TUNIS: Secular lawmakers have submitted a motion of no-confidence against Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki after he criticised “secular extremists”, a lawmaker said yesterday.
Tension has been growing between Islamists and secularists since the Islamist Ennahda Movement won an election after an uprising in 2011 that toppled the autocratic Zine Al Abidine Ben Ali and sparked the Arab Spring.
Marzouki, himself a secularist elected president under a power-sharing deal with Ennahda, told Al Jazeera television last month that if “secular extremists” came to power, they could spark a bloody revolution in which they would be hanged.
The remarks, just weeks after the assassination of secular politician Chokri Belaid brought thousands onto the streets, sparked outrage among the secular opposition, which said Marzouki was no longer president of all Tunisians.
Marzouki has also criticised hardline Islamists, and a presidential spokesman said his comments had been taken out of context as part of a campaign against him.
Member of parliament Ali Ben Chrifa told the state news agency that the motion had been submitted with 77 signatures.
By law, the vote must be held within two weeks. The motion is unlikely to pass, because Marzouki can count on majority support from Ennahda and two non-religious parties among the 217 members of parliament, but a sizeable showing could embarrass the government.
Turkey to give Egypt $1bn loan soon
ANKARA: Turkey will transfer the remaining $1bn of a $2bn budget support package agreed for Egypt last year within the next two months, Turkish economy officials and banking sources said yesterday.
The loan will be a shot in the arm for Egypt, which on Tuesday failed to agree with the International Monetary Fund on a $4.8bn loan that could ease a worsening economic crisis in the Arab world’s most populous nation.
Under the Turkish agreement, announced last September during a visit to Ankara by Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi, Turkey’s Treasury loaned Egypt the first $1bn.
Turkey’s Eximbank will now supply the second tranche in the next two months, the sources said, although the interest rate on the loan had not yet been settled.
“The Egyptians are completing the deal’s conditions at the moment. We expect them to get it done by the end of the month and the deal to come into effect afterwards,” one of the sources close to the transaction said.
“The deal will include capital goods and pre-determined projects. Egypt will soon have a short list of these projects.”
Iraq bombings kill
four ahead of polls
BAGHDAD: Bombings in Iraq, including one against an MP’s convoy, killed four people and wounded 18 yesterday, just days ahead of the country’s first elections since US troops departed, officials said.
In the deadliest attack, a car bomb exploded near an army checkpoint in Abu Ghraib, west of the capital, killing two people and wounding six, while another car bomb in the Jihad area of south Baghdad killed at least one person and wounded six, an interior ministry official and medical sources said.
And in Ramadi, a magnetic “sticky bomb” killed a secondary school teacher, a police officer and a doctor said.
A roadside bomb targeted a convoy carrying an MP from the secular, Sunni-backed Iraqiya bloc in Madain, south of Baghdad, wounding four people but not the politician, while a “sticky bomb” wounded two people in Mansur in west Baghdad, the ministry official and medical sources said.
Agencies
