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TUNIS — Hundreds demonstrated on Sunday in Tunisia’s capital against a planned referendum on constitutional changes and President Kais Saied’s recent firing of dozens of judges. 

Protesters in Tunis responded to calls from opposition organisations, including Saied’s nemesis the Islamist-inspired Ennahdha Party, chanting “constitution, liberty and dignity” and “the people want an independent judiciary”, an AFP correspondent said.

The new constitution is the centrepiece of reform plans by Saied and is set to go to referendum on July 25, exactly one year after he sacked the government and suspended parliament. 

He has steadily extended his power grab since then, including by dissolving parliament in March. Earlier this month he sacked 57 judges, after accusing many of corruption and other crimes.

“The referendum is just nothing but a fraud,” said Ali Larayedh, a leader from Ennahdha, which was parliament’s biggest party and a key player in the government fired by the president. 

“We are demonstrating against the exclusion of the judicial authority and against the coup d’etat that targets the constitution,” he said. 

The 2014 constitution, a hard-won compromise between Ennahdha and its secular rivals, created a system where both the president and parliament had executive powers.

It was adopted three years after the North African country’s 2011 revolution.

Rights groups have condemned Saied’s firing earlier this month of the 57 judges as a “deep blow to judicial independence”. 

Saied is a former law professor elected in 2019 amid public anger against the political class in the North African nation. 

He has organised a “national dialogue” around the constitutional reforms, but opponents including the powerful UGTT trade union confederation have boycotted it, on the grounds that it excludes key civil society actors and political parties. 

A draft of the new constitution is due to be presented to Saied on Monday ahead of a referendum in the form of a simple yes/no vote. 

Ennahdha warned earlier this month against dropping references to Islam in any new constitution. 

Sunday’s protest came just days after flights were cancelled, public transport ground to a halt and government offices were closed in a nationwide strike by the UGTT that piled more pressure on the president. 

The confederation had urged workers across the North African country’s vast public sector to strike, halting work at 159 state agencies and public companies to demand concessions on salaries and threatened reforms. 

In February, the president scrapped an independent judicial watchdog and replaced it with a body under his own control. 

Saied’s opponents accuse him of moving the only democracy to have emerged from the Arab Spring uprisings back towards autocracy. 

Some Tunisians however support his moves against a system they say achieved little in the decade since the 2011 revolt that toppled dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. 

Legislative elections are planned for December.

AL LAOTA, Sudan — Looking at the sacks of wheat stacked in Imad Abdullah’s small home, no one would guess that Sudan’s food security is hanging by a thread after an October coup and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

But the wheat farmer fears that the grain will soon rot, after his country’s cash-strapped government backed out of promises to purchase it at incentivising prices.

“It has been two months since I harvested the wheat and I can’t store it in the house anymore,” said Abdullah, pointing to the large sacks filled with ripened wheat crammed into his small house in Al Laota, in Gezira state, south of Sudan’s capital.

He is one of thousands of farmers who have cultivated the grain as part of Sudan’s largest agricultural scheme, named Al Gezira.

When Abdullah harvested in March, he was promised 43,000 Sudanese pounds ($75) per sack — a price set by the government to encourage farmers to cultivate the grain.

“We used to sell the government our entire harvest. We never had to bring it home. We don’t even have adequate storage places.”

Sudanese officials have however declared in recent weeks that they will not be able to buy this season’s entire harvest due to lack of funds.

Impoverished Sudan has for years been grappling with a grinding economic crisis, which deepened after last year’s military coup prompted Western governments to cut crucial aid.

The October coup derailed a fragile transition put in place following the 2019 ouster of president Omar Al Bashir.

Over 18 million people, nearly half the Sudanese population, are expected to be pushed into extreme hunger by September, according to United Nations estimates.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, both key grain suppliers, threatens to compound Sudan’s existing food security troubles.

Wheat imports from both nations make up between 70 and 80 per cent of Sudan’s local market needs, according to a 2021 UN report.

Empty coffers

Last month, dozens of wheat farmers from Sudan’s Northern State staged a protest outside the agricultural bank after it refused to take their harvest.

“I grew 16 acres [10.5 hectares] of wheat this season, filling some 120 sacks amounting to a total of 12 tonnes,” farmer Modawi Ahmed told AFP.

He said the bank only agreed to buy less than half of his harvest, and he now fears the rest will spoil.

Farmers working the fields as part of the Al Gezira scheme have over the years contributed only a small portion of Sudan’s annual wheat needs of 2.2 million tonnes.

This year, local wheat production was forecast to cover only a quarter of the country’s needs, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

The finance ministry earlier this month said it was committed to building a strategic wheat reserve of up to 300,000 tonnes. 

But the government “does not have the money to buy the harvest”, said an official with Sudan’s agricultural bank, which procures the wheat from farmers.

“We have asked the finance ministry and the central bank for funds but we got no response,” the official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

An official with Sudan’s finance ministry, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed the lack of funds.

Properly stored wheat can last up to a year and a half in silos with controlled temperature and humidity levels, according to agricultural expert Abdulkarim Omar.

But it “could spoil within as little as three months” in inadequate storage, he said.

Traders have offered to buy the farmers’ wheat, but at far lower prices that barely cover the cost of production, according to Omar Marzouk, the governor of the Al Gezira scheme.

As a result, he predicted that “farmers will opt against cultivating the grain next season”.

Risk to food security

Now, as the new growing season starts, many frustrated farmers are leaving their lands untilled and unprepared.

Kamal Sari, leader of the farmers’ association, fears that reluctance to prepare for the new season could affect “food provision for the Sudanese people”.

Last week, two children in Sudan’s Darfur region died “due to hunger-related causes”, UK-based aid group Save the Children said, warning it was “an ominous sign of what is to come”.

Sudanese households have come under increasing pressure in recent months due to spiralling fuel and electricity prices.

Prices of staple food items have also skyrocketed, with inflation recently surpassing 200 per cent.

Rising bread prices due to slashed wheat subsidies sparked the political turmoil and mass rallies that led to the ouster of Bashir in 2019.

Given the economic crisis and the ongoing war in Ukraine, economist Mohamed Al Nayer said “the government should buy the wheat from farmers at any price”.

Otherwise, he warned, “it complicates the situation in Sudan far more than it already is”.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Israeli warplanes hit Hamas military sites in the Gaza Strip on Saturday in retaliation for rocket fire from the Palestinian enclave run by the Islamist movement, the Israeli army said.

“A short while ago, in response to the rocket attack, [Israeli military] aircraft struck a number of Hamas terror targets in the Gaza Strip,” the army said in a statement.

The strikes came after Hamas “launched a rocket... toward Israeli civilians in southern Israel”, it said, adding the projectile was intercepted by Israel’s air defences.

The Israeli “aircraft targeted a weapons manufacturing site located inside a Hamas military post and an additional three military posts belonging to Hamas”, the statement said.

After the strikes balls of flame shot into the air, leaving dark smoke drifting over the territory.

Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem said the air raids, in the southeast of Gaza City, “are an extension of the aggression against Palestinian territory in Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank,” after the killing of three Palestinians on Friday.

Twelve Palestinians were also wounded in that same incident during an Israeli army raid in Jenin, a stronghold of armed Palestinian factions in the West Bank.

The men were killed when Israeli forces opened fire on their vehicle, the Palestinian news agency Wafa said.

Israel’s army said soldiers had come under fire during an operation to search for weapons.

One of the dead was a Hamas commander, the group said, vowing that the killings “will not go unpunished”.

Qassem made no mention of whether Saturday’s air strikes caused any casualties.

Israel’s army said hours earlier that air raid sirens sounded in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon and in areas near the blockaded Gaza Strip.

In April, Israeli warplanes also hit Gaza after Palestinian armed groups fired rockets from the territory.

That exchange came after nearly a month of deadly violence focused on Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem’s flashpoint Al Aqsa Mosque compound, the third holiest site in Islam.

The impoverished Hamas-controlled Gaza coastal enclave of 2.3 million people has been under an Israeli blockade since 2007.

Last year, Israel and Hamas fought an 11-day war triggered in part by unrest over the Al-Aqsa mosque compound, the most holy site for Jews, who call it the Temple Mount.

Israel occupied the West Bank and east Jerusalem in the 1967 June War. It later occupied East Jerusalem in a move never recognised by most of the international community.

SAMAWAH, Iraq — Gazelles at an Iraqi wildlife reserve are dropping dead from hunger, making them the latest victims in a country where climate change is compounding hardships after years of war.

In little over one month, the slender-horned gazelle population at the Sawa reserve in southern Iraq has plunged from 148 to 87.

Lack of funding along with a shortage of rain has deprived them of food, as the country’s drought dries up lakes and leads to declining crop yields.

President Barham Saleh has warned that tackling climate change “must become a national priority for Iraq as it is an existential threat to the future of our generations to come”.

The elegant animals, also known as rhim gazelles, are recognisable by their gently curved horns and sand-coloured coats. The International Union for Conservation of Nature classes the animals as endangered on its Red List.

Outside Iraq’s reserves, they are mostly found in the deserts of Libya, Egypt and Algeria but are unlikely to number “more than a few hundred” there, according to the Red List.

Turki Al Jayashi, director of the Sawa reserve, said gazelle numbers there plunged by around 40 per cent in just one month to the end of May.

“They no longer have a supply of food because we have not received the necessary funds” which had come from the government, Jayashi said.

Iraq’s finances are under pressure after decades of war in a poverty-stricken country needing agricultural and other infrastructure upgrades.

It is grappling with corruption, a financial crisis and political deadlock which has left Iraq without a new government months after October elections.

“The climate has also strongly affected the gazelles,” which lack forage in the desert-like region, Jayashi added.

Barren soil

At three other Iraqi reserves further north, the number of rhim gazelles has fallen by 25 per cent in the past three years to 224 animals, according to an agriculture ministry official who asked to remain anonymous.

He blamed the drop at the reserves in Al Madain near Baghdad, and in Diyala and Kirkuk on a “lack of public financing”.

At the Sawa reserve, established in 2007 near the southern city of Samawah, the animals pant under the scorching sun.

The brown and barren earth is dry beyond recovery, and meagre shrubs that offer slight nourishment are dry and tough.

Some gazelles, including youngsters still without horns, nibble hay spread out on the flat ground.

Others take shelter under a metal roof, drinking water from a trough.

Summer hasn’t even begun but temperatures have already hit 50ºC in parts of the country.

The effects of drought have been compounded by dramatic falls in the level of some rivers due to dams upstream and on tributaries in Turkey and Iran.

Desertification affects 39 per cent of Iraqi land, the country’s president has warned.

“Water scarcity negatively affects all our regions. It will lead to reduced fertility of our agricultural lands because of salination,” Saleh said.

He has sent 100 million dinars (over $68,000) in an effort to help save the Sawa reserve’s rhim gazelles, Jayashi said.

But the money came too late for some.

Five more have just died, their carcasses lying together on the brown earth.

TUNIS — Flights were cancelled, public transport ground to a halt and government offices were closed in a nationwide strike by Tunisia's main trade union on Thursday, piling pressure on a president already facing multiple crises.

The powerful UGTT confederation had urged workers across the North African country's vast public sector to strike, halting work at 159 state agencies and public companies to demand concessions on salaries and threatened reforms.

The action appeared to be widely observed. At Tunis airport, dozens of flights were cancelled, while public utilities and post offices were closed.

Around 1,000 strike supporters gathered outside UGTT headquarters in central Tunis, singing the national anthem and waving flags.

In a fiery speech, union chief Noureddine Taboubi claimed the action had been "96.22 per cent" successful, and blamed the government of President Kais Saied for a collapse of salary negotiations.

"This is a stubborn government which sows discord and spreads false information," Taboubi told the demonstrators.

"We won't stop campaigning, no matter the cost, until our demands are met."

'Painful reforms' 

The strike comes as Tunisia prepares for formal talks with the International Monetary Fund on a new bailout plan for an economy overwhelmed by mountainous debt.

Tunisians are also facing soaring prices fuelled by the Ukraine crisis, with inflation hitting 7.8 per cent in May.

The union has demanded a new deal to raise public sector salaries, including retroactively for last year.

Yet, critics say it is ignoring the country’s deep financial woes.

Hatem Bejaoui, a 29-year-old veterinarian in Tunis, said that “whatever strikes happen, at this point they’re useless, because the country is in a really fragile economic situation”.

But the UGTT, a key power centre throughout Tunisia’s modern history, has extra leverage due to the IMF conditioning a bailout deal on the union’s buy-in.

The government has presented a reform plan to the global lender which includes a freeze on the public sector wage bill, some subsidy cuts and a restructuring of state firms.

But the UGTT has warned against “painful reforms” aimed at pleasing the IMF, and has demanded guarantees that publicly owned firms remain state property.

Tunisian economist Fadhel Kaboub said the strike was “the culmination of a collective failure by more than 10 Tunisian governments, the UGTT, the IMF and Tunisia’s international partners” to restructure the economy.

“It will serve as a reminder to the IMF that working people in Tunisia can only sustain so much economic pain,” he said.

‘Better than nothing’ 

While the UGTT insists the strike is not political, it comes as the president faces intense criticism for excluding opposition forces from his “national dialogue” — part of a push to overhaul the Tunisian state and consolidate an ongoing power grab.

Saied sacked the government and suspended an elected parliament in July last year, moves decried by some opponents as a coup in the only democracy to emerge from the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011.

But the UGTT, a co-laureate of the Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts in a previous national dialogue following Tunisia’s 2011 revolution, initially backed Saied’s moves.

It has since become increasingly critical as the president has extended his power grab, including by dissolving the legislature in March and sacking scores of judges by decree earlier this month.

Tunis resident Basma Rabeh, 50, said the union should have responded more immediately to Saied’s power grab almost a year ago.

“Today’s strike is too late, but it’s better than nothing,” she said.

The UGTT was invited to take part in Saied’s national dialogue, but refused on the grounds that key political forces were not, and that the process aimed to push through “conclusions decided unilaterally in advance”.

“We don’t believe this dialogue can help Tunisia resolve its crises,” Taboubi said.

Economist Kaboub, who teaches at Denison University in the United States, said a decade of democratisation had failed to deliver key economic reforms.

“It’s time for the IMF, the Tunisian government and the UGTT to formulate an alternative vision for economic development in Tunisia,” he said.