TUNISIA is building a wall, part-rampart and ditch and part-fence along its entire 460-km frontier with its eastern neighbor Libya. This major undertaking, due to be finished by the end of the year, is designed to stop the flow of terrorists to and from training camps in Libya. The “Wall” as it is being called inaccurately in the Tunisian press comes in the wake of the murder of 38 tourists and a Tunisian at the beach resort of Sousse at the end of last month. The government has also declared a temporary state of emergency, which many expect will be extended as Tunisia squares up to the terrorist threat. Critics of the government of the 89-year-old president Beji Caid Essebsi and his Prime Minister Habib Essid say however that the powers now being re-conferred on Tunisians security forces are alarmingly similar to those used by the Ben Ali dictatorship. The government certainly does have some awkward questions to answer. The first attack by Daesh (so-called IS) terrorists was in March when two gunmen ran amok in the Bardo Museum in the capital Tunis killing 22 people, most of them tourists. The museum is close to the parliament building, which on the day of the massacre happened to be debating anti-terrorist legislation. It might have been expected that the state of alert and the response by nearby police and security to the attack by the pair of terrorists, both of who were wearing police uniforms, might have been quicker. More remarkably, the level of vigilance in Tunis itself actually seemed to go down after Bardo. The once-numerous plainclothes policemen, with radio antennae sticking out of their pockets, who had been highly visible on most downtown streets and avenues, were no longer in evidence. They may of course have been deployed elsewhere. But if so, it was not to the soft terrorist targets of Tunisia's world-famous beach resorts. It was fully 35 minutes before any police made it to the Sousse hotel where a lone Libyan-trained terrorist was carrying out his butchery. The frontier “wall” is also curious. It will not continue along the border with Algeria. Libya's own Algerian border is notoriously porous. Thus the Tunisian barrier can easily be bypassed by terrorists. Moreover, as demonstrated by Sunday's gunfight in which five suspected terrorists were killed in Gafsa, a Tunisian region bordering Algeria, it is not just Libya from which terrorists are coming. But if the Tunisian government is behaving oddly, the British government is acting more oddly still. Last week it told all British tourists to get out of Tunisia immediately. Travel firms laid on planes to take their customers home, warning that those who insisted on completing their vacations were on their own and would have to buy new air tickets home. In the wake of the Sousse murders, some 40 percent of Brits at Tunisian resorts, insisted on finishing their holidays. UK Premier David Cameron said there was clear evidence that another attack was being planned. If this is true, then the British should be working with the Tunisians to counter it. Instead London appears to have panicked fearing a backlash if more holidaymakers were murdered. This response is utterly craven and completely wrong because it both damages Tunisia's fragile economy and also presents the terrorists with a victory. “Terror” is their stock in trade and the British government just bought it.
