Migrants from sub-Saharan Africa living in Tunisia are staying indoors through fear of reprisals, while some have been forcibly evicted from their accommodation by landlords. Sub-Saharan students who are studying legally in the North African country meanwhile say they are “living in fear” and have been told by student organisations to “stay in their homes” to avoid being attacked. This climate of fear comes after comments made by Tunisian president Kaïs Saïed on Tuesday February 21st during a meeting to discuss the issue of undocumented sub-Saharan migrants in the country.
In a statement published after that meeting the president spoke of an “unusual” wave of immigration that had led to “unacceptable violence and crime”. The statement also spoke of a “criminal plan that had been in place for decades to change Tunisia's demographic make-up, with people having received large sums of money to provide residency for sub-Saharans”. The plan's aim, said the communiqué, was to make Tunisia “entirely African” and to stop it from belonging to the community of “Arab and Islamic countries”.
This conspiracy theory – which is very similar to the 'Great Replacement' theory in France and elsewhere – was immediately picked up by Éric Zemmour, the president of France's far-right Reconquête party and a failed presidential candidate. “The countries of the Maghreb [editor's note, a term for north-west Africa, an area also known as the 'Arab Maghreb'] are themselves starting to raise the alarm over the mass arrival of migrants,” he tweeted on Wednesday. “Here we have Tunisia wanting to take urgent measures to protect its people. What are we waiting for to fight the Great Replacement?”
Enlargement : Illustration 1
The emergence of such language in Tunisia is no trivial matter. For several days numerous TikTok pages have been sharing videos of sub-Saharan migrants accompanied by racist messages in Arabic, in which the names of Tunisian neighbourhoods are replaced with those of African towns to denounce their supposed “colonisation”. In recent months the Tunisian Nationalist Party, a political party set up in 2018, has been spreading a petition urging the expulsion of sub-Saharan migrants and the abolition of what is called 'loi 50' - passed in 2018 - which outlaws all forms of racism and discrimination in Tunisia.
Exploited and mistreated workforce
Yet sub-Saharan migrants have been in Tunisia for years. There are between 30,000 and 50,000 of them according to figures from non-governmental organisations; there are no official statistics. Many of the migrants come to work for a spell before heading clandestinely for Europe by boat.
As soon as they arrive in Tunisia their lack of resources and irregular legal status obliges such migrants to work as cheap and undeclared labour, and they are exploited by the services, restaurant and construction sectors. The procedures for getting a work contract or a residence permit are very compartmentalised and some of the migrants do not try and settle in Tunisia because of the hurdles involved.
Tunisia is, to an extent, a 'transit' country and does not have a law on asylum nor a clear immigration policy, in a bid to avoid becoming a magnet for anyone seeking to get to Europe. “The country is caught in the vice of European migration policies on migration anyway,” explained the political scientist Yasmine Wardi Akrimi. The number of sub-Saharan migrants leaving Tunisia's shores on boats bound for Italy has increased, with an estimated 10,000 seeking to make the journey in 2022.
Racist campaign
However, President Kaïs Saïed's statement did not make explicit reference to this issue, and was – according to his own words – more about the spectre of a “planned” influx of migrants to Tunisia. That statement followed a wave of arrests of nearly 400 sub-Saharan Africans and came in the wake of numerous hate campaigns on social media. These are “in part orchestrated” according to Mahdi Elleuch, a researcher at the NGO Legal Agenda, who points to the number of Facebook pages run from abroad which are sharing racist comments about sub-Saharan migrants. “There's also the fact that the nationalist party, a racist party, has been invited onto a state television station and onto many media outlets in recent months,” he added.
On top of this sudden media coverage of the issue, disinformation has been widely spread on social media. Anthropologist Kerim Bouzouita said that the arrival of conspiracy theories in the north of the continent concerning countries from the south was not surprising “because they are spread and accelerated thanks to Facebook”. He said: “At one time the theory of a Judaeo-Masonic plot also arrived here and was picked up.” There are nearly seven million Facebook users in Tunisia out of a total population of twelve million people. “Internet users have little trust in the traditional Tunisian media because of a certain blurring of the line in the past between the media and politics, so they seek the truth elsewhere, in this case on social media,” added Kerim Bouzouita.
These racist attacks employ the kind of targeting that is commonly found in conspiracy theories. On top of the conflation of irregular migration and crime, several media and TikTok pages have produced inflated numbers for how many sub-Saharan migrants are in Tunisia. Some speak of 700,000 migrants, others of 1.2 million, but they cite no sources. “It's a way of raising the spectre of an invasion,” said Yasmine Wardi Akrimi. She pointed out that talk of an “invasion” from sub-Saharan Africa also exists in other countries in the Maghreb. “In Morocco, too, you currently have a big campaign to ban marriages between Moroccan women and sub-Saharan men in order to avoid more of them,” she said.
An economic and social crisis
The economic crisis in Tunisia has provided fertile terrain for those seeking scapegoats. “One of the videos that's been shared the most in recent days is that of a poverty-stricken Tunisian woman saying that the sub-Saharans are able to get state-subsidised food supplies while she is no longer able to,” said Yasmine Wardi Akrimi. “They're also seen as the origin of the shortages in certain products that the country is experiencing.”
According to researcher Mahdi Elleuch, this damaging and violent situation has been fuelled by the drift towards authoritarianism that Tunisia has experienced since Kaïs Saïed's 'self-coup' on July 25th 2021 following a political and health crisis. In under two years the elected president has dissolved the legislature, taken on new powers and overseen a referendum to adopt a new constitution that provides for a strongly presidential regime.
In the past two weeks a security clampdown has led to the arrest of around a dozen political figures and regime opponents for allegedly “plotting against state security”. At the same time committal proceedings have been launched against the director of a private radio station for “money laundering”. His lawyers say these are trumped up charges and that this is simply an attempt at intimidation because of the radio station's editorial line, as it has hosted political debates openly critical of Kaïs Saïed.
This security crackdown comes as Tunisia seeks to negotiate a 1.9 billion dollar loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). “We're looking at a regime where the government is facing unprecedented economic difficulties and a crisis of legitimacy with a very strong rate of abstention at the last legislative elections (close to 89% of the electorate did not vote). So talking up an enemy within enables it to win some popularity,” said Mahdi Elleuch.
In a video published last Thursday during a meeting with his minister of the interior, Tunisian president Kaïs Saïed once again tackled the issue of migration, this time addressing his audience directly rather than via a statement. He said that migrants “living legally in Tunisia have nothing to fear”, that the plan to bring in undocumented migrants was “indeed real”, but that the current security measures had “nothing to do with racism, it's simply about applying the law”.
These new remarks did not convince civil society and human rights groups in Tunisia. Around 15 associations have created an anti-racist front and will take legal action over the racism of recent social media campaigns. They also staged a demonstration against racism on Avenue Habib Bourguiba in Tunis on Saturday.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter