TUNIS, Tunisia – Tunisia swore in a new interim president Saturday — the second change of power in this North African nation in less than 24 hours — and grappled with looting, deadly prison riots and chaos in the streets after protests forced the country's leader to flee.
Amid the political instability, looters emptied shops and torched the capital's main train station, and soldiers traded fire with assailants in front of the Interior Ministry in Tunis. At least 42 people were killed Saturday in a prison fire in a resort town and the director of another prison let 1,000 inmates flee after a deadly rebellion.
The interim president — Fouad Mebazaa, the former president of the lower house of parliament — ordered the creation of a unity government that could include the opposition, which had been frozen out and ignored under President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali's 23 years of autocratic rule.
Ben Ali abruptly fled the country Friday for Saudi Arabia following a month of street protests over corruption, a lack of jobs and clampdowns on civil liberties. Yet while the protests were mostly peaceful, the first day after his departure was chaotic — and deadly.
The leadership changes came at a dizzying speed. After Ben Ali left, his longtime ally, Prime Minister Mohammed Ghannouchi, stepped in briefly with a vague assumption of power that left open the possibility that Ben Ali could return. But on Saturday, Constitutional Council President Fethi Abdennadher declared the president's departure permanent and gave lawmaker Mebazaa 60 days in which to organize new elections.
Hours later, Mebazaa was sworn in.
In his first televised address, he said he asked the premier to form a "national unity government in the country's best interests" in which all political parties will be consulted "without exception nor exclusion."
The move was one of reconciliation, but it was not clear how far the 77-year-old Mebazaa, who has been part of Tunisia's ruling class for decades, would go to invite the opposition into the government.
It was also unclear who would emerge as the top political leaders in a post-Ben Ali Tunisia: The autocratic leader has utterly dominated politics for decades, placing his allies in power and sending opponents to jail or into exile.
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