Tunisia: 4 police killed in attack on minister’s home

By African Bulletin on May 29, 2014

Tension was rising once more on Wednesday in Tunisia after fundamentalist fighters killed four policemen during an attack on the interior minister’s home in the southwestern part of the country. Over three years after the ousting of President Zine El-Abidin Ben Ali, local civil society is meanwhile trying to join forces for the sake of the nation’s equilibrium, wedged between Islamic parties and representatives from the former regime that never left the local political scene. The armed attack on the home of Interior Minister Loufti Ben Jeddou occurred around midnight on the lower reaches of Mount Chambi, a stronghold of armed fundamentalists surrounded by security forces. Though no armed violence had been reported since February, numerous clashes between security forces and militants have occurred since the beginning of 2013. Two political assassinations have been carried out and at least twenty police officers have been killed. ”They will hurt us but they won’t win. We will be the ones to win,” Tunisia’s prime minister Mehdi Jomaa told the press.

The president has called a national day of mourning. Amid the growing tension, an international conference on freedom of expression in the Arab world was inaugurated on Wednesday in Tunis, sponsored by the Italian NGO Un Ponte Per as part of a project co-financed by the European Union. In his opening remarks at the event, Messaoud Romdhani – a trailblazer in Tunisian activism during the darkest years of the previous regime – asked all attendees to observe a minute of silence in honor of the four policemen killed in the attack. In his speech, Romdhani underscored that amid a ”suffocating economic crisis” and ”steadily deteriorating security conditions”, Tunisia is seeing growth in ”populist forces and those aiming to limit citizens’ freedoms”: ”Islamists, represented by the Ennahdha party and Salafis”, and ”numerous members of Ben Ali’s system of power”, who are now trying to create an image of themselves as leaders of new secular parties.

”Following Ben Ali’s ouster,” Romdhani continued, ”the experience of Islamic forces was not seen as positive by wide sections of Tunisian society, both on the political and economic level. This fostered a return of representatives of the former regime, who use slogans focusing on a restoration of security and opposition to Islamic fundamentalism.” According to Romdhani, promoter of the 2013 World Social Forum and the upcoming 2015 edition, ”after the revolution in January 2011, the Islamists in the government got involved in the transitional justice process, which must instead be led by civil society – and which has not actually begun yet. This prevented a crucial issue for the growth of the country and society from being dealt with.” Moreover, some of ”Ben Ali’s former ministers are now political leaders, as are members of the ousted regime’s secret services and Old Guard, who were found innocent of crimes committed between 2010 and 2011 or who have never stood trial due to a continuing lack of an independent judiciary.”

Featured