Region

ALGIERS — Algerian police beefed up security and arrested about 20 people on Sunday at a campaign rally for President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s re-election, a day after violence ended a similar gathering.

Dozens of students hostile to the ailing 77-year-old’s bid for a fourth term tried to demonstrate ahead of the rally in Tizi-Ouzou, in the mainly Berber region of Kabylie east of the capital.

“Free and democratic Algeria!” and “Boutef, pull out!” they chanted of the veteran leader, before police arrested about 20 people, journalists said.

Abdelmalek Sellal, the former prime minister who is Bouteflika’s election campaign manager, then arrived to address the gathering of hundreds of supporters.

Bouteflika is widely expected to clinch another term in the April 17 election, but without taking to the campaign trail because of concerns about his health.

Tensions over his re-election bid turned violent on Saturday when protesters stormed a campaign rally in Bejaia, also in the Kabylie region, and torched portraits of him before attacking a television crew covering the event.

In 2001, 126 people died in Kabylie during violent clashes between the security forces and Berbers protesting about discrimination, poor living and working conditions and alleged government corruption.

Bouteflika’s main challenger, Ali Benflis, condemned the violence which prompted Sellal to call off Saturday’s rally.

“I regret that this campaign is taking place in a climate of tensions,” Benflis said in a statement issued Sunday at a rally in his hometown of Batna, in another mainly Berber region, the Aures.

“I have to be honest and say nothing has been done to ensure it is taking place in a calm and serene” atmosphere, he was quoted as saying.

“I call for the respect of freedom of expression in all circumstances, a value which is the cornerstone of my policy of national renewal.”

Bouteflika’s campaign headquarters blamed the violence on the Barakat movement (Arabic for “That’s Enough”) formed to oppose his candidacy.

Sellal and other Bouteflika aides have been doing the leg work for the president, who is too frail to campaign after a mini stroke last year confined him to hospital in Paris for three months.

The defence ministry, meanwhile, said the army killed an armed Islamist, and seized weapons and equipment in a raid Saturday on hideouts in Jijel area of Kabylie.

DUBAI — The navies of Iran and Pakistan plan to hold joint military exercises in the eastern part of the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday, Iran’s state news agency said on Sunday.

Several Pakistani naval vessels, including a warship and a submarine, docked at the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas on Saturday, the IRNA news agency said, citing an Iranian navy statement.

“The most important activity of the Pakistani fleet during its stay in Bandar Abbas is to launch joint manoeuvres with selected units of Iran’s navy in eastern waters of the Hormuz Strait,” Iranian Rear Admiral Shahram Irani told IRNA.

Iran’s state news agency said the joint naval exercises were aimed at promoting military cooperation between Tehran and Islamabad but gave no details of the plans.

More than a third of the world’s seaborne oil exports pass through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow corridor between Iran and Oman. Western navies, led by the United States, patrol the region to ensure their safe passage.

A crude oil tanker was shot at last week as it sailed through the Strait of Hormuz, although such incidents are rare.

BAGHDAD — Authorities launched a massive polio vaccination campaign on Sunday in Iraq, Syria and Egypt after health officials found a suspected case of the virus in a young boy near Baghdad.

The five-day campaign aims to vaccinate more than 20 million children, including 5.6 million in Iraq alone, UNICEF said, with confirmed cases in conflict-hit neighbouring Syria having sparked a region-wide alert.

“Polio eradication is a global priority,” UNICEF’s representative in Iraq Marzio Babille said in a statement.

“I appeal to the people of Iraq to join hands in ensuring every child under the age of five is vaccinated during the upcoming April polio campaign, regardless of how many doses they’ve received previously.”

Last month, Iraq’s health ministry said it found a case of polio in a young boy in Bab al-Sham, near Baghdad, the country’s first such case in 14 years.

Health ministry spokesman Ziad Tariq said at the time that officials believed the case originated in Syria, which shares a long border with Iraq’s restive western province of Anbar.

In early January, anti-government fighters took control of all of Anbar city of Fallujah and parts of the provincial capital Ramadi, some of which they still hold.

A total of 27 children have been paralysed by polio in Syria through the end of March, according to the UN, including 18 in Deir Ezzor, the Syrian province across the border from Anbar.

Lebanon and Turkey will join the regional polio vaccination campaign on April 10 and April 18 respectively, according to UNICEF.

BENGHAZI — Public and private sector staff including oil workers went on strike in the Libyan Port city of Benghazi on Sunday, protesting against worsening security and demanding the resignation of parliament whose mandate has expired.

Traffic at Benghazi’s international airport was halted by the strike. As a result, a Turkish Airlines plane was turned away, according to state media.

Oil companies, universities and schools also closed, heeding a call by political groups for a day of “civil disobedience” to demand better security, witnesses said.

Government forces have failed to improve security in the port city where car bombs, and killings of police and army officers have become part of daily life.

Most foreigners left Benghazi after the US ambassador to Libya was killed in an Islamist assault on the US consulate in September 2012.

The strikers want Libya’s General National Congress (GNC) assembly to resign immediately. The GNC’s initial mandate mandate expired on February 7 but a date as yet to be set for a new election.

Many Libyans blame infighting parliamentarians for the growing turmoil and anarchy that have persisted in Libya since Muammar Qadhafi was toppled in a NATO-backed uprising in 2011.

GAZA CITY — Israeli warplanes attacked several sites in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip Sunday, sources on both sides said, hours after a rocket from the Palestinian enclave hit Israel.

Palestinian medical and security sources said five sites in northern and southern Gaza were hit, including training camps for the Islamic Jihad and Ezzedine Al Qassam Brigades, Hamas military wing.

The Palestinians said there were no injuries in the attacks.

The Israeli army said in a statement it “retaliated” to “ongoing rocket attacks from Gaza”, targeting four “terror sites” in northern Gaza and a fifth in the south of the coastal territory.

On Saturday night, a rocket fired from Gaza hit an open area in southern Israel without causing damage or injuries, the army and police said.

According to data from the Israeli army, since the beginning of March 82 projectiles fired from Gaza hit Israel.

DUBAI — An Iranian suspected of helping kidnap a British-Iranian businessman in Dubai has been arrested in Thailand and deported to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), an official source familiar with the matter said on Sunday.

Ali Rehmat Assadi will stand trial in the UAE on charges of abducting Abbas Yazdi, who went missing in June, the source added. Yazdi’s wife, Atena, has told UAE media she feared he might have been kidnapped by Iranian intelligence officers.

Iran has denied any role in Yazdi’s disappearance.

UAE authorities said in January they had detained three Iranians suspected of being part of a group that had kidnapped Yazdi, a businessman who owns a general trading company in the Gulf Arab emirate.

The official source said on Sunday that Assadi, the subject of an Interpol “red notice” or international wanted persons alert requested by Dubai, was the fourth principal member of the group. There was no immediate word on why Assadi had been in Thailand.

The Iranian and British governments had been informed of Assadi’s arrest in line with diplomatic and consular regulations, the source said.

Britain’s Foreign Office said in August it was in touch with the Dubai and Iranian governments over the case of Yazdi, who was 44 years old at the time of his disappearance.

UAE newspaper 7Days has cited Yazdi’s wife as saying the trader and investor was a close childhood friend of the son of former Iranian president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

Britain is among Western nations at odds with Iran over its nuclear programme and other issues. It shut its embassy in Tehran after what it called “an attack by government-sponsored militias” on the mission in November 2011. Iran’s embassy in London was also closed.

British media had reported that, at the time of his disappearance, Yazdi was giving evidence by video link to an international arbitration tribunal in The Hague intended to settle a long-running commercial dispute involving United Arab Emirates-based Crescent Petroleum and the National Iranian Oil Company.

There is no suggestion that this involvement in the arbitration is connected to his disappearance, British media have said.

TUNIS — Three years after its uprising that inspired the Arab Spring revolutions, Tunisia is on its way to political stability with a new constitution and the promise of elections later this year.

At the same time the country’s caretaker government, led by Prime Minister Mehdi Jomaa, is conscious that some real social challenges lie ahead.

Jomaa, a former aerospace executive who worked in France, warned Tunisians last month that they must make “painful sacrifices” to revive the economy.

Tunisia’s budget deficit is set to grow to 8 per cent of the gross domestic product this year, mostly due to public worker wage costs and subsidies which are a hangover from former Tunisian autocrat Zine El Abidine Ben Ali ousted in 2011.

Jomaa’s challenge is how to cut government costs without triggering the kind of discontent that toppled Ben Ali, whose overthrow was caused partly by grievances over unemployment and high costs that are still very real for many Tunisians.

The technocrat government headed by Jomaa took over two months ago after an accord between the two main political poles — the Islamist Ennahda Party and its secular opponents — that ended a political standoff and cleared the path for elections.

Jomaa last month announced external borrowing needs for this year would be $8 billion — nearly double the initial estimate in the government’s budget plan.

Just last year, an attempt to increase a vehicle tax showed how sensitive subsidy and financial austerity reforms can be. The announcement triggered rioting and clashes that forced the previous government to reverse its decision.

“We know very well there is social tension in the country, but we should move forward with reforms to restore the balance of the Tunisian economy,” Finance Minister Hakim Ben Hamouda told journalists last week after meeting with an IMF delegation.

Sensitive to past tensions, the minister avoided setting a date to raise fuel prices and tackling other subsidies that balloon the state’s spending bill but help poorer Tunisians.

With few hydrocarbon reserves unlike its rich neighbours Algeria and Libya, Tunisia relies heavily on foreign tourism and remittances from Tunisians living overseas.

Political stability has opened up the door to credits and aid like $500 million in US loan guarantees and financing from the IMF, World Bank, European Union and the Japanese government — a total of $3.2 billion in packages.

Steady, painful measures

But Jomaa’s government is under pressure from international lenders to take hard steps to curb public expenditure — fuel subsidies, public wage bills and transport subsidies, all politically sensitive.

One government source told Reuters that a 6 per cent increase in domestic fuel prices may be introduced in July this year.

Industry Minister Kamel Ben Nasr has said planned fuel price hikes will provide the government with an extra 350 million dinars or around $220 million this year.

He told the state news agency TAP that Tunisia’s government is looking to reduce energy subsidies from 3.6 billion Tunisian dinars ($2.26 billion) in 2013 to 2.5 billion Tunisian dinars ($1.57 billion) this year.

This year the government has already cut energy subsidies for cement companies by 50 per cent and will cut them by 100 per cent next June.

It also plans to reduce fuel subsidies for sectors including food industry and textiles, which will bring 420 million Tunisian dinars ($263.83 million) to state coffers.

Public transport prices will rise as part of plans to offset losses of public transport companies from fuel increases.

But with Tunisia preparing for elections later this year — its first ballot under a new constitution and its second only free election — those reforms may carry political cost.

“It is a delicate balance. Tunisian purchasing power worsened remarkably due to the increasing of inflation, but the government is forced to make immediate reforms,” said Ezzidine Saidaane, a local economic expert.

Saidanne expects Jomaa’s government will look to cut subsidies on food items, fuel prices and cooking gas, but it will not include bread prices, which would be too sensitive. In 1984, dozens were killed in rioting over a bread price hike.

Preparing to ward off potential protests over price increases, last week the government began negotiations with Tunisia’s powerful labour union federation the UGTT.

But in a country where many still complain they have yet to see the economic benefits of their “Jasmine Revolution”, getting those reforms done may come at a price.

“We can’t accept an increase in gasoline or food prices,” said Salem Rbihi, a truck driver in Tunis. “Beware of our anger, I tell the government, because a second revolution will be on its way, and it will be harder, a revolution of the hungry.”

ASWAN, Egypt — Clashes between an Arab clan and a Nubian family resumed Sunday in Egypt’s south, killing two people and wounding four, health officials said, leaving the tourist city of Aswan on the edge despite a high-profile government effort to end the bloodshed.

The bloody clashes, which began Friday, so far have claimed 25 lives. Gunfights spread beyond a residential area to outside the local hospital and morgue near the city’s centre, a few kilometres from the tourist hotels and its commercial areas.

An angry mob from the Arab clan torched more new Nubian homes Sunday after collecting the bodies of their relatives to bury. The attack pushed armed Nubians into the streets, sparking pitched gunbattles. Police struggled to break up the mob outside the hospital. A military helicopter flew over the area.

Locals, meanwhile, complained of the inability of security forces to halt the vendetta violence. Nubians burned horse carts belonging to the Arab clan in protest.

A Nubian resident reached by telephone said gunmen from the Arab Haleyla clan attacked his neighbourhood Al Sayel Al Rifi, on the edge of Aswan.

“We are dying. They are attacking us,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he feared for his life. “There is no government and no police in the area.”

The renewed clashes came shortly after the local governor visited the area. An Associated Press photographer there said firefights broke out nearby, including outside the hospital and morgue. An armoured vehicle was stationed outside the neighbourhood of narrow dirt roads. Authorities closed local schools and a university over fears of renewed violence.

In the city’s centre, shops and bakeries were closed. Trains sat at the edge of town, trying to wait out the violence.

The bloody feud began after a fight last week between school students drew in adults, sparking the clashes that turned deadly Friday. Police said the fight was over the harassment of a girl. Witnesses said offensive graffiti written on the school walls fuelled the violence.

Security officials say members of the Arab clan are involved in arms and drugs smuggling and are well-armed. The fight took on a political overtone when the impoverished Arab clan accused the ethnic Nubians of supporting the military, while the Nubians say the Arabs back ousted Islamist President Mohamed Morsi and are protected by officials loyal to longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak.

Local leaders say police were mostly absent from the streets, causing the violence to spread. The governor appealed for the military to deploy troops in the area. On Sunday, a military official said more soldiers were heading to Aswan.

Egypt’s Prime Minister Ibrahim Mahlab and his interior minister visited Aswan on Saturday to meet local leaders to end the dispute. Mahlab promised a fact-finding mission to investigate whow the violence erupted. But vendettas, particularly over perceived violations of honour, are all too common in southern Egypt.

On Sunday, local government official Mohammed Mostafa told private television station CBC that officials are considering emergency measures and possibly a curfew in the area.

The violence in Egypt’s south adds to unrest plaguing the country since Morsi’s overthrow in July. Protests by Morsi supporters often devolve into violence and militants have launched a wave of attacks since his ouster. It also comes before May’s presidential election, in which the former powerful military chief Abdel-Fattah Al Sisi, who removed Morsi, will run for office and is widely expected to win.

On Sunday, former presidential hopeful Mortada Mansour announced he would run for president. Mortada, widely considered a Mubarak loyalist and the head of renowned Egyptian football club Zamalek, was disqualified on a technicality before the 2012 poll that Morsi won.

Speaking to journalists, Mansour said he would ban all protests and strikes nationwide for one year if elected. He did not offer details on how he planned to do it.

Leftist politician Hamdeen Sabahi is also running in the election, scheduled for May 26 and 27.

BAGHDAD — An explosion at a booby-trapped house, ensuing clashes with militants and a roadside bombing killed 18 soldiers Saturday in Iraq, authorities said.

The blast happened Saturday afternoon when a group of soldiers searched a farmhouse in Garma, an area near the city of Fallujah, 65 kilometres west of the capital, police said. Minutes later, police said gunmen opened fire on arriving soldiers.

The blast wounded 24 soldiers and levelled the home, officials said.

In other attacks, police said a roadside bomb targeting a military convoy killed three soldiers and wounded seven just north of Baghdad.

Medical officials at two Baghdad hospitals confirmed the casualties. All officials spoke on condition of anonymity as they weren’t authorised to speak to journalists.

Al Qaeda-inspired militants took control of Fallujah and parts of Ramadi in late December, taking advantage of a months-long surge in Sunni discontent against Maliki’s government. The takeover was sparked when security forces arrested a Sunni lawmaker sought on terrorism charges, then dismantled a year-old Sunni anti-government protest camp. They later pulled out of the area to calm angry residents, allowing the militants to take control.

Violence has been escalating in Iraq. Last year, Iraq saw its highest death toll since the worst of the country’s sectarian bloodletting began to subside in 2007, according to United Nations figures.

The country will hold its first parliamentary elections since the withdrawal of US troops on April 30.

BEIRUT — Mortar shells slammed into several areas of the Syrian capital on Saturday, with one hitting near the Russian embassy without causing injuries, a monitoring group said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights also said regime troops battled rebels in Eastern Ghouta near the capital, while opposition forces tightened their siege of a military base in Idlib province of northwest Syria.

The observatory reported mortar fire near the Ummayad area and the Russian embassy in the upscale Mazraa neighbourhood of Damascus, with no casualties reported.

The Britain-based group also reported mortar fire in the southern Shughur district and nearby Fahama, where a number of security buildings are located.

Syria’s state news agency SANA reported 17 mortar round attacks across the city, causing damage to a hospital as well as several homes and cars.

Mortar shell attacks on the capital on Friday injured 22 people, it said, without giving a toll for Saturday.

The escalation came as government troops stepped up a campaign against rebels on the outskirts of Damascus, particularly Eastern Ghouta which has been under regime siege for months.

The observatory said rebels and regime troops were fighting in the town of Mleiha in the Eastern Ghouta area.

On Friday, regime warplanes carried out air strikes as soldiers tried to storm the town.

The fighting left 17 rebels dead on Friday, a day after 22 opposition fighters were killed in and around Mleiha, according to the observatory.

In nearby Jaramana, SANA reported “terrorist mortar shell attacks” injured 13 people on Saturday.

The army siege of Eastern Ghouta has led to food and medical shortages, which the observatory said had caused the death of a child on Friday.

In Idlib, the observatory reported fighting between regime and rebel forces in the area around Babuleen, which opposition forces captured on Friday.

Their advance has allowed rebel forces to tighten a siege of the Wadi Deif army base, one of the regime’s last significant posts in Idlib.

In northern Aleppo city, the observatory reported regime air raids with explosives-packed “barrel bombs,” a day after 18 people were killed in air raids on the east of the city.