3″ May”2023″ AFP
Tunisia’s relationship with Europe remains firm as the EU courts Tunis’s help in stopping migration.
At its turbulent centre lies Tunisia and those making their way there from across Africa to join with thousands of local emigres in the hope of building new lives in Europe
At its periphery lie political arguments over Europe’s internal politics, the energy needs of the bloc and even the war in Ukraine.
However, at its heart are human pain and, ultimately, hope for a better future.
Tamba spent about $2,000 to get from Sierra Leone to Tunisia. “I travelled by road, through the desert, from Guinea, Mali and Algeria, then here,” he said of the journey of about 6,000km (3,730 miles).
There is nothing for Tamba in Tunisia, he says, but unemployment and the racism of local inhabitants, which forced him from his apartment into a makeshift encampment outside the buildings of the International Organization for Migration, where he shelters with others awaiting passage to Europe or for some kind of solution. He has no idea what that could be, he says
If he is able to leave for Europe, Tamba would join the 12,000 people already reported to have made their way informally across the Mediterranean to Italy during just the first quarter of this year. Libya, the second-largest source of irregular migration to Italy, saw about 7,000 people leave over the same period.
Hundreds of others have drowned trying to make the same trip. From just April 18 to 28, 210 bodies were recovered off the beaches around central Tunisia. Morgues are straining to deal with the influx.
The recent conflict in Sudan, which has supercharged the numbers of people fleeing across the continent, is unlikely to help limit departure numbers.
Systematically tortured’
Both Tunisia and Libya struggle to meet anyone’s definition of a safe harbour. Since their 2011 revolutions, Libya has striven to free itself from anarchy, civil war and the chaos of rival governments, and Tunisia, which, until recently, was on a hopeful, if flawed, democratic transition, has been reverting by degrees to the kind of authoritarianism that defined much of the continent before 2011
For those able to escape or avoid the Libyan camps, Tunisia offers little respite. It is locked in an economic crisis and roiling under the populist conspiracies of its president, Kais Saied, whose own sense of persecution dominates much of the national conversation, pulling focus from the country’s rising authoritarianism and dramatic decline in global regard.
At the time of the writing of this article, 28 opponents and critics of the president had been arrested during his latest purge, including the divisive head of the self-styled Muslim democrats, Rached Ghannouchi, leader of Ennahdha, a party that has lost popularity in recent years, having previously been the largest party in parliament before Saied dissolved it in 2021.
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