Moncef Marzouki

Israel deported Tunisian ex-president Moncef Marzouki and European parliament member Ana Miranda on June 30 after they took part in a flotilla seeking to defy its Gaza blockade, an official said.

Israel's navy boarded and took over an activist vessel seeking to break its Gaza blockade and was escorting it to port on June 29 in an operation that did not use force, the military said.

Tunisia's new leader Beji Caid Essebsi said the country has turned the page on dictatorship after a presidential vote that European observers hailed on Tuesday as "credible and transparent".
      
Essebsi, an 88-year-old veteran of previous Tunisian regimes, was on Monday declared the winner of a vote seen as a landmark for the birthplace of the Arab Spring.
      

Anti-Islamist politician Beji Caid Essebsi won Tunisia's presidential election with 55.68 percent of the vote, beating incumbent Moncef Marzouki, the electoral commission said on Dec. 12.
      
Essebsi, an 88-year-old veteran of previous governments, becomes the first president freely elected by Tunisians since independence from France in 1956.
      

The head of Tunisia's anti-Islamist Nidaa Tounes party, Beji Caid Essebsi, was on Nov. 25 leading the country's first presidential election since a 2011 revolution that sparked the Arab Spring uprisings.
      
But with no outright winner from Sunday's poll, in which Essebsi took a lead of six percentage points over incumbent Moncef Marzouki, a runoff will be held in December.

Tunisians went to the polls on Nov. 23 to vote for their first directly elected president, in the final step to be taken to full democracy after the 2011 revolution that ended the rule of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.

A Tunisian diplomat and an embassy worker kidnapped earlier this year by unknown gunmen in Libya arrived at dawn on Monday at a Tunis airport after being freed on June 29.
   

President visits Serbian military cemeteries in Tunisia

TUNISIA -- President Tomislav Nikolić laid a wreath on Thursday at Tunisia's Museum of the National Memory in Sijoumi.

He was greeted thre by a guard of honor and Tunisian Minister of Defense Ghazi Jeribi.

TUNIS - There are no open issues between Serbia and Tunisia, but efforts must be made to ensure that the economic cooperation of the two countries is on par with their excellent political relations, which is now not the case, Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic said on Wednesday.