The Jihadis are Coming Home: A Heavy Burden for Everyone

What should a small country with limited means like Tunisia do if and when more than 6,000 determined jihadists return from Syria? Should they be welcomed to their native land or should they be stripped of their citizenship? Should they go to jail upon arrival? The set of questions I pose here haunts both the government and the people of Tunisia who do not want their country to become a breeding ground for terrorism. After all, it was the made in Tunisia terrorism that was at the root of the Nice blood bath last year and indeed the Berlin carnage this year. Both radicalized men came from Tunisia: Mohammed Bouhlel and Anis Amri. The sun seems to have gone down on Tunisie la Douce. Its people, once known for their gentleness, are branded as terrorists.
After many years of civil war in Syria but also in Iraq, many so-called “soldiers of Islam” would like to return to Tunisia. Many of them are married to more than one woman and have had many children whom they want to live in a safe place where they can be at peace. The government has to statue over their cases because it fears a backlash from the people of Tunisia who want to keep them at bay. It is an enormous challenge for the country.
The people of Tunisia also fear civil unrest at home for they still have in memory what happened to neighboring Algeria in 1990s when Algerian fighters returned home from Afghanistan. They recall the bloody civil war which cost that country more than 400,000 lives, not to mention the one million Algerians who left their homeland to settle elsewhere. The death of my friend Tahar Djaout, a brilliant poet in the tradition of García Lorca, gunned down in May 1993 in the heart of Algiers, remains an open wound even today.
Many people in Tunisia think that the International Court of Justice in The Hague should take care of the matter (i.e.) try all those who left Tunisia after the advent of the 2011-Revolution to fight in Syria. But the question remains: What about the very people who were governing Tunisia at the time, shouldn’t they also be triedl? I am thinking of the quartet: the then Prime Minister Hamadi Jbali, Minister of the Interior Ali Larayd, Cheik Rached Ghannouchi, and President Moncef Marzouki. All four facilitated the exit of so many young men and women drunk with Jihadism to set off for Syria. The recent trial of the still pro-active Imed Dghij (from the suburbs of Tunis) reminds all of us of the existential threat that those people pose for a country like Tunisia; a country struggling to come to grips with the reality on the ground: unemployment, desperation, corruption, religiosity, marginalization, poverty—the perfect brew for social unrest. One can only surmise that the decision to let the Jihadis go home is recipe for disaster insofar as the country has neither the means nor the time to deal with the matter. It is busy trying hard to take care of the wounds of the past—unemployment among them. That they should go back to the country of their birth, be tried according to the new constitution, and if found guilty, go to jail is a claim many Tunisians oppose vehemently. Those who argue that they must face justice in the Netherlands make a good point insofar as they are a threat not only to Tunisia but to the whole world as well and only a capable court like the International Court of Justice at The Hague is able to see to a matter of this importance.
The times have indeed changed, haven’t they! Half a century ago, young people leaned toward the Left because they saw in it a measure of hope: social justice, equal sharing of wealth, and a certain utopia for a better life for all. It was an idealistic view of the world. Today, young people, from the Islamic world in particular, are filled with hatred. Their sole aim is to kill, maim, or blow themselves up in the middle of crowds of innocent people. Their intention is vengeful in that they see themselves as the guardians of a banner that says: “We Kill in the Name of Islam”; a beleaguered religion they are bent on safeguarding from Western incursion by any means.

In Praise of Three Spotted Hyenas
A Novel
(Part Three)

Of the three spotted hyenas, Allāt is known to copulate with her dogs. She owns two lap dogs she takes with her everywhere she goes so that she can breast-feed them and they, in return, are able to lick her, if you know what I mean! Reputed to be both a coiter and a masturbator, Allāt stands for what Jean-Paul Sartre aptly called “une . . . femme [qui] . . . sait qu’elle doit être dominée,” not by humans of course but by her lap dogs. She tickles all notions of lust and depravity, teases all ideas of bestiality and wickedness out of both people and animals, dogs in particular. Poor creatures! Because they electrify her nipples and other moist organs, her lap dogs are always subjected to the “micro-physics of [female] . . . power/knowledge/pleasure.” She particularly enjoys the mad fluttering of their rough tongues that once, twice, thrice, wander over the geography of her repugnant milky body. It is reported that they give her the sensation that she is being gored in the center of her precious moist object of desire which keeps them warm during cold nights. Although Allāt appears to be content, in this God’s skewed invention lurks all shadows of perversion and bizarre caprices, for in the absence of her dogs, she fantasizes incessantly to stir her insatiable desire in the midst of her nocturnal labors. It is fair to say that she wears all her vices with poise.
Al-Uzzā, on the other hand, has a face that dilates like an anus in anticipation of alvine fæces, getting ready to repel excrements, whereupon it would shut itself up tight and pout, with its thousand and one little puckers-like words, to impress her interlocutors. She always fails to do so, and when she does succeed, she would break down crying to arouse sympathy. Her scheme has fooled many people, including the newly-arrived grey wolf. She also has a mind that encompasses a certain quantity of filth which sticks to the walls of her soul. Physically, she looks like an androgynous village idiot with a man’s cock and a woman’s flat tits! When she laughs, which she seldom does, her cheeks grow hard and erect, as if an invisible muzzle were sucking on them, and the muscle of her forehead becomes tense as though she were an amateur boxer ready to punch her opponent. She always harbors dirty, scabrous thoughts: promiscuity among them. Her body smells like a rotting rat in the vicinity. She likes to fornicate, and she would say so in public with a wonderful smile on her ugly face. In a certain sense, Al-Uzzā is a voluptuary. Always addicted to her vulgarity, she is cast aside like an old leprous screen of faded Indian leather.
As to Manāt, she has large ears; both of them, but the right one in particular tends to stand out from her head at the top, curving back on itself, determined to capture for itself all the world’s gossip. She is ashamed of them, which at times they look like a bat’s ears. When she puts on her make-up, which she always does, Manāt looks like an undisputed queen of a Napelese bordello. She always strikes people around her as a woman who might have a startling hairy crest between her breasts. A horrifying thought! She too is promiscuous. She is also as dull as dust. That is all that can be said about Manāt.

À suivre . . .