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PDF version The 18 March terrorist attacks on the Tunis Bardo museum were clearly directed against Tunisia’s transition to democracy, as the “lone success story of the ‘Arab Spring’”, said MEPs in a debate with EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini on Wednesday evening. All speakers insisted on the need to maintain or beef up EU support for Tunisia, so to in encourage it to pursue its democratic transition and not be intimidated by attempts to cause anarchy and chaos.
MEPs speaking on behalf of the political groups backed Ms Mogherini's view that continued EU support for Tunisia's economic and democratic transition was the best response to the terrorist attacks, in the country which started the Arab Spring and the only one in the region to genuinely deliver on its promises, with a non-religious and unity government.
MEPs stressed that shootings in the museum were in fact also attacks on the EU – both by killing EU citizens and as a symbolic attack on the EU values of democracy, tolerance and fundamental freedoms. The EU’s backing for Tunisia’s transition to democracy is “intolerable to terrorists”, making it an “enemy of their utopic caliphate”, they said.
Some urged that the east-south distribution of EU neighbourhood policy funding be “rebalanced” – a question which Ms Mogherini promised to raise at the April Southern Neighbourhood” summit in Barcelona (Spain). Some also suggested that the EU could help meet security needs on the Tunisian-Libyan border, but others blamed EU “interference” in the region as a possible trigger of the terrorist attacks.
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