(Sfax, Tunis and the island of Kerkennah, Tunisia) The region of Sfax, in Tunisia, has become the main hub for migrants to Europe: since the beginning of the year, departures for Italy have jumped 300%. But not all of them reach their destination. There are many tragedies, as we saw this week with the tragic shipwreck off the coast of Greece. The dead number in the hundreds. And it is not the racist remarks of the Tunisian president that will reverse the trend: the black population is more determined than ever to join Europe. No matter the cost.
More and more migrants, more and more shipwrecks
Maria Mkabo remembers her departure at sea on April 7, when it was dark, from a beach near Sfax, in a metal boat where a few dozen sub-Saharan migrants were piled up hoping to reach Italy. She remembers the raging waves which, after a few hours, capsized the fragile boat and threw everyone into the waters of the Mediterranean.
But the 20-year-old does not remember how she managed to survive several hours in cold water, with her 10-month-old baby, clinging somehow to a badly inflated inner tube.
Her husband, Ismaïl Ilah, 28, never came to the surface. Maria Mkabo was rescued the next day by a fishing boat that brought the survivors back to the port of Sfax. Baby Ismaïl was hospitalized and spent five days in a coma, after suffering from hypothermia.
“I was very scared, I don’t want to get back in a boat”, says the young mother with a serious face, met in Tunis in an improvised camp where around 200 sub-Saharan migrants are piled up in tents and under plastic sheeting. , next to the offices of the International Office for Migration (IOM), a United Nations organization.
“I want to go home to Sierra Leone, but I have no more money and I have no one to take care of me,” she laments, while little Ismaïl, feverish, cries in his arms.
Three times more departures
Maria Mkabo is one of the thousands of people, mostly from sub-Saharan Africa, who have tried to reach Italy from Tunisia since the beginning of 2023. This is an unprecedented wave: migrants are three times as many this year as last year.
Between January and April, the number of irregular entries of migrants into the European Union through the central Mediterranean increased by 292% compared to the same period in 2022, reaching 42,165, according to the European agency Frontex, responsible for managing borders. Main countries of origin of migrants: Côte d’Ivoire (eight times more numerous) and Guinea (five times more numerous).
For their part, Tunisian authorities intercepted 23,093 people trying to leave the country’s shores in the first five months of 2023, compared to 7,250 in the same period last year, an increase of some 220%, according to the data. collected by the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights (FTDES).
dead every day
But there are many shipwrecks, as evidenced by the tragedy that left hundreds missing off the coast of Greece earlier this week. There were 534 dead and missing at sea in the first five months of 2023, 90% of them sub-Saharans, according to the FTDES, which had counted 374 for the same period in 2022. The organization points out that minors are more and more people are trying to cross.
The region of Sfax, the economic capital of the country, and the island of Kerkennah, located opposite, 40 km from the coast, have long attracted Tunisians who try to enter Europe illegally by joining the Italian island of Lampedusa, which is located less than 150 km from Kerkennah.
But now, it is sub-Saharan migrants who are the majority on this route.
They come from Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Niger, Sudan, Yemen. They crossed the desert, then Algeria or Libya, before ending up in Tunisia on the shores of the Mediterranean.
They have already paid smugglers for the first part of their journey, from their country, piled into trucks like cattle. To reach the promised land, in a makeshift boat, they will have to extend the tickets even further, between 1,400 and 5,000 dinars (from 600 to 2,200 $ CAN) for the 14-hour crossing.
This is why several of them stop more or less long in Tunisia to work and collect some money, even if they are badly paid and often have trouble finding work, especially since the speech in racist connotation of Tunisian President Kaïs Saïed, last February (see other text).
Multiple attempts
At the end of May, in a popular district of Sfax, we are invited to the homes of young men, mostly from Gambia. They are twenty to live crammed into three spartan and dusty apartments, furnished with what they found in the scrap.
Many speak only the dialect of their country, but a few speak English, and even a little French.
They have all already attempted the crossing, sometimes three or four times. They were intercepted by the Tunisian coastguards or their boat sank.
The young man recounts with sorrow how he rubbed shoulders with death last March. He spent two hours in the water before fishermen agreed to take the survivors on board.
It was his second attempt. The first time, a few months before, the boat had turned back because the sea was too rough.
Lamine tries to save some money, by working on construction sites, to try his luck once again.
“I am the oldest in a family of six children,” he explains. My family is poor, but they have spent a lot of money to allow me to come here and they are counting on me to reach Europe so that I can help them financially. I can’t go home. I know it’s dangerous, but I’m ready to give my life for my family.”
“We only want to improve our lot”
Migrants from sub-Saharan Africa met in Tunisia by our journalists tell their stories.
Why do the Tunisian authorities intercept sub-Saharan migrants to prevent them from reaching Europe, when they are not welcome in Tunisia?
This is the question that many of them ask themselves.
“They don’t want us here, we are victims of racism,” denounces Saikou, a 22-year-old Gambian met in the suburbs of Sfax, who prefers to keep his true identity silent. “After the speech last February, we had to stay locked up at home for two weeks for fear of being attacked, and I couldn’t find a job for a month.”
The speech of February 21 is the one in which the Tunisian President, Kaïs Saïed, called for “urgent measures” against the illegal immigration of sub-Saharan Africans to his country, affirming that their presence was a source of “violence and crime”. He denounced the arrival of “hordes of clandestine migrants”, maintaining that it was a “criminal enterprise hatched at the dawn of this century to change the demographic composition of Tunisia”, in order to transform it in an “African only” country and blur its “Arab-Muslim” character.
This statement sparked a wave of racist attacks against the black community in the country. Homeowners kicked out their sub-Saharan tenants, employers fired black workers.
The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) in April called on the Tunisian authorities to stop “racist hate speech” against nationals of sub-Saharan Africa, expressing concern at the numerous acts of violence against these migrants and by the arbitrary arrests “carried out by the police within the framework of the campaign entitled Strengthening the security fabric and reducing the phenomenon of illegal stay in Tunisia”.
Departures and repatriations
These difficulties have prompted many migrants temporarily settled in Tunisia to move forward their plan to cross to Italy. Others preferred to return to their country: Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Burkina Faso and Cameroon, in particular, have organized flights to repatriate their nationals.
In fact, President Saïed is under enormous pressure from the European Union to prevent migrants leaving his territory from entering Europe illegally.
“As long as the current border regime exists, people will continue to leave their country in very dangerous conditions,” adds a Tunisian activist, volunteer for the organization Alarm Phone, which lists departures by sea from various countries and receives distress calls from migrant boats.
The two NGOs denounce the fact that it is Tunisia that finds itself with the task of enforcing Europe’s borders, while the country has few means and is going through a financial crisis.
“We will never be able to stop mobility with laws and restrictions. People will always want to leave to find a better world. We can’t stop them from moving,” argues lawyer Wajdi Mohamed Aydi, former deputy mayor of Sfax, who was responsible for the migration file, before President Kaïs Saïed decided to dissolve all the country’s municipal councils. , last March.
In the meantime, the Tunisian coastguards continue to intercept more and more boats full of irregular migrants, using techniques denounced by NGOs. A report published in early June by the FTDES describes the use of tear gas and beatings.
A migrant boat hit by the National Guard
The migrants we spoke to confirm this: boats patrolling Tunisian waters sometimes crash into migrant boats, or cause waves by circling them, which ends up capsizing them. Or the coast guards remove the motors from the boats and let them drift.
When the authorities bring the migrants back to the port of Sfax, they are simply released on the quay, sometimes after having had their property confiscated. And the same merry-go-round resumes after a few weeks or months: after having managed to raise the necessary money, the migrants go back to sea, at the risk of not returning.
“An open-air cemetery”
These boats used during unsuccessful journeys of migrants from Sfax to Italy were seized by the Tunisian authorities.
Warning: this section discusses the death of migrants. Its reading and one of the accompanying photos could shock some readers.
Boulbeba Bouguecha is still haunted by what he saw, on December 24, on a beach in Kerkennah where he had gone for a picnic with his family: the lifeless body of a little girl, recognizable by her little bright pink coat. , lying face down on the edge of the water.
The business student, who is also a photographer, took a snapshot reminiscent of the one showing little Aylan Kurdi, this Syrian child whose body was found on a Turkish beach in 2015, and who toured the planet.
The body of a little girl, probably dead following a shipwreck, was found on a beach in Kerkennah.
This photo sparked outrage around the world and drew attention to the plight of Syrian migrants who risk their lives trying to reach Europe.
This time, the photo of the girl, which was published by the French online media Mediapart last February, did not cause the same stir, neither in Tunisia nor elsewhere.
Such grisly discoveries are now commonplace in the region, given the skyrocketing number of shipwrecked migrants trying to cross the sea to reach Europe – 534 dead and missing in the first five months of 2023.
“The Mediterranean is becoming more and more an open-air cemetery,” denounces lawyer Wajdi Mohamed Aydi, former deputy mayor of Sfax.
“Where are the authorities? I don’t know. »
Neji Hdidar, fisherman from Kerkennah, on his boat moored in the port of Kraten
We see bodies almost every day. They often get caught in our nets.
Neji Hdidar, fisherman from Kerkennah
The fishermen, who have become witnesses to these tragedies in spite of themselves, are not equipped to deal with corpses. They then call the National Guard, but the authorities sometimes ask them to stay there until they arrive, which can take several hours. Consequences: some fishing boats have stopped reporting the bodies they see.
When they are recovered by the National Guard, the remains are transported to the hospital in Sfax to be examined by a medical examiner. Since many of the castaways have no identification on them or family in the area who could recognize them, DNA is taken from the bodies for possible identification.
But morgue workers are struggling to keep up with demand. Their facilities are regularly overflowing, forcing them to keep bodies on stretchers in the hospital hallways.
At the end of April, in the space of a week, 186 bodies were recovered or washed up on the coasts in the region, reveals a Red Crescent official in Kerkennah.
While they fear the discovery of new corpses, the fishermen are less and less busy fishing, since the fish is becoming scarce, due to overfishing and the dredging of the seabed.
Some decide to sell their boat, which ends up in the hands of a smuggler.
A group of fishermen with whom we discuss then evokes a former colleague who has converted to the transport of migrants, who is in the process of having a castle built on the island and drives in a luxury car.
“If it continues like this and I can no longer feed my family, maybe I won’t have the choice to become a smuggler myself,” drops Mr. Hdidar, discouraged.
