reopened at least partially Saturday, and some in Tunis said things were looking up. Huddled in the doorway of a darkened apartment building downtown Saturday, a man in his late 20s was smoking cigarettes and watching security forces patrol the square outside. He would give only his first name, Faisal, and he said that he had been unemployed for the seven years since he graduated from college, in part because he could not afford the bribes necessary to secure a job.
He had nothing good to say about Mr. Ben Ali, but when asked about what would come out of the chaos, he shrugged and smiled.
“Look,” he said, “everything is going to be O.K.”
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