Fear of Tunisia’s democracy led Isis to launch an attack on its tourist economy

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/22/tunisia-terror-attack-tourists

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A Humvee sits incongruously amid the marble columns of the ruined city of Carthage on the outskirts of Tunis, deployed to reassure visitors after last week’s Bardo museum attack. But since the terrorist killing of 21 people, 18 of whom were tourists, there have been almost no visitors. And staff fear it may stay that way.

“We hope they will come back; we cannot know yet if the Bardo events will affect the visitors,” said Mohammed Ghadab, who has been a guide there for 43 years. “We will only know next Wednesday.”

Wednesday is the day buses depart from the cruise ships docked in the port below, making a circuit that includes stopoffs at markets, Carthage and the Bardo museum.

Last week’s buses drove into tragedy, when two gunmen opened fire, spraying the buses with bullets, then slaughtering more inside the museum itself. The fear is that the greatest casualty of all will be the tourist industry itself, one of the few earners in a troubled economy. One in 10 Tunisians works in tourism, and last year 424,000 Britons visited. Now staff at Carthage, Tunisia’s most famous attraction, wonder how many will return.

“British visitors are our friends; we want to assure them everything is fine,” said Ghadab, standing in the empty ruins looking down on the grey Mediterranean. “We hope they will come again.”

So far, the indication is the opposite. The majority of the dead and wounded in the attack came from the cruise ships Costa Fascinosa and MSC Splendida – both quickly weighed anchor, their companies announcing that they would not return. The Foreign Office has issued travel advice warning Britons of a “high threat from terrorism”.

The blow is all the greater because Tunisia’s tourism industry had just been getting back on its feet after the trauma of the 2011 Arab Spring that saw the overthrow of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.

With visitor numbers last year close to the pre-revolution level of seven million, officials hoped to add festivals and cultural attractions to the lure of the beaches. National Geographic Traveller labelled Tunis one of its 20 world destinations for 2015. Now all of that is in jeopardy. “The pillar of our economy is tourism,” said journalist Safa Ben Said, the editor of Tunisia Live. “It is a fragile sector; if anything happens it could be damaged.”

The immediate reaction of the government has been to deploy troops on the streets while police sweep up terrorist suspects. But more security, such as the Humvee and a squad of soldiers at Carthage, is no real solution because tourists are risk-averse. The sight of resorts ringed with troops is more likely to deter visitors than encourage them.

For all its apparent madness, the Bardo attack seems driven by an icy logic: that the leaders they want to depose are too well protected to be easily targeted. Far better to aim for the soft underbelly of a state, in this case the economy.

“A jihadist explained the policy to me. It was very basic, to target the economy, to create chaos,” said David Thompson, one of France’s leading terrorist experts. “What is for sure is this attack will have extreme consequences for tourism.”

The same tactics were used by Islamists in the Egyptian resort of Luxor in 1997, when 58 foreigners were slaughtered. The extremists achieved their aim, wrecking the tourist industry and fomenting unrest.

The loss of visitors and the hard currency tourists bring to Tunisia may see an already moribund economy sink lower, eroding faith in democracy itself. “We have freedom, but people haven’t felt any change in their daily life,” says Ben Said. “What democracy has brought us is a bad economy and now terrorism.”

Meanwhile, growing numbers of young Tunisians are leaving to join Islamic State in Syria, Iraq and Libya, radicalised by a sense of hopelessness that endures in a country with too many young men and not enough jobs.

Yassine al-Abidi, one of the two Bardo attackers, was himself employed in the tourist industry. Last Wednesday he arrived for work at his Tunis agency, then left to spread death and carnage among the people his agency served.

More than 3,000 Tunisians have flocked to Isis abroad. “In Tunisia the radicals cannot expand; they are pushed to the margins,” said Houeida Anouar of Huffington Post Maghreb.

Isis claimed responsibility for Wednesday’s attack, promising more violence, but the organisation has seen no mass outpouring of support. For Isis it may be enough to derail Tunisia’s democracy. While war and upheaval have hit fellow Arab Spring states – Egypt, Libya, Syria and Yemen – Tunisia has held a succession of trouble-free elections. As the world’s only Arab democracy, it may pose an existential threat to Isis greater even than coalition bombing, by showing that there is a path to peace through the ballot box.

The reaction of ordinary Tunisians has been to take to the streets with protests and candle-lit vigils across the capital. Yesterday saw a mass at St Vincent de Paul, the capital’s cathedral, a reminder that Christians and Jews coexist with the Muslim majority.

“You saw what happened today at the cathedral, this is the proof of our unity,” said Carthage shopkeeper Mohamed Ajaal, standing in his empty shop that stocks guidebooks, postcards and lumps of sand-blasted rock from the Sahara.

Carthage was a civilisation that blossomed centuries before Christ, and was lauded for its democratic virtues by Aristotle. Since its fall, crushed by Roman invasion, democracy vanished from Tunisia until it returned in 2011, only now to be threatened by an enemy within. “Terrorism hits all the countries of the world, we saw it in France, in the US, in Morocco, and they all survived,” says tour guide Najib Tabouri. “We can survive it, too.”