Tunisian President Beji Caid Essebsi on Saturday declared a state of emergency following a beach massacre, claimed by extremists, that he said had left Tunisia facing a “special type of war.”
In another firm response to the June 26 attack claimed by the Islamic State group, formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, that killed 38 foreign tourists, several officials were sacked, including the governor of the Sousse region where the attack took place.
The North African state, which has seen an exodus of tourists, has admitted its security services were unprepared for the seaside attack in Port el-Kantaoui and that police were too slow to respond.
Photo: EPA
In a televised address to the nation, Essebsi said the state of emergency, effective from Saturday for a 30-day period, was decided on after consultations with the Tunisian parliament’s speaker and Tunisian Prime Minister Habib Essid.
The measure was adopted because of “the exceptional situation, which the country is going through after the latest terrorist attack, and the persistent threats, which place the country in a special type of war,” he said.
A state of emergency, granting special powers to the police and army, was in force for three years up until March last year, following longtime secular former Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s ouster in a 2011 revolution.
Photo: AFP
Apart from allowing the barring of strikes, the measure allows authorities to carry out raids on homes at any time of the day and to keep tabs on the media.
Independent political analyst Selim Kharrat questioned the timing of Essebsi’s announcement, coming eight days after the beach attack, and warned that a state of emergency “could become an excellent tool of repression.”
An aide to Essid on Saturday said that several officials, including the Sousse governor, and those from the assailant’s home town and where he studied, as well as police officers, had been sacked.
“Just as there have been security failures, there have also been political failures,” Essid’s communications adviser Dhafer Neji told reporters.
The beach shooting was the second such rampage in three months, after another extremist attack at the National Bardo Museum in Tunis on March 18 that killed 21 tourists and a policeman.
Tunisia had already stepped up security after the museum attack and announced, in the wake of the beach killings, that it would deploy armed guards on beaches and close 80 mosques suspected of fanning Muslim extremism.
On Friday, Essid said that police had taken too long to respond to the beach attack.
“The time of the reaction — this is the problem,” Essid told the BBC in an interview.
Police had been “blocked everywhere,” he added.
Tourists fled in horror as a Tunisian, identified as 23-year-old Seifeddine Rezgui, pulled a Kalashnikov assault rifle from inside a furled beach umbrella and went on a shooting spree outside a five-star hotel.
British tourists accounted for 30 of those killed, along with three Irish nationals, two Germans, one Belgian, one Portuguese and a Russian, before the assailant was shot dead.
British Prime Minister David Cameron announced a permanent memorial would be built for the victims, hours after the coffins carrying the final five bodies of those killed arrived back in the country.
On Thursday, Tunisia announced it had arrested eight people, including a woman, “with direct links” to the attack.
The authorities said Rezgui received weapons training from extremists in Libya, traveling to the chaos-wracked country at the same time as the two young Tunisians behind the Bardo attack.
Disillusionment and social exclusion, as well as economic woes, have fueled radicalism among youths in Tunisia.
About 3,000 Tunisians have gone to Iraq, Syria and Libya to join militant ranks.
The extremist attacks have dealt a heavy blow to the tourism industry, which contributes between 7 percent and 8 percent of Tunisia’s GDP.
The sector accounts for 400,000 jobs, directly and indirectly, and is a key source of foreign revenue for a country where the local currency, the dinar, is non-convertible.
The economic impact of the beach bloodbath, on top of the upheaval following the overthrow of Ben Ali, is likely to exceed half a billion US dollars this year, according to Tunisian Minister of Tourism and Handicrafts Selma Elloumi Rekik.
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