About 100 unemployed people with university degrees demonstrated
Thursday outside Tunisia's Kasbah government building in Tunis,
chanting "work, freedom and dignity."
Kept away from the building by a strong police
cordon, the demonstrators also shouted slogans dating from the Tunisian
revolution of early 2011 and they threatened to hold a sit-in.
"This government has taken no steps to deal with
the problem of providing employment," an official with the Union of
Unemployed Graduates (UDC), Belgacem Ben Abdallah, told AFP, accusing
the authorities of "corruption and nepotism".
The Islamist party Ennahda, which has come to power
in the north African country since the ouster of dictator Zine El
Abidine Ben Ali, "distributes jobs to its followers," UDC coordinator
Salem Ayari said.
"The Ben Ali regime fell because of unemployment. But the curse is still there and even worse than before," Ayari added.
The UDC has called for the swift and transparent
opening of recruitment exams into public service and for the
establishment of unemployment benefit at a fixed rate.
The government has announced a programme to employ 25,000 in 2012.
The unemployment rate is almost 19 percent in
Tunisia, compared with 14 percent in 2010, and university graduates
account for 250,000 of the 750,000 job-seekers in the country.
When graduates held a protest on Bourguiba Avenue, one of
the capital's main thoroughfares, on April 7, they were violently
dispersed by police and several people were injured.
Demonstrations on Bourguiba Avenue were banned at the time.
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