Associated Press

TUNIS: A planned rally by Tunisian police to protest the firings of high-ranking officers was swamped by a thousands-strong counter demonstration in the capital Wednesday.

Some 2,000 supporters of Ennahda, the moderate Islamist party that was once heavily repressed and then won elections, demonstrated in front of the Interior Ministry, calling for cleaning up the security forces.
A year ago, demonstrators overcame Tunisia’s once-feared security apparatus in a monthlong popular uprising that killed almost 300 people and ousted the country’s dictator.

The new interior minister, from Ennahda, has fired a number of high ranking officers, including Col. Moncef Laajimi, head of the rapid response units that once clashed with protesters. Other top officials also have been put on trial.
Separately Wednesday, a middle-aged woman became the fourth case of self-immolation in the last week, dying Wednesday after setting herself on fire in a Tunisian industrial city, said a local official.

Malek Mihoub, the director of civil protection in the city of Sfax, said the 46-year-old woman had a history of mental illness, had just escaped from the local hospital’s psychiatric ward, and had previously tried to kill herself.

He added that she had set herself on fire with the aide of a flammable substance and a canister of cooking gas. Her suicide followed that of a father of three who set himself on fire in Gafsa Thursday and died five days later. Two others, in the towns of Bizerte and Siliana, survived.

These acts of desperation, often protesting the inability to find work, come as the Jan. 14 anniversary of the 2011 overthrow of Tunisia’s dictatorship nears.
That uprising began after a young vegetable seller died after setting himself on fire to protest government injustice.