During a celebratory normally full of music and dancing, the secondary students at Hay al-Hadiqa Institute in Tunis raised the flag of al-Qaeda and posted pictures of Osama Bin Laden and members from Ansar al-Sharia- a banned organization in Tunisia- during their dakhla, or exam kick off, celebrations.
Ayman— a student there also known as ‘monster’ thanks to his large muscles—says bin Laden is considered a symbol by a large sector of young Tunisians.
During a celebratory normally full of music and dancing, the secondary students at Hay al-Hadiqa Institute in Tunis raised the flag of al-Qaeda and posted pictures of Osama Bin Laden and members from Ansar al-Sharia- a banned organization in Tunisia- during their dakhla, or exam kick off, celebrations.
Ayman— a student there also known as ‘monster’ thanks to his large muscles—says bin Laden is considered a symbol by a large sector of young Tunisians.
“We have the right to express our opinion. Some have chosen the picture of Bin Laden and others have chosen the fighter Chokri Belaid. There were those who chose the pictures of Umm Kulthum and other artists to express their own views,” he said.
Before the 2011 revolution, May dakhla celebrations were usually limited to dancing, singing, music and sweets. The families of students and their friends attended the celebrations to encourage students and to take pictures. Now, bakhlas have much less of a carefree, celebratory feel.
The events witnessed by Tunisia in the last two years, such as assassinations, political disputes between political parties and the deep rooting of terrorist and Jihadist thought have been used by the baccalaureate students to criticize the country’s conditions on the one hand and to express their own views with regard to these developments on the other.
Politicized slogans
This year, the baccalaureate dakhla celebrations featured sarcastic pictures and slogans poking fun at the country’s controversial political figures like Rashid Ghannouchi, president of Ennahda or Beji Caid Essebsi, head of the Nida Tounes party.
Away from cynicism and sarcasm, the slogans have also carried political messages and implications. In the dakhla celebrations at an institute in Djerba, in southern Tunisia, students carried the pictures of Saleh Bin Yousef, one of Tunisia’s national symbols in the 1960’s and the most prominent political opponent of Habib Bourguiba, the first president of the republic.
In the northwest of the country, specifically in Wadi Maliz in the Jendouba province, the birthplace of Kamel Gadhgadhi, a suspect in the February 6, 2013 assassination of opposition leader Chokri Belaid, students raised a very big black and white picture of Belaid with a slogan in French reading: “No to terrorism.”
This year dakhla celebrations of the Tunisian educational institutions, from the north to the south, carried with them a conflicting mosaic of ideas: art, Arab nationalism slogans, leftist and anti-terrorist slogans. There were also slogans in support of jihadist ideology and more pictures of Bin Landen and the flags of al-Tawheed, the symbol of jihad.
External financing of the dakhla
Mazen Elsharif, an expert in military and security affairs and Islamic streams, has a different opinion about what is happening in the Tunisian institutes said: “The 2014 baccalaureate dakhla celebrations have revealed the weakness of the Tunisian state in confronting the tide of terrorism,” he said.
“The pictures of Bin Laden promoted by students and the jihad slogans used went beyond the accepted limits of freedom of expression.”
Mazen said many young people underestimated the repercussions of their acts saying: “They do not realize the danger surrounding them and they don’t know how easy it is to manipulate their minds by emptying these Jihadi ideas of their ideological content.”
Muhammad Juweili, a sociology professor, told Correspondents that this phenomenon is part of the political fever affecting educational institutions.
“It’s natural given the exceptional circumstances of the country,” Juwelli said.
