Sub-Saharan Migrants are Bearing the Brunt of Tunisia’s Crackdown on Civil Society

“The main political software of our president is conspiracy,” says Hakim Fekih, a management consultant and political activist in an interview with OkayAfrica. “Everything that doesn’t go well is always explained through a conspiracy, and it’s all connected. He places all civil society and political parties into one big group, which he frames as the elite [and] refers to as ‘them.’”

Fekih outlines the timeline that brought Tunisia to its current crisis: After 2011, when the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi triggered a wave of political unrest, which toppled dictatorships across the region, Tunisia lived through a 10-year democratic transition. NGOs and civil society expanded and were often funded by foreign money; when the economy faltered and the transitional process appeared to be failing, the NGOs and “elites” working on democratic ideals were blamed.

Voted into power in 2019, Saied sacked the parliament in 2021 and changed the constitution from a parliamentary to a presidential system. He was able to do so because people had become disillusioned with the political class and economic hardship; many initially supported him as he claimed to be a man of the people.

In February 2023, Saied began curbing free speech and imprisoning political opponents on a larger scale, and Tunisians quickly realized that they were witnessing in real time the establishment of autocratic rule. He released an official statement on Facebook, the social media platform on which politics are most widely discussed, alleging that there is a criminal plan to change the composition and demographic landscape of Tunisia.

“It was a big shock, because we never saw a statement like this by any president in Tunisia,” says Fekih. “There’s an old problem of racism in Tunisia, but it was not acceptable for somebody in the political class to say racist things. This statement freed hate speech. ”

Horrific violence against Black people spread across the country as a direct result, with Aesat, Tunisia’s largest union for Sub-Saharan students, calling on members to leave their houses only when necessary, and to carry documentation. “This was the first crisis,” says Fekih.

The second crisis followed in June, when a Sub-Saharan migrant murdered a Tunisian in the Southern Tunisian town of Sfax. This crime triggered a campaign against Black people where locals rounded them up and smashed them with clubs. “The police took over one thousand migrants and threw them into the desert, somewhere by the border with Libya and Algeria, without water or food or anything,” says Fekih.

This practice continues, with the most recent occurring on May 3, 2024. It rolls back a major achievement in 2018 when Tunisia became the first country in the SWANA region to enact a law that penalizes racial discrimination and allows victims of racism to seek redress for verbal abuse or physical acts of racism.

Meanwhile, the president was meeting with representatives of the EU, which transfers the responsibility of keeping Africans out of Europe to North African governments. Against Saied’s claim that he is for the people and against foreign intervention, he agreed to be paid 150 million euros ($163 million) as compensation for turning Tunisia into an externalized border of Europe.

“Now that Tunisia is blocking the migratory route, migrants are stuck with nowhere to stay. It’s anarchy,” says Fekih. “Tunisia was never a country of migration and there are no systems to welcome migrants. The state made no effort to give them minimum dignity and they started being everywhere, sleeping in the streets and on farms. It became a huge problem on the political scene.”

The growing fear and xenophobia fit perfectly into Saied’s conspiratorial playbook. During a National Security Council meeting on Feb. 21, 2023, he made more racist and xenophobic remarks, blaming the migration issue on the few civil society organizations that offer support to migrants.

Saied claimed that NGOs were accepting foreign funding in order to realize the alleged “great replacement,” and arrested several citizens. Amongst them are Saadia Mosbah, a Black Tunisian activist and president of Mnemti (Arabic for My Dream), an NGO that combats racial discrimination, as well as Sherifa Riahi, ex-president of Terre d’Asile Tunisie (French for Land of Asylum Tunisia) which provides assistance to migrants. Both are facing charges of money laundering.

“The last couple of weeks have been insane,” says Fekih. “He now connects his fight against free speech with the problem with migrants: the civil society is bad for the country and they’re bringing in migrants to replace people.” Attempting to explain the economic crisis, Saied claims that migrants are taking basic food that Tunisia has seen a shortage of for years.

While racially motivated violence was commonplace before, according to migrants interviewed by Avocats sans Frontières (ASF), an organization providing legal aid to asylum seekers and migrants, the president’s speech in February escalated it further. Until recently, Black Tunisians were not widely concerned with the mistreatment of Sub-Saharan Africans, because they mostly considered themselves Black Muslims who belong to Tunisia. But in this climate of explosive xenophobia, they are finding themselves targeted “by mistake.”

Lilia Abdelmoula, a Tunisian decolonial scholar and PhD researcher working on race, nation, state and gender in Tunisia, has worked alongside the anti-racism activists who have been imprisoned. They share stories of Black Tunisian friends who do not leave the house without ID and pretend to speak on the phone in public spaces, so that others can hear their Tunisian accent and not mistake them for a migrant.

“Tunisian national identity is intentionally color-blind and vague, because it was created to establish a post-colonial state,” Abdelmoula tells OkayAfrica. “Identities like Amazigh, or being Jewish, or being Black, are subsumed under ‘Tunisian, Arab and Muslim.’”

Thus, there is no clearly defined Black Tunisian community that shares a particular culture or slang. What connects them is the experience of anti-Black racism, which they try to overcome by assimilation, rather than through specific activism that would further solidify them as a separate group.

Amongst Black Tunisians, racism is often perceived to be a person’s personal prejudice, rather than systemic violence. In addition, most black Tunisians live in the south, whereas most anti-racism activists live in the richer, more developed north, which adds a separating class element to questions around who would be fit to represent Black people as a group.

“A Black Tunisian will have a hard time identifying with a Sudanese migrant,” says Abdelmoula . “The two communities don’t have the same needs at all. Sub-Saharan migrants really need help in the traditional sense: language assistance, housing, healthcare, etcetera.” Many Black North Africans would rather not be associated with a group that is even more marginalized than their own.

“I have this theory that North African states want to make it unbearable for migrants to stay, so that they go back to their country willingly. It’s been normalized to attack migrants in their homes and in public spaces. Both by the police and by normal citizens. They are made to be the embodiment of ‘the other’ and framed to be barbarian, unlike the civilized Tunisians,” says Abdelmoula.

Having worked with refugee organizations in Tunisia, Abdelmoula asserts that Algerian and Moroccan authorities, as well as Libyan groups, all have lethal migration policies in cooperation with European countries. In this process, African borders are becoming more militarized and tougher than ever before.

“Migrants are like a ball and nobody wants them, so they kick them across borders,” she says. “North African [regimes] are becoming the sword of imperialism and Western racism, adopting the same neo-fascist interests and policies as the EU. They never thought of themselves as part of the African continent anyways.”

Amidst worsening repression against civil society, Sub-Saharan migrants and, by extension Black Tunisians, find themselves at the intersection of deeply embedded racism and EU-funded and sanctioned violence against those trying to pass from Tunisia to Europe.

“The president must stop finding scapegoats for Tunisia’s economic and political woes. The community of Black African migrants in Tunisia is now gripped by fear of assault or being arbitrarily arrested and summarily deported,” saysHeba Morayef, Amnesty International’s Director for the Middle East and North Africa.