10″May”2024″ Aljazeera Tunisia: The migration trap
Refugees and migrants from across Africa are becoming stranded, unable to return and persecuted by authorities
Sub-Saharan African refugees and migrants fleeing northwards away from war, conflict and corrupt governments are ending up trapped in Tunisia, unable to move on to Europe or return home.
Across Tunisia, signs of growing hostility towards these arrivals are apparent
The thousands living in makeshift camps are under pressure from a frustrated population and a government that analysts say is out of options.
On Friday, security forces raided two temporary camps and a protest site in the capital, Tunis, forcing more than 500 refugees onto buses to the Algerian border where they were abandoned. Some others may have been expelled to Libya
The Refugees in Libya organisation described a wretched journey for the asylum seekers, many travelling with infants, who were refused help from hostile people in Tunisia and blocked from accessing transport back to Tunis.
Outside Sfax, 278km (172 miles) south of Tunis on the coast, thousands of sub-Saharan Africans, many of them registered refugees, shelter in open fields, attacked by security services and residents
Refugees in Libya shared a video of 400 refugees and migrants they said had been seized from Sfax, as well as some from the Tunis camps, being expelled to Libya on May 2. The only indication the NGO has of what happened to them is a message it received on Tuesday originating from Libya’s al-Assa prison, 19km (12 miles) from the border
On Monday, Tunisia’s President Kais Saied confirmed the expulsion to the National Security Council, blaming unnamed “others” for the migration crisis before lambasting “traitors” who had allowed them to enter Tunisia
Competition for limited resources
Living standards in Tunisia are falling, with its own migration statistics testament to a lack of hope.
The high unemployment that caused its 2011 revolution remains, while an estimated 17 percent of the population lives below the poverty line.
Some 17,000 irregular Tunisian arrivals landed in Italy in 2023, many from working-class areas where refugees stay, like the industrial areas around Sfax where finding casual labour can be the difference between eating or not.
There, Tunisians find themselves competing with refugees and migrants for diminishing resources.
There has also been a surge in suspicion of outsiders, echoed in Saied’s rhetoric and press attacks on “foreign” NGOs such as the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, telling the public to distrust them for their international links and blaming them for the “disruptive” refugee presence.
In Sfax, citizens have attacked refugees with fireworks and in the farming and fishing town of al-Amra, they protested against refugees sheltering on farmland, saying farmers needed it to feed their families.
Channelling public suspicions, Saied paints Tunisia as a victim of a conspiracy to overrun it with refugees
At a Tunisian National Security Council meeting on Monday, he accused “traitors” of receiving millions to do that, claiming to have seen a document “proving” more than 20 million dinars ($6.4m) from an unnamed organisation were being funnelled unofficially for a migrant centre in Sfax
The IOM estimates some 15,000 people are camped in olive groves outside Sfax. The UNHCR said it registered 11,535 refugees between January 2023 and April of this year, bringing the total number in the country to 16,500.
Many are likely sleeping in the fields outside Sfax, or near Zarzis on the Libya border and various other points.
It is uncomfortable and dangerous, but for many, going home is simply not possible.
Salahadin, 26, a former nurse in Sudan, told Al Jazeera in March of leaving El Geneina in West Darfur in August. Returning to Sudan was not an option.
“They [the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group] killed my people, my family, all of them … killed,” he said flatly
Dead end
Tunisia’s position at the northernmost tip of Africa means it was always likely to be a dead end for the hopes of those fleeing from across the continent.
Conflict in Sudan has displaced 7.5 million people. Coups, the devastating effects of global warming, and intense competition for remaining resources have displaced 13.6 million people this year across Central and West Africa.
What this means to the 30 or so expelled people that the Refugees in Libya NGO are still searching for is uncertain. They are lost in Tunisia’s north.
According to the organisation, trains have barred them from boarding and shopkeepers have refused to serve them, scared of rumours that helping Black refugees has been criminalised.
With no alternative, the men, women and children have resorted to sleeping in caves.
They continue to walk. There isn’t much else they can do.
SOURCE: AL JAZEERA
