Associated Press
Chetaibi, Algeria (AP) – A stunning city on the Mediterranean coast of Algeria has become a controversial center around male swimwear, which faces religious and conservative values with tourist customs.
Chitybi, a town of 8,000 people known for its turquoise waters, their rocky backgrounds and shed hills, attracts thousands of Algerian forgiveness every summer. Seasonal tourism is the local economy column.
“The weather is warm, warm, colored, loud, without hostility towards swimmers, neither in words nor in appearance. People here have a tradition of hospitality,” said Salah Edini, who lives there for years.
In his opinion, there were few signs of controversy, until there was.
At the beginning of the month, some summer and merchants were surprised when the mayor issued a decree prohibiting the squares from walking across the city in short shorts of short type, describing the clothes as inappropriate compared to the longest and longest shorts preferred by the most conservative vacationers.
“These summer clothes disturb the residents, and contradict the moral values and the feeling of the fitness of our society.”
He added, referring to visitors from other parts of Algeria: “The residents can no longer bear the vision of foreigners wandering in the streets with inappropriate clothes.”
This procedure caused the immediate reaction to the authorities, including the regional capital programs, Anaba, which the mayor asked to cancel.
Allaoua pulled the decree in two days. On Facebook, he insisted that his matter was not driven by Islamic pressure, but by the desire to preserve “peace and calm” for both residents and visitors.
Nevertheless, the episode showed more deep tensions about religion, identity and public space in a country still tortured by a civil war in which about 200,000 people died during the 1990s. The conflict began in 1991, when the army abolished elections where the Islamic Party was preferred.
The “Black Contract” that has been laid off has ended. But he left without resolving some basic friction between political Islam and the secular state supported by the Algerian army.
“Although the Islamists lost the war in the nineties, they did not leave their invasive and intrusive ideological project, which gained ground in society,” said sociologist in Redwan Buduima.
For some, the discussion on the beach at the time sparked when the Islamists -led municipalities attempted to reshape public life according to the religious belief. For many Algerians, especially in the most deprived areas, political Islam is still popular not through extremism, but as a reaction to corruption, inequality and lack of confidence in state institutions. Although Islamic parties have often had bad performance in the polls, they play a great role in daily life, and fill social and moral gaps.
In the adjacent generation generation, the population collar parts of the beach to form a collective prayer, and the viewers’ videos that cause the division of opinions on the Internet are spread.
For Kabir, it is a clear reminder to the past. In the nineties, the Islamists who won the local elections in Jijel imposed strict rules on public behavior. Today, parked cars near the beach were sabotaged from the warnings that tell the prose to “go to sin elsewhere.”
“It is a provocation,” Kabir said. “An attempt to remove visitors from other areas.”
Boklifa, a former official in the Ministry of Tourism, said that conservative groups benefit from Algeria’s economic problems – because the decrease in gas revenues puts the state in trouble – to expand its influence. He said this could undermine the country’s ambitions to develop the tourism sector.
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This story is translated from the English language by the AP editor with the help of the Wooing AI tool.
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