MONCEF Marzouki, the head of the Congress for the Republic (CPR), a veteran human rights activist was selected as Tunisia's new interim president on Tuesday. Marzouki will take on the role for the next year while a new constitution is being written. The agreement was reached between Al-Nahda, the Islamist Party that won 89 of 217 seats in the new assembly in the 23 October elections and the CPR, which came second with 29 seats. Marzouki, a physician who headed the Tunisian League of Human Rights, was once jailed for four months in 1994 for attempting to run for president against long-serving dictator Zein Al-Abidine bin Ali, who was overthrown by a popular uprising in January. He studied medicine at the University of Strasbourg and returned to Tunisia in 1979, when he founded the Centre for Community Medicine in Sousse and the African Network for Prevention of Child Abuse. Earlier, he had travelled to India to study Mahatma Gandhi's peaceful resistance, and to South Africa to study its transition from Apartheid. When the government cracked down violently on the Al-Nahda Movement in 1991, Marzouki spoke out and later was a founding member of the National Committee for the Defence of Prisoners of Conscience, but he resigned after it was taken over by supporters of the government and was later arrested. He subsequently founded the National Committee for Liberties, and in 2001, the CPR which was banned in 2002, but Marzouki moved to France and continued running it. Mustafa Ben Jaafar, the leader of the leftist Ettakatol (Democratic Forum for Labour and Liberties), which finished third, has been offered the position of president of the new assembly. The assembly, which will write the fledgling democracy's new constitution and appoint an interim government, will convene on 22 November.
