Terrorism and tourism: the two faces of Tunisia

Strict secularism and a Western-orientated economy were the key policies until the revolution in January, 2011. The regime attracted tourism but also subsidiaries of many European firms to earn hard currency. The road south behind the coast was dotted with plants either making components for the auto industry in France and Italy or cheap clothes for European chains.

Before the revolution, the regime kept down labour costs which was the spur to the protests in 2011. Young, often unemployed Tunisians used their mobile phones to mobilise against the regime in 2011. Their access to the global culture of the internet informed their discontent. Peering at the unaffordable fruits of the secular West on their phones, or through the fences of Western beach resorts, a kind of love-hate for the West grew.

By chance, a few years ago I travelled with a group of young Tunisian men to Turkey. They were pioneers of the wave of jihadis who have recently gone to fight in Syria and Iraq. But they seemed like any group of twenty-somethings, their mobile phones always at hand. As much as Islamic fundamentalism, a search for adventure had lured them across the Mediterranean to a foreign war.

Maybe now a few are returning to wreak havoc at home. As we have seen with our own would-be jihadis, a fascination with Western pop culture, online porn and experimenting with drugs is no obstacle to radicalisation. Indeed, it seems more a part of the evolution of the modern Muslim terrorist than a traditionally devout upbringing.

These born-again Muslims, who are turning against their Western idols, are exactly the type to go over the edge into violence against the place they had once dreamed of joining. Jobless young men in dusty towns are preyed on by preachers offering a gateway to paradise and a way to assert themselves against the West and its local allies. The fundamentalists consider poverty to be their best recruiting-sergeant; the recession, which hit post revolution when the europeans left, is radicalising young Tunisians.

Supporters of the Islamist Ennahda Party march prior to elections (FADEL SENNA/AFP)

This resentment is the well of the country’s dangerous terrorist sub-culture and from it they draw justification for those attacks on Western tourists. But Tunisia’s terrorists are vulnerable. They lack natural hideouts and so necessity makes them urban guerrillas. “Safe houses” in the big cities provide their bases and as frequent shoot-outs with the police have shown, they are difficult to keep secret. About 400 suspected terrorists were in custody before the Bardo attack. Perhaps, in their desperation, the violent militants want to push the government into a brutal crackdown. They would then be able to pose as martyrs of a secularist dictatorship, rather than criminals hunted by a democracy’s police.

President Essebsi has promised to be “merciless”, but he needs to be smart too. He got himself elected last year by reassuring Tunisians that he represented the best of the secularist past and would shepherd them to a secure future linked to the West. It would serve him and his country well if he uses this to their advantage. Keeping people and tourists safe must be a vital priority for the Tunisian government, but the key weapon against Islamic terrorism is the disgust felt by ordinary Tunisians for the murderers of innocent visitors and the economic havoc it visits on their own prospects. The terrorists are more vulnerable to that than any security measures.

Oxford historian, Mark Almond, is preparing a study of “The Crisis of Secularism in Tunisia and Turkey”.

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