“Chicken, chicken, chicken, chicken,” a Tunisian man yelled in French one afternoon this March from the back of a pick-up truck, bouncing over the uneven earth of olive groves by the small village of Ktetna, 24 kilometers north of Tunisia’s second-largest city Sfax. He regularly drives through the fields to sell unplucked, throw-away chickens that died, often from sickness, before they made it to slaughter and Tunisian grocery stores. He sells them to the groves’ new inhabitants: migrants from across Africa who have been living there for months in homemade tents. The migrants refer to the numerous makeshift migrant camps collectively as ‘les zeitouns’, a phrase mixing French and Arabic that means ‘the Olives’.
The chickens on offer risk spreading infectious diseases and go for five dinars a piece. The migrants who could still afford to buy one to share with their community waved and came out to meet the truck on the dirt paths, nestled between tents, olive trees and trash-bearing dust devils. A few hundred meters away, a cluster of tents broke out into cheers.
“It seems someone from their group arrived in Lampedusa,” explained Zubeir, a 39-year-old Ghanaian who has been living in the camp for seven months. Zubeir has himself attempted—and failed three times—the same dangerous sea crossing to the Italian island less than 200 kilometers away.
The migrant camp near Ktetna is one of many in the area, each known by the number of kilometers north of Sfax they’re situated. As of this March, inhabitants estimated that the camp had between 600 and 1000 people in it, and some say there are at least seven other similar camps in the area. While some Tunisians have become entrepreneurs selling diseased meat and groceries with marked up prices to the migrants, security forces have also regularly preyed on the migrants, as evidenced by the residual tear-gas canisters and buckshot strewn across the camps.
The migrants are in a precarious situation due to numerous factors such as their limited supplies, their criminalized status, and racism. Yet in the camps, an additional factor is that they are now not allowed to leave the camps. Attempting to do so risks getting beaten by Tunisian security forces and thrown back in—or worse as the empty buckshot ammunition found at the camps suggests.
In recent months, President Kais Saied has used increasingly harsh rhetoric to demonize black migrants while proposing on May 10 a bill that would make the existing law governing migration even stricter, with punishments for irregular migrants of up to three years in prison and a 5000 dinar fine, as well as punishments for any Tunisians who help the migrants. In recent days, Tunisian security forces have targeted parts of civil society that work with migrants and migrant issues with continuing wide-ranging sweeps of different associations’ offices across the country and arrests of rights activists like Saadia Mosbah, the president of the Mnemty organization, and Sherifa Riahi, the former director of Terre d’Asile. In the summer of 2023, Saied inked a deal with the European Union, spearheaded by far-right Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, which stipulated aid to Tunisia in return for cracking down on migrants in Tunisia on their way to Europe—a deal criticized by opposition groups and rights activists in Tunisia as a form of bribery to be Europe’s “policeman.”
Economic Drivers of Migration
The migrants in the camps near Sfax are in phone contact with communities back in their origin countries—families and friends who are depending on them making it to Europe for economic survival and who keep sending money to ensure migrants reach Europe. In that sense, the migrants simultaneously have access to money and live without legal protection, making them easy targets for economic exploitation and theft – reflecting also the migrants’ and their countries’ position in a global hierarchy that does not seek to deal with the drivers of irregular migration.
“A lot of people sold their private properties to [reach] this place, a lot of people,” said Zubeir. They “sold family valuables to use this route. So if you go back without anything of value, they are not even going to spare you.”
In other words, while the individual migrants in the camps may be poor, they bring with them the economic resources of entire families and communities. For local would-be entrepreneurs, this presents an opportunity to profit.
Before leaving Ghana, Zubeir, who asked we not use his family name for safety, ran a baby supplies store for 15 years in Kasoa, a town about 30 kilometers west of the capital Accra. He says that work used to be enough to make a good living for him, his wife and children.
“I have a nice place in Ghana. We eat good, we drink good. I even order KFC for my family, stuff like that,” Zubeir said.
But over the past five years, Zubeir explained, life in Kasoa got progressively worse, and the business became impossible to maintain. “I promised myself, if I go to Europe, I will go for holidays. But that was before.”
Ghana, like many countries in Africa, is also suffering from a debt-cycle to Global North institutions and countries that has sapped its public spending for its citizens.
“The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer,” he continued, lamenting political leaders and elite families across the continent who, he pointed out, send their children to Europe for education and healthcare. Zubeir sees this as a sign that they do not plan on improving education and healthcare at home.
In recent years, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has intensified lending to African nations facing sovereign debt crises. But that lending has come with conditions such as fiscal austerity—cutting almost exclusively social spending—as well as a series of privatization, liberalization & deregulation policies that the IMF used to call structural adjustment and which critics identify as neoliberal restructuring. According to Corinna Mullin, a professor at the City University of New York whose research includes studies on imperialism, securitization and racial capitalism in Tunisia and other parts of Africa, the neoliberal restructuring is a primary reason for the current migration flows.
“Peripheral countries facing IMF structural adjustment have the highest share of their population migrating abroad for low-wage employment,” she told Meshkal.
As it became difficult to feed his family, Zubeir left Ghana in July 2023 and moved through Togo, Benin, Niger and Algeria to reach the camp by Ktetna where he has lived since arriving in September 2023. Shortly after arriving, he tried to cross the Mediterranean for the first time. But as the boat he was on reached the islands of Kerkennah, the sea was too choppy, and the group had to return to the coast for safety.
He tried a second crossing shortly after. That time, Zubeir’s group was caught by the Tunisian National Guard, which brought them to the port in Sfax for a migrant photo-op with local media. Afterwards, they were let go, and Zubeir said he spent two nights in the streets before finding his way back to the camp by Ktetna. “At this time, they were not sending people to the desert. Not yet,” he said.
Banishment to the Desert
Tunisian authorities have for years pushed migrants back into Libya and Algeria when they were intercepted at the borders. In the summer of 2023, this unofficial policy left many stuck in no-man’s land between Tunisia and Libya—sometimes with deadly consequences. The practice of deporting migrants from the camps in Sfax to the borders was first reported in October 2023 and, according to anecdotal evidence and witness statements from migrants in the camps, have become near universal for those intercepted at sea and common for those stopped without legal residency outside of the olive fields.
On Zubeir’s third and most recent attempt in November 2023, he and the 42 others traveling with him reached international waters when their engine broke. They were unable to reach either rescue teams from Italy or the Tunisian coast guard, so when a large Tunisian fishing boat found the desperate group of migrants the next afternoon and offered to take them, they took the offer. The fishermen took the boat’s engine for themselves – a valuable commodity given the lucrative migrant-transportation market in the Sfax region. Zubeir said that the fishermen then turned the migrants in to the National Guard at the port of Mahdia.
“We were taken into a room with no water. We were telling them that after three days on the sea, they should at least give us water to drink. They did not give us water. We were being chained, both legs and hands. Our phones were taken from us. Our money was taken from us. Our valuables, everything was taken from us,” said Zubeir.
They put the group on a bus and told them they were going back to Sfax. However, after several hours on the road, around Gabès, they realized that they were on the way to the Libyan border, rioted in the bus and fled. The ensuing night, the National Guard chased the group of migrants around and arrested them all, after which they took them to a National Guard station.
From there, they were taken a few at a time to the Algerian border and dropped off. Zubeir and a woman he didn’t know were dropped a few meters from the border and ordered to cross.
“This time around, we were lucky they took us to the Algerian border. I guess it’s because of the woman,” said Zubeir, implying that Tunisians, similar to many of the migrants, acknowledge that Libya has the worst conditions for migrants in the region and that they might have taken pity on a woman more than on a man.
Tens of migrants as well as several Tunisian neighbors of the camp confirmed to Meshkal that when migrants are caught trying to migrate as well as when they’re found by the National Guard along the main road or in Sfax, they’re usually taken to the Algerian border and told to cross.
“They get caught, then the authorities take them to Tebessa [Algerian city across the border], and then a few weeks later we see the same persons back here again,” said one Tunisian neighbor to the camp.
Kidnappings for Profit
Zubeir made his way back to Tunisia from Algeria intent on reaching the camp by Ktetna once again. On his way, he met a seemingly friendly group of Tunisians offering him a ride to Sfax. But they ended up detaining him and extorting him for money.
“I was sold by some people to Tunisian bandits. I had to pay 400 euros to leave. If you don’t pay, they beat you,” Zubeir said, narrating how the group brought him to a large warehouse about 25 kilometers inland from Sfax. Zubeir said the warehouse was full of other kidnapped black Africans. “They beat you and they will call your family. They’ll hear you shouting: ‘Don’t kill me, don’t kill me!’ And your family, you know, they don’t want to lose you, so anywhere the money is, even if it’s their property, they will sell it,” he continued.
The practice of kidnapping, selling and holding migrants for ransom has been documented in neighboring Libya for years. However, in Tunisia, the phenomenon seems to have appeared around October 2023. In April, several recently arrived migrants living in the zeitouns camps told Meshkal that the phenomenon has become very common and that they personally had suffered such extortion at the hands of kidnappers working with the smugglers who had organized their trips from the Algerian-Tunisian border to the Sfax area. In this more recent case, the kidnappers were described as Ivorians. Migrants in the camp share knowledge about different gangs of kidnappers, often described by their nationality – the Ivorians, the Guineans, the Malians – but oftentimes working together across nationalities, including with Tunisians.
Zubeir was held by his captives for a week and was finally able to return to the camp by Ktetna after his family paid the money via bank transfer. This January he managed to get a new phone – an essential tool for saving up money via mobile banking for the next trip out on the sea. Recently, a friend of his from Ghana who went to Brazil and migrated through South and Central America to the United States was able to send him $100 U.S. dollars as he begins saving up once again.
In the camps, those who still have their passports sneak into Sfax and take out money for others while taking a small cut (banks require migrants present passports when withdrawing money). But it’s a risky practice because migrants say that whenever Tunisian authorities stop them, the authorities inevitably confiscate all the money they have on them and their belongings, and then deport them to one of the borders (at least 15 migrants told Meshkal this happened to them personally). But given they are virtually stuck in the camps, it’s the only way for the migrants to receive their money.
Making money off the camps
On the other side of the camp, a Tunisian man drops off pallets of pasta from his pick-up truck beside a tent. Inside the tent sits Touré, a middle-aged man from Guinea. He works as a cashier for the Tunisian business networks that drop off foodstuffs to sell in the camp and set prices above the Tunisian market price, taking advantage of the migrants’ inability to move freely to buy at the shops themselves.
In Tunisian shops, half a kilogram of pasta costs 0.410 dinars, a price fixed by the state. But in the camp, it sells for 0.500 dinars. Vegetable oil, which sells in stores for less than five dinars sells for six in the shop manned by Touré. Some of the migrants told Meshkal there have been times when prices were even higher.
As a result of these illegal profit margins (apparently punishable by up to five years in prison according to article 139 of the penal code), the camp shops are able to stock items that their Tunisian neighbors cannot get a hold of because the persistent food shortages of goods like rice, flour and sugar mean that limited stocks are hoarded and sold at higher prices when there are no authorities to check compliance, like at the camps. One older Tunisian woman living with her family next to the campsite in Ktetna commented, “we the poor [zawwali] as always pay the bill,” noting that while they have no issue with the people living in the camp, they feel that authorities pushed the burden onto their community far from the wealthy city of Sfax because the poorer people living in Ktetna don’t have as much political sway.
In recent days, locals in the Jbeniana district [moatamdiyya] have protested about the situation — specifically against the fact that Sfax’s authorities have chosen to concentrate the region’s huge migrant population in their area. A recent statement by Jbeniana’s local branch of the Tunisian General Labor Union (UGTT) threatened the possibility of a general strike over the camps, complaining that they are causing “serious consequences to the health, environmental and social fields,” while authorities are procrastinating on finding solutions beyond the insufficient security approach.
“The people of al Amra and Jbeniana’s rejection of the high concentration of Africans has nothing to do with any racist viewpoint. On the contrary, all observers are witness to the distinctly humane nature in which the people are treating the migrants,” the statement emphasized. It also called on both civil society and the general population to be “vigilant and not be drawn into anything that might inflame the situation,” in what may be a reference to Member of Parliament Fatma Mseddi’s collection of signatures in the district in mid-April for a petition calling the camps an “illegal invasion” and a “threat to national sovereignty,” while advocating for authorities to deport them.
‘Security’ or business?
The small tent shop tended to by Touré is where Zubeir shops for himself and those who are without a phone and therefore also without access to money – including a young man from Benin who sits next to us during the interview. He appears dazed, underweight, and unable to walk straight, and he barely speaks. Zubeir speaks for the Beninese man, explaining that he returned to the camp on foot the week before after the National Guard caught him at sea and then dropped him at the Algerian border. Zubeir claims that a large scar stretching from the Beninese man’s forehead to the crown of his head is an injury resulting from a guardsman beating him with a stick. And as many say is the norm, the security forces took the Beninese man’s phone.
Another camp is a kilometer further out from Sfax, much larger area-wise, but more scattered than the one closer to Ktetna. There, as I arrive and pull up to a small campfire in the center used for cooking, around 30 men, women and children apparently from different countries gather around me frowning and shouting.
“Are you Tunisian? Are you here to bring us food? If you’re not here to bring us food, we won’t talk to you,” are some of the phrases the crowd puts to me as an outsider.
Scattered on the ground in the vicinity of the campfire are scores of used tear gas cartridges and empty buckshot rounds, produced respectively by Spanish company Falken and Czech company Sellier & Bellot. They are what’s left from the National Guard’s last visit to the camp a week and a half prior. These are the same products from the same companies that were documented in the National Guard of Kebili’s assault on the Kamour sit-in in Tataouine in 2017 when locals protested their region’s marginalization and lack of share in the profits derived from nearby oil extraction. The black Falken tear gas cartridges that Meshkal found at the Sfax migrant camps were also documented during the Ouled Jaballah uprisings. During the Kamour sit-in, one protester lost an eye after a National Guardsman shot a tear gas canister at the protester’s face.
Sellier & Bellot, which manufactures both rubber bullets and regular ammunition, is a subsidiary of the Czech company Colt CZ Group which owns several other weapons manufacturing companies including Colt’s Manufacturing Company, originator of the famous Colt revolver, and the Smith & Wesson successor company, Dan Wesson Firearms.
An October 2023 report by the United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment classified ammunition like buckshot, the type of ammunition used on migrants in the olive fields outside Sfax, as one on a “prohibited list of inherently cruel, inhuman or degrading items,” because they inflict excessive or unnecessary pain or injury and are inaccurate and thus hit targets arbitrarily.
The UN report also mentions Tunisia as one among 11 other countries where there has been documented police violence resulting from “heavily armed and technologically equipped police and increasing mobilization of social movements and peaceful protests.”
“Imperialist Security Intervention”
For professor Mullin, the policies of Tunisian security forces towards migrants in the camps and elsewhere amounts to carrying out “the dirty work of the West: militarization and policing its borders and the southern Mediterranean to block people on the move from the African continent and west Asia from making their way to Europe,” or if they make it, leave them vulnerable to labor exploitation.
Explaining why Tunisia’s security forces play this role, Mullin pointed to “colonial legacies and ongoing forms of imperialist security intervention,” the latter she explains as consisting of “funds, equipment, intelligence sharing, training, and security ‘expertise’, provided through Western, and particular U.S., French and German imperialist security actors.”
The Tunisian National Guard receives training and equipment from both the European Union (EU), from European countries bilaterally, and from the United States. Some of these resources go through trainings with, for instance, the EU’s International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD), which is currently facilitating the “Strengthening the Tunisian Coast Guard Training Pillar” and implemented a program called Integrated Border Management (IBM) in Tunisia, under which thousands of Tunisian National Guardsmen were trained by German officials, in some cases in Germany. The Tunisian National Guard also partners with the Wyoming National Guard through the State Partnership Program (SPP)—the U.S. side noting that Tunisia and the U.S. face border challenges that are “remarkably similar.” The National Guard Special Units (USGN) that take part in the migrant dispersions in the olive fields even receive free surplus equipment from their U.S. partners through the U.S.-Tunisia Joint Military Commission.
The Tunisian National Guard has also received equipment and surveillance technology from Germany, Italy, France and the United States in exchange for its enforcement of Europe’s southern borders. According to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Tunisia’s military expenditure per capita almost doubled since 2010 and increased by more than 30% from 2018 to 2021. That comes as real public spending in education, healthcare, social security, and other public services have been scaled back as part of a set of austerity policies.
With Tunisia’s external funding sources tied closely to their role in stopping migration, it would seem that they have a perverse incentive to meet donor demands to cut migration flows while ensuring the threat never fully disappears.
Under President Saied’s government, Tunisia has put engagement with the IMF on hold indefinitely, in what Mullin argues should be seen as a disruption of Tunisia’s dependency-relationship with the West in the economic arena.
“The hope is that the assertion of sovereignty in the economic realm will trickle down to the security forces realm. But doing so at this stage would most likely provide a pretext for various forms of western intervention,” she said.
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