Tunis beaches highly polluted

EZZAHRA, Tunisia: Tahar Jaouebi looks out from a beach south of Tunis remembering the 1990s, when the water was still clean enough to bathe in.

"Now I can’t swim any more, and neither can my son," he says. Jaouebi, 47, is one of hundreds of protesters who formed a human chain over the weekend to highlight the pollution plaguing the coast south of the Tunisian capital.

Maryam Chergui, a 37-year-old resident of the neighbourhood of Ezzahra, bemoans the state of the water nearby. "It’s very dirty," she says. "There are dead shells and dead fish. We’re not taking care of our environmental wealth."

Organisers say some 3,500 people joined the protest along the beaches between Rades and Borj Cedria, a 13-kilometre (eight-mile) stretch of sheltered coastline home to around 300,000 people.