2023-07-10 21:05:38
Several hundred migrants, abandoned in a desert area on the border between Tunisia and Libya after being evacuated from the city of Sfax last week, were sheltered in towns in southern Tunisia on Monday, but NGOs worry about the fate of dozens of others pushed back to the Algerian border.
Following clashes that cost the life of a Tunisian, dozens of migrants were driven out of Sfax (center-east), which had become the main point of departure for irregular immigration to Europe, and led by authorities according to NGOs, to inhospitable border areas with Libya and Algeria.
Those picked up by Tunisian authorities at the Libyan border, in the militarized buffer zone of Ras Jedir, have been divided into several groups, according to NGOs and media. “A group is in Medenine, at the level of a high school guarded by the security forces,” said the head of HRW.
The Tunisian association Beity for assistance to women victims of violence had launched an urgent appeal on Monday to other NGOs and public institutions to “coordinate and pool resources” in order to provide emergency aid to sub-Saharan migrants “deported to the gates of the Sahara”.
For Ms Chellali of HRW, “it is a relief to know that they were able to leave the border area with Libya but many other people deported near the Algerian border risk their lives if they are not immediately rescued”. According to HRW, they would be at least 150 to 200 in this situation.
“torture”
In a press release, the refugee aid organization Refugees International denounced “the violent arrests and forced expulsions of hundreds of black African migrants” in Sfax, stressing that some were nevertheless “registered with the High Commissioner for Refugees or have a status legal in Tunisia”.
The World Organization against Torture in Tunisia (OMCT) announced for its part that it had seized the UN Committee against Torture to denounce the specific case of “VF, a migrant of sub-Saharan origin deported to the border between Tunisia and Libya on July 2” after being arrested without cause and “beaten with an iron bar in security posts” in Ben Guerdane (east).
This ill-treatment as well as the deprivation of water and food for “more than 700 migrants” held in the buffer zone “knowingly imposed by State agents on VF and other migrants because of their racial origin in order to force to leave the territory constitute torture”, added the OMCT.
An increasingly openly xenophobic discourse against these migrants has spread since the Tunisian President, Kais Saied, condemned illegal immigration in February, presenting it as a demographic threat to his country, plagued by a socio-economic crisis that has worsened since he assumed full powers in July 2021.
On Saturday, he denounced what he called “lies propagated on social networks”, saying that migrants in Tunisia received “humane treatment in line with our values, contrary to what is said in colonial circles and among agents who work in their service”, according to a press release from the presidency.
Monday evening, he estimated in a new press release that “Tunisia has given a lesson to the world with the way it has taken care of these migrants”, adding however that “it refuses to be a substitute homeland for them and will only accept those who are in a regular situation”.
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