EU-TUNISIA MIGRATION: Encouraging the people smugglers?

K KNIPP, T GUIZANI

The best thing would be to return to Nigeria, says Victor Ambedane, who’s been in Tunisia for over six months now.

Ambedane has tried to leave the country twice by crossing the Mediterranean to Europe. But he’s also failed twice. The second time was worse, he says. And recently, back in Tunisia, he had all his possessions stolen. “We were attacked by the local mafia,” he told DW. “They came to our house and they took my mobile phone, my money and everything. Now I don’t have anything. I’ve been sleeping rough for a week now.” Ambedane says he’s given up on trying to get to Europe now. But it doesn’t have anything to do with the new “strategic partnership” the European Union agreed upon with the Tunisian government this month. In fact, Ambedane says, he hasn’t even heard about it.

“I just don’t know what I am going to do now,” he told DW. “I’m not even thinking about trying to get to Europe. I have two kids and my wife in Nigeria and I just want to go back. I’m begging God, I’m begging the Tunisian government, to come to my assistance and just send me back.”

At the moment, the EU-Tunisia agreement is only a memorandum of understanding — that is, it is still only a declaration of political intentions. Eventually the various plans in it, which address issues like economic stability in Tunisia, climate change and migration, will be realized after they have been approved by individual EU member states.

Human rights activists on both sides of the Mediterranean are already critical though, complaining that it shows the direction the EU is heading in. They say it will only further restrict pathways to migration and possibilities for asylum seekers looking for refuge.

The memorandum is one sided and favours the EU, says Ramadan Ben Omar, an official at the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights. Additionally it was signed in a non-democratic environment, he noted, referring to the fact that Tunisia’s President Kais Saied has been acting in an increasingly autocratic way since he took control of the country in what was described as a “constitutional coup” in July 2021.

The agreement is really only about Europe trying to prevent irregular migration, Ben Omar argues. The fact that the agreement includes support for the Tunisian economy is just window dressing, he says. The head of the Europe division at refugee rights advocate, Pro Asyl, sees it similarly. “We see a partner of the EU spreading hate speech against sub-Saharan refugees,” Karl Popp told DW, referring to remarks that Saied has made. “We see that hundreds of people have been abandoned in the desert near Libya. A deal under such circumstances does not bode well. It is so clearly about an autocrat intercepting people heading for Europe on boats.”

Over the past few weeks, the Tunisian authorities have been increasingly tough on sub-Saharan asylum seekers. Earlier this month there were violent clashes between African migrants, locals and the security forces after a Tunisian man was stabbed and died in the southern Tunisian city of Sfax.

After the violence, Tunisian authorities forcibly took around 800 African migrants to the border with Libya, a place in the middle of the desert. Some were left stranded without supplies or shelter in the zone between the two borders. Others were brought to the border with Algeria and left to survive in similarly life-threatening conditions. The migrants were there for several days before authorities did anything for them.