The fear is always there, day and night, says Mamadou of Chad, who asks that his full name not be published for fear of reprisals. And he tells what happened to him at the beginning of the month when he failed to reach the Italian island of Lampedusa with the help of human traffickers.
“The Tunisian Coast Guard took our mobile phones and our money, took us to the Libyan border, took our clothes and left us there,” he told DW from his hideout: an olive grove near the Tunisian port city of Sfax. He says he walked about 150 miles through the desert to get there.
Hidden among olive groves
The olive groves have become a hiding place for around 80,000 sub-Saharan migrants waiting for an opportunity to cross the Mediterranean Sea and reach Europe.
Lauren Seibert, a researcher at Human Rights Watch and an expert on refugee and migrant rights, says what Mamadou and others have experienced is an “illegal collective expulsion.”
Algeria, Libya and Mauritania have been “practicing illegal mass expulsions for years,” the expert tells DW, but in Tunisia it is a more recent phenomenon.
A Tunisian migration expert shares this opinion, telling DW on condition of anonymity that “in recent years, there have been a handful of cases, usually when Tunisian authorities intercept smugglers’ boats coming from Libya.”
Earlier this month, Lighthouse Reports, an investigative news organization that collaborates with several international media outlets, published a report on the rise in mass deportations.
After a year of investigations, journalists concluded that the Tunisian National Guard was at the center of these operations and that much of the financing came from European countries.
Stop migration
Since last year, the European Union has signed migration partnerships with Egypt, Morocco, Mauritania and Tunisia, agreements that include contributions of money specifically aimed at stopping migration to Europe.
For many analysts, recent events in Tunisia are especially worrying, as Tunisia has become a popular departure point for migrants from across Africa hoping to reach Europe.
The country had reduced visa requirements in 2015, and it was widely reported that Tunisia needed cheap labor in unofficial sectors, making it a good middle ground to obtain funds to then cross the Mediterranean.
In the past decade, Sfax, a city located less than 150 kilometers from Lampedusa, had become a major center for human trafficking, something that was more or less tolerated by the Tunisian authorities.
But in February 2023, President Kais Saied launched a new offensive against migrants, claiming that people from sub-Saharan Africa were changing the Tunisian demographic structure. He said this threatened to turn Tunisia into an “African” country rather than an “Arab-Muslim” one.
This was followed by nationwide police operations against immigrants, which were partly supported by the population, operations in which many sub-Saharan families were harassed on the streets, expelled from their homes and arbitrarily detained.
In July last year, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen offered Tunisia a partnership package worth more than one billion euros, consisting of $900 million plus $150 million in immediate budget assistance, and $105 additional millions for border management and anti-smuggling activities.
“The EU’s growing financial aid for migration control only encourages these collective expulsions, which are contrary to law,” HRW’s Seibert told DW.
Systematic expulsions
When Tunisia first deported some 1,200 migrants to the border with Libya in May 2023, it “catalyzed a humanitarian crisis that left several migrants dead, including children, and also generated a political crisis between Tunisia and Libya,” the report said. migration expert who spoke to DW on condition of anonymity.
However, after an international outcry, those deportations stopped in July, but were resumed in September, when Tunisian authorities again detained large numbers of people.
“Since then, part of the transport has gone to the border with Algeria, where there is a lot of tension with the Algerian forces, and another to the border with Libya,” he explains.
“The current expulsions from Tunisia to Libya do not create a humanitarian crisis because Libyans are picking up migrants fairly quickly to take them to detention centers, where they risk abuse and extortion.”
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