At the beginning of July the Tunisian security forces they arrested hundreds of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa and forcibly took them to a desert area in the east of the country bordering Libya.
Since then, migrants have been stuck in a kind of “no man’s land” on the border between the two countries, without food, water and the possibility of accessing medical care. It is an area that is difficult to access for NGOs and journalists: only Al Jazeera in recent days she managed to talk to the stranded migrantsdescribing an extremely serious situation.
“They need to be helped urgently, it’s a matter of life and death,” he said the director of the NGO Human Rights Watch in Tunisia, Salsabil Chellali. The arrests and deportation of recent days are only the latest in a series of violence and discrimination against sub-Saharan migrants, which the authoritarian president Kais Saied is using as a scapegoat to explain the terrible economic and social situation in which Tunisia finds itself .
According to the calculations of Al Jazeera around 1,200 migrants were arrested and deported to the border with Libya. They say they were stopped in various security operations in Sfax, the coastal city in central Tunisia from which boats leave for the small Italian island of Lampedusa. At the moment they are stranded in a desert area near the sea about 35 kilometers east of the Tunisian city of Ben Guerdane, without the possibility of returning to Tunisia or entering Libya (where, in any case, they would risk being locked up in migrant detention centres, in whose violence and rapes are systematic).
Human Rights Watch writes that according to various testimonies, the Tunisian police forces beat the detained people and smashed their phones. Also according to these testimonies, some men who arrived from Libyan territory equipped with machetes and other weapons would have robbed some migrants blocked and raped several women. The lack of drinking water has led some migrants to drink sea water to try and quench their thirst.
The Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights, a well-known Tunisian NGO dealing with human rights, he said al Financial Times that among the people stopped and arrested there are several asylum seekers, women and children, i.e. vulnerable people who would need assistance and protection.
Migrants in Tunisia accuse the authorities of rounding them up and dumping them close to the Libyan and Algerian borders, a few weeks after the EU offered a lucrative migration deal to Tunisia. pic.twitter.com/IXip2TuM41
— DW News (@dwnews) July 9, 2023
In recent weeks, Tunisia has been trying to obtain aid for around one billion euros from the European Union. In exchange for aid, the European Union has asked Tunisia to step up efforts to stop migrants and asylum seekers intending to reach Europe by sea, with an agreement similar to the one that keeps thousands of migrants in inhumane conditions in detention centers Libyans. The billion in aid provides, among other things, around 105 million euros to strengthen the operations of the Tunisian police forces against migrants.