Tunisia hotel shooting

Vast stretches of sand were empty of people along the normally packed beaches of Sousse on Saturday. There were still a few tourists around; they had taken the entirely correct view that the place was safer now than it has ever been in recent times, having a heavy security presence in the wake of Friday’s massacre.
But even these hardy visitors said they would be gone as soon as their holiday finishes, and the gloomy hotel and restaurant owners do not expect a new wave of custom to follow this summer, or indeed anything like the same numbers for the next season either.
It is perhaps surprising that there were so many Western tourists around for the dreadful slaughter. They obviously had not thought that the attack at the Bardo Museum in Tunis three months ago, in which 20 foreigners died, meant that they, too, were potential targets. Or perhaps they simply decided to come despite the risks involved.
The front of the Marhaba hotel (Getty)
The fact is that Islamist extremists have very specific targets in Tunisia. The killer, Seifeddine Rezgui, was extraordinarily careful in his choice of victims, picking on obvious foreigners, deliberately sparing locals when he could, urging them to get out of the way. This is not seen as visceral hatred of kafirs (unbelievers) and altruism towards fellow Muslims, but part of a deliberate plan to destroy the tourist industry, the biggest revenue earners and the biggest source of employment, in the country.
Tunisia has not suffered over much from the arbitrary massacres of suicide bombs. The internal targets have been civic society figures, the security forces and politicians. The aim, it is felt, is to undermine fatally the structures which have made the country, arguably, the only one of the Arab Spring with a fledgling democracy and an election in which the main Islamist party, Enhada, was edged out of power.