Brussels believes it can make Tunisia take on the role of sentinel in the service of the European border police to block or curb migratory flows from its coasts to the Old Continent. A risky bet…
The European Council will meet on June 29 and 30, 2023. The draft agreement with Tunisia will certainly be on the agenda. In this project, the Tunisian executive did not believe it necessary to reveal its content to Tunisian citizens. Is this in line with the fundamental principles, values and rights that the European Union (EU) keeps drumming into our ears?
This draft agreement of one billion euros, including 900 million in the form of a loan, was agreed with the President of the Republic Kaïs Saïed during the recent visit to Tunis by the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the Italian Council Giorgia Meloni and the Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, and the few elements that have filtered through indicate that it essentially concerns the management of migratory flows from the Tunisian coasts to Europe.
The transparency requirement
Unbalanced, unequal and taking advantage of Tunisia’s current difficulties to make it take on the role of sentinel in the service of the European border police, this draft agreement is highly contested by political actors and civil society in Tunisia, where it does not has not been the subject of official debate, not even within the parliament in place, which we know, however, is totally committed to the political process driven by President Saïed by the proclamation of the state of emergency on July 25 2021.
Commenting on this agreement, in a Facebook post today, Tuesday, June 27, 2023, former ambassador Elyes Kasri rightly recalls that ” any international agreement signed by political authorities without sufficiently transparent and credible national consultation runs a high risk not to enjoy the legitimacy necessary for the political survival of its signatory.”
“The European Union, which prides itself on being a democratic structure, should be attentive to the requirement of transparency and preliminary adhesion to any agreement that it would claim to extort from a Tunisian executive running out of room for maneuver and ‘Diplomatic alternatives to get caught up in a transaction that risks proving to be social, security and diplomatically onerous to the point of being untenable’, he adds, considering that the role of sentinel that Brussels wants Tunisia to take on will be a heavy burden for our country, both internally, where the strong presence of sub-Saharan migrants in certain border regions is beginning to cause great concern for the populations and the authorities, and outside, in the sense that our country will have great difficulty in protecting its borders, which have become real sieves for smugglers.
Misunderstandings and tensions
“Tunisia has recently experienced misunderstandings and tensions with countries of the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa ,” the diplomat recalls in this regard. And adds: “Any agreement on the management of the migratory flow signed in haste and opacity, is likely to deepen Tunisia’s loneliness further to the point of making it a pariah in its own region.”
In this context, the declarations of President Saïed, often echoed by Foreign Minister Nabil Ammar and the other members of the government, according to which Tunisia will never keep the borders of other countries, should give food for thought to those who, in the north of the Mediterranean, and for clearly electoral reasons, think that the agreement with Tunisia is already folded and in the pocket.
Saïed’s statements are not intended only to serve as media packaging for an unpopular agreement, they also express a position of principle which, on D-Day, and in the event of an aggravation of the migration problem, the beginnings of which we can already see in last weekend’s protest marches in Sfax could be used to justify a very likely about-face. Is it not, moreover, this hypothesis, which the Europeans do not exclude, given the unpredictability of the Tunisian president, which explains the weak financial commitment of the EU towards Tunisia?