Region

TUNIS — With Tunisia’s health system close to collapse after being overwhelmed by a surge of COVID-19 cases, other countries and even individuals have stepped in to stem the crisis.

European and Gulf nations, Tunisians abroad and ordinary citizens have organised equipment and vaccine donations that are now helping to battle the pandemic.

The small North African nation of 12 million people had been struggling to come up with the necessary vaccine doses even before COVID-19 really began to hit hard.

Now more than three million doses, most of them donated, have been sent, with the number set to reach five million by mid-August, the health ministry says.

China and the United Arab Emirates have each supplied 500,000 doses, while neighbouring Algeria gave 250,000.

Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne at the French ministry for Europe and foreign affairs told AFP that France this week alone sent more than one million AstraZeneca and Janssen doses, enough to vaccinate “a tenth of the adult population”.

But either because of sluggish diplomatic efforts by Tunisia or the global shortage of doses, vaccines have arrived late.

Tunisia has received just a sixth of the number of doses promised under the Covaxprogramme, set up to ensure a fairer distribution of COVID-19 vaccines to lower-income countries.

It now has one of the world’s highest coronavirus death rates.

According to an AFP count on Wednesday based on official reports, Tunisia recorded 1.4 daily deaths per 100,000 population over the previous seven days, placing it second-worst globally on this metric after Namibia.

Swamped morgues

Tunisian internet users have shared videos of panicked families unable to find beds for loved ones, of medics worrying about oxygen shortages and of bodies crammed into swamped morgues.

Dr Hechmi Louzir of the Pasteur Institute in Tunis told AFP that donations will mean the vaccination programme can speed up, and thus reduce the spread of the virus.

Tunisia could “achieve our goal of vaccinating about 50 per cent of the population by mid-October”, he said.

Even in pre-COVID ‘normal’ times, Tunisia’s public hospitals suffered from poor management and a lack of resources.

At the beginning of summer, they put out a plea for help — for personal protective equipment and intensive care resources in particular.

Groups including the country’s organisation of young doctors, Tunisian embassies abroad and even private citizens organised fund-raising events.

“The mobilisation of civil society saved Tunisia from a catastrophic scenario,” said gynaecologist Cyrine Chedly, a member of an organisation of young doctors in Kairouan.

The central city was one of the first to be badly hit by the pandemic, with some bodies left lying in rooms next to live patients for up to 24 hours because of a lack of staff to take them to overstretched mortuaries.

“Donations of oxygen concentrators have made it possible to reduce the number of serious cases and deaths” at the city’s main hospital, Chedly said.

 ICU beds 

Ons Jabeur, the celebrated Tunisian tennis player now in Tokyo for her third Olympics, auctioned two racquets and raised $27,000 to help finance an intensive care unit.

Before the pandemic, the country had only 90 intensive care unit (ICU) beds in the public sector: Now, helped by donations, it has 500.

Tunisians arriving from abroad are allowed to import one oxygen concentrator per traveller, free of import duty.

Doctors post pictures of these items and other equipment on social media, to show donors they are being put to use.

But providing more sophisticated 

healthcare equipment can be stymied by coordination problems and bureaucratic obstacles.

One field hospital supplied in May by the United States was not up and running until July, and another donated by Qatar is still not operating because of a lack of oxygen.

Of three oxygen generators, each capable of feeding 300 beds continuously and supplied by France at the beginning of June, just one is fully functional.

In the meantime, both France and Italy have sent containers loaded with oxygen cylinders to help make up the shortfall.

Arab countries including Algeria, Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have all sent medical equipment.

Mauritania even offered to send 15 tonnes of fish.

Donations alone will not end a crisis spurred by poor observance of preventative measures by the public and by political power plays, which have seen a succession of health ministers in the last year or so.

“We need public awareness, sound management by the authorities of the health crisis and political stability,” said Chedly in Kairouan.

BEIRUT — Lebanon's deepening economic crisis has piled pressure on hospitals, leaving them ill-equipped to face any new wave of the coronavirus, a top hospital director has warned.

Already struggling with shortages of medicine and an exodus of staff abroad, the country's health facilities are now also having to contend with almost round-the-clock power cuts.

"All hospitals... are now less prepared than they were during the wave at the start of the year," said Firas Abiad, the manager of the largest public hospital in the country battling COVID.

"Medical and nursing staff have left, medicine that was once available has run out," and ever lengthening cuts to the mains power supply have left hospitals under constant threat.

Even the Rafik Hariri University Hospital (RHUH) he runs has been struggling to cope.

"We only get two to three hours of mains electricity, and for the rest of the time it's up to the generators," Abiad said.

On top of worrying they could burn out, "we have the huge burden of having to constantly be on the hunt for fuel oil".

Huge demand for the increasingly scarce commodity has driven up prices by more than 80 per cent since June 17.

Even at the prestigious RHUH, some medicines are routinely running out.

"Some days it's antibiotics, others it's anaesthetics," the hospital chief said.

Sometimes "we're forced to ask the patients' relatives to go and try to find the medicine from another hospital or a pharmacy".

After dropping over the spring, COVID cases are on the rise again as Lebanese expats flood home for the summer, and many gather with family and friends.

On Thursday alone, 98 people tested positive for COVID on arrival at Beirut airport, the health ministry said.

“It could be catastrophic if this rise in coronavirus numbers leads to a spike like the one we saw at the start of the year,” Abiad said.

Abiad said the solution was better social distancing and more inoculations in a country where just 15 per cent of the population have been fully vaccinated.

On Thursday, private hospitals warned of a looming “catastrophe” as some were only hours away from running out of fuel to power their generators.

The following day, pharmacies said they were going on indefinite strike over persistent shortages of medicines, just weeks after drug importers said the central bank owed millions of dollars to their suppliers abroad.

Pharmacies said importers are refusing to make deliveries as they are unhappy with the new prices for drugs that are no longer subsidised, and cannot get lines of credit for those that still are.

Around 1,300 doctors have emigrated since the economic crisis began in 2019, with the numbers picking up over the past 12 months, the doctors’ syndicate says.

Since February last year, Lebanon has recorded 553,615 cases of COVID-19, 7,890 of them fatal, according to health ministry figures.

SOUSSE,  Tunisia — In Tunisia’s Mediterranean resort of Sousse, exhausted medics struggle to stem surging coronavirus deaths, desperately monitoring oxygen supplies beside patients’ beds, while on the beach tourists relax in the sun.

Tunisia has been overwhelmed by COVID-19 cases, including nearly 18,000 people who have died in a country of around 12 million.

Hospitals have faced acute shortages of oxygen, staff and intensive care beds, and less than a tenth of the population are fully vaccinated.

“When you are told, ‘in three hours, there is no more oxygen’, it is stressful,” said Khaled Ben Jazia, head of intensive care at the hospital in Sousse, southeast of the capital Tunis.

“Two days ago, there was only an hour of oxygen left. Can you imagine the disaster if we ran out? I’ve never been so stressed... we were all with bottles at the bedside of patients just in case.”

The pandemic has hit Tunisia hard, with 1.4 deaths per 100,000 residents per day over the last week, making the country one of the worst globally on this metric, according to AFP data from official sources.

Tunisia has also suffered the biggest absolute number of COVID-19 deaths in North Africa despite its small population.

On Thursday, Paris said a million vaccines would be flown to Tunisia in coming days, and the French navy delivered giant oxygen tanks to boost supplies, adding to oxygen generators already provided.

Exhaustion -

At the hospital, medics waited anxiously for the truck fetching fresh oxygen bottles to return.

“When we heard the siren of the escort accompanying the truck, it was such a relief,” Ben Jazia said.

After more than a year of intense work coping with the pandemic, medical staff is worn out.

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Hichem Mechichi’s announcement that hospital staff would not be able to take any leave sparked anger.

“We are holding up, but the situation is precarious, given the lack of human resources and logistical support,” said Zied Mezgar, head of the emergency department in Sousse hospital.

“The disaster will not come from the influx of patients, but from the exhaustion of caregivers.”

Despite the crisis, the country remains open to visitors and there is no quarantine for people — vaccinated or not — arriving with tour operators.

At the Bellevue Park hotel in Sousse, life at the Mediterranean resort seems to be going on almost as normal.

“I had my two jabs,” said Doris Brecking, a 71-year-old German tourist tanning by the pool.

“In the hospital, there are sick people, but here at the hotel, everything is fine with the health rules... I am not afraid.”

‘Not over at all’ 

France, where many tourists come from, has placed Tunisia on its travel “red list”, but allows people who have been double vaccinated to go there.

“The urge to come back here was too strong,” said French tourist Stephanie Wilmert, a beautician from Luxembourg.

She has been vaccinated, but said she was still cautious.

“We sometimes say, ‘it’s good, it’s over’, but no, it’s not over at all.”

Away from the crisis of the pandemic, Tunisia is trying to support the crisis in tourism, a economic pillar making up around a tenth of GDP.

“We must adapt,” said Nizar Marghli, director of the Bellevue Park hotel, where turnover has been slashed by a third.

JUBA — Jemma Nunu Kumba will become the first woman to preside over the parliament of South Sudan, the world’s youngest nation that only recently marked 10 troubled years of independence.

The secretary general of the ruling Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) “will be the next speaker” of the newly reconstituted assembly, President Salva Kiir said on Friday afternoon.

Born in 1966, Kumba joined SPLM rebels at the start of the 1990s in a civil war that pitted them against Khartoum.

She was active in the party and eventually took part in peace negotiations between the SPLM and the Sudanese government, then led by Omar Al Bashir.

After independence in 2011, she held several official posts, including governor of the Western Equatoria state in the country’s southwest.

But then in 2013, just two years after independence, South Sudan plunged into a civil war that pitted Kiir against his nemesis Riek Machar.

Close to 400,000 people died and 4 million were displaced before a ceasefire was declared in 2018.

Kiir and Machar are now both part of a coalition government.

As part of the 2018 peace deal, parliament was dissolved and then reconstituted in May, with 550 lawmakers instead of the previous 400.

Of these, 332 deputies were chosen by Kiir, 128 by Machar, and 90 others by other signatory parties.

As such, Kumba will preside over an assembly that includes nearly 40 per cent of members of Machar’s party.

The deputy speaker, who has yet to be nominated, will also be from that party.

“It is not going to be business as usual. The current political dispensation calls for diligence from all of us, it calls for unity of purpose,” Kumba said after her nomination.

Kiir called on Kumba and SPLM members to focus on the truce, of which few provisions have been honoured.

“You must be the ambassadors of peace,” he said.

The oil-rich country remains severely underdeveloped and poorly managed.

Despite the peace deal, brutal communal conflicts — often over cattle raiding — continue, with more than 1,000 killed in violence between rival communities in the last six months of 2020.

The country also faces its worst hunger crisis since independence.


BAGHDAD — Iraq was in mourning on Tuesday for at least 36 people killed when a bomb ripped through a crowded Baghdad market in what the Daesh group's terrorists claimed as a suicide attack.

The bloody carnage on Monday evening, one of the deadliest attacks in years in the war-scarred country, killed mostly women and children on the eve of Eid Al Adha, the Muslim festival of sacrifice.

It sparked revulsion and renewed fears about the reach of the Daesh, which lost its last territory in Iraq after a gruelling campaign that ended in late 2017, but retains sleeper cells in remote desert and mountain areas.

The Sunni Muslim extremists claimed on the Telegram messenger service that a Daesh suicide bomber had detonated an explosives belt in the bustling Woheilat market of Baghdad's Shiite district of Sadr City.

In the panic and chaos of the attack, screams of terror and anguish filled the air. When the smoke cleared, human remains lay strewn amid scattered sandals, market produce and the charred debris of stalls.

Iraqi President Barham Salih condemned the "heinous crime of unprecedented cruelty on the eve of Eid", writing on Twitter that the perpetrators "do not allow people to rejoice, even for a moment".

The United Nations Mission in Iraq said the attack showed that "the scourge of terrorism knows no bounds", while the German embassy expressed its "sadness after this senseless and brutal attack".

No official death toll has yet been released by Iraqi authorities, but medical sources told AFP that at least 36 people were killed and about 60 wounded.

'Cowardly attack' 

Prime Minister Mustafa Al Kadhemi said the "cowardly attack illustrates the failure of terrorists to regain a foothold after being defeated by our heroic security forces" and vowed that "terrorism will not go unpunished".

The attack came days before Kadhemi was to meet US President Joe Biden in Washington, and ahead of a scheduled parliamentary election in October.

"This is a clear message that Daesh is still present and is able to strike targets in Baghdad," said Osama Al Saidi, head of the Iraqi Political Science Association.

"Whenever elections approach, terror attacks happen with the aim of sending a political message that those governing are weak."

Deadly attacks were common in Baghdad during the sectarian bloodletting that followed the US-led invasion of 2003, and later on as Daesh swept across much of Iraq.

Iraq declared Daesh  defeated in late 2017 after a fierce three-year campaign and attacks became relatively rare in the capital -- until January this year when a twin suicide bombing claimed by Daesh killed 32 people in a Baghdad market.

The US-led coalition that supported Iraq's campaign against Daesh has significantly drawn down its troop levels over the past year, citing the increased capabilities of Iraqi forces.

The United States, which provides the bulk of the force, has 2,500 troops left in Iraq -- down from 5,200 a year ago. They carry out air strikes, drone surveillance and training of Iraqi forces.

US forces have come under repeated attack from Shiite paramilitary groups, integrated into the Iraq security apparatus, that support neighbouring Iran, the arch enemy of the United States.

'Tired of everything' 

The latest attack sparked condolences from abroad, and recriminations among Iraqi political leaders.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said "the murder of dozens of civilians ... is shocking in its cruelty and cynicism" and urged that the perpetrators "receive the punishment they deserve".

Iran's foreign ministry also condemned the "barbaric act".

At home, parliament speaker Mohamed Halbousi called for "leadership changes among senior security officials who have proven their dereliction of duty".

Lawmaker Adnan Al Zurfi accused commanders of the Falcon Cell counter-terrorism unit of having turned from "intelligence gathering to politics".

Iraqi analyst Jassem Al Moussaoui said the attack highlights "the weakness of the security forces which have not been formed on a professional basis but according to their political loyalties".

Many ordinary Iraqis meanwhile shared their grief, exhaustion and sense of helplessness in a country that has endured decades of war and insurgency, as well as an ongoing deep economic and political crisis.

In a widely shared social media post, comedian Ahmed al-Basheer recalled that only days ago at least 60 people died when a fire tore through a Covid hospital unit in the southern city of Nasiriyah.

"Every day there's a new calamity," he wrote. "We're tired of everything."