More than ten days after the shooting near the Ghriba synagogue in Djerba, which killed five people, the Tunisian authorities are communicating little about the progress of the investigation. But the Ministry of Health quickly triggered emergency psychological assistance, a well-established mechanism put in place after the attacks on the Bardo museum and a hotel in Sousse in 2015. Its teams of psychologists and psychiatrists went to Djerba after the tragedy.
In her office in Tunis, psychiatrist Anissa Bouasker recounts the first days after the Djerba shooting. Coming from Tunis with a team sent by the Ministry of Health, the emergency psychological assistance unit (Cap) that she chairs had to manage very high demand.
“People were completely panicked even several days after the attack,” explains the psychiatrist. We heard from people who are active in associations, that there are children, young people, who no longer wanted to go to school and who were afraid.”
Faced with the trauma, a Jewish school in Djerba let the psychotraumatologist and her teams enter, to offer assistance to around a hundred children: “These were children who were there or who, we can see it through the drawings, who ran with the others who were in the rooms, who were marked, but there are also children who were not even present, but who are strongly impacted by the adult story.”
For adults, there is the memory of two previous attacks against the synagogue: that of 2002 and that of 1985. To which is added this new attack perpetrated by an agent of the national guard.
“Suddenly the confidence, the feeling of security, was really very affected, continues the psychiatrist. They feel that they have not been sufficiently recognized as victims.”
While the investigation is still ongoing, the Tunisian authorities for the moment qualify the attack as a “criminal act”.
