Ten men are seen lined up across a beach. One holds his arm out as though barring the way. An eleventh man, carrying a Kalashnikov, strolls away from them. The photo was taken outside the Imperial Marhaba hotel in Sousse on June 26, and is emblematic of Tunisia in 2015.
The young gunman had just slaughtered 38 holiday makers.
The hotel and beach workers were risking their own lives to stop him moving further up the beach. This was the year that Tunisians faced up to the fact that their country was not beyond the reach of ISIL-inspired violence. There was a determination to resist its encroachment.
Year in review 2015: See all of our end-of-the-year coverage
Since the 2011 revolution, about 80 members of the army, national guard and police had been killed by armed groups. They had died in clashes, ambushes or explosions in mountains along the border with Algeria and in the centre-west. Those jihadists were regarded as leftovers from those opposing the Algerian government in the 1990s. They had not targeted civilians.
The attacks at the Bardo Museum on March 18, in which 20 foreign tourists died, and then in Sousse, were something new. Recognising a common enemy, after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris in January, the French president, François Hollande, joined his Tunisian counterpart, Beji Caid Sebsi, on a “march against terrorism” in Tunis on March 29.
But the Tunisian security services appeared slow to understand the nature of the threat. It would take almost half an hour for special forces to come to the rescue in Sousse.
All three gunmen involved in the two attacks had received weapons training in Libya, investigators said. Numbers of would-be jihadists were still trickling across the southern border, heading mainly for the Libyan coastal town of Sebrata. The groups in Sebrata may not be closely integrated with ISIL, according to one diplomatic source in Tunis, but they are in harmony with its ideology. They are thought to include veterans of Tunisia’s Ansar ash-Sharia (Followers of Islamic Law) movement.
Through the summer, the Tunisian defence ministry erected a barrier – a bank of sand with a broad ditch – along much of this border. US Reaper drones were reported to have been authorised to operate over the country. A columnist in La Presse newspaper on November 21 said the US drones should be welcomed into Tunisian airspace for their combat capability.
Prospects have dimmed for generating new jobs speedily for the hundreds of thousands of unemployed. In July, projected GDP growth for the year was revised downwards by the central bank to 1 per cent, from a previous forecast of 3 per cent. Tourist numbers had fallen 45 per cent since 2010. But a bumper olive harvest meant that Tunisia reportedly became the world’s leading exporter of olive oil, displacing Spain.
The year had begun with Beji Caid Sebsi – the veteran politician who had founded the secularist Nidaa Tounes (Tunisian Call) party – settling into the presidential palace in Carthage. He was the first president elected in a free and fair vote. A new, coalition government took office in February under Habib Essid, a self-effacing civil servant with no party affiliation, as prime minister. When the Islamists of Ennahda (Renaissance) were given one ministry, and three junior ministries, this was not to the liking of some within Nidaa Tounes. Some were also unhappy that the president's son, the businessman Hafedh Caid Sebsi, was seeking to be a prominent player in the party. As the year draws to a close, Nidaa Tounes is still riven with bitter rivalries and divisions.
The Nobel peace prize for 2015 was awarded to Tunisia's National Dialogue Quartet, a four-member panel that two years earlier had helped head off an acute political crisis that pitted Islamists against secularists. The Nobel committee's message to the wider region was clear, as it praised the Quartet's commitment to peaceful dialogue and "consensus-based solutions" in the building of a "pluralistic democracy".
Eileen Byrne is a foreign correspondent at The National.