Tunisia – Teams of garbage workers are busy in the deserted alley in front of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) office in Tunis. A nearby park is empty.
In both cases, large piles of garbage are the only evidence of the hundreds of refugees and migrants from sub-Saharan countries who until recently sought refuge here.
In the early hours of Friday, police stormed into both camps as well as a protest site outside the UNHCR offices a few miles away, evicting them from shelters set up there and packing the men, women and children onto city buses to the Algerian border.
The Refugees in Libya organization claims they were taken off buses near the border town of Jendouba – whose governorate borders Algeria – where they had no food or water to fend for themselves.
The raids in Tunis are the latest example of an increasingly hostile atmosphere in Tunisia. One in which irregularly arriving sub-Saharan Africans, whose numbers are increasing by the day, are under attack by both security services and politicians, forced to seek refuge in open fields while becoming increasingly vulnerable to kidnapping and ransom.
who they are
Tunisia is currently hosting tens of thousands of irregular refugees from sub-Saharan Africa, almost all of whom are hoping to continue their months-long journey to Europe.
🚨Continued mass dumping in the desert by the Tunisian authorities.
At around 3 a.m. yesterday, several police forces, including special riot control and counterterrorism units, dispersed the protest camp in front of the UNHCR office in the Lac zone of Tunis. Hundreds of refugees and… pic.twitter.com/5uaYxDmR75
— Refugees in Libya (@RefugeesinLibya) May 3, 2024
Total numbers cannot be confirmed. However, the IOM estimates that around 15,000 people could be living in the fields near the coastal city of Sfax after police evicted them from the center in September.
Some have returned to the outskirts of the city and settled in working-class neighborhoods near the railway tracks. More shelters in the fields near Zarzis, near the Libyan border, are clustered around the UNHCR office in the hope of securing refugees accreditation and some level of protection in a country that offers none.
At the time of Friday’s police raid, it was estimated that around 550 people were living in distress in Tunis. In front of the IOM offices, many families had sought refuge in wooden and tarpaulin structures. Among them were numerous children and newborns, including Freedom, a four-month-old boy born in Tunisia to a Nigerian mother named Gift.
“I called him that because I need freedom,” she had told Al Jazeera. “I need to know freedom.” There is no freedom for us,” she says.
Gift entered the country last summer via Libya, where a militia patrolling the desert captured her and held her for seven months before her family in Nigeria could raise her ransom.
Gift and Freedom’s location is currently unknown.
Undesirable
Conditions in the fields near Sfax are terrible, said 37-year-old Richard from Ghana.
Violent police raids and surveillance have become more common, and disease has gradually spread in a community without medical care. The fear of arrest and deportation to the desert borders of Libya and Algeria is omnipresent.
“The conditions there are bad. Very, very bad,” Richard said.
He had returned from Sfax to the fragile safety of the IOM camp in Tunis a week earlier.
“I’m sick, you can see that. My body hurts,” he said. “I have to go to the hospital, but they won’t give you any help. It’s very difficult in Sfax.”
He pointed to his coughing friend Solomon (36): “My brother here is really sick. He has been coughing for some time,” he said.
“I started coughing three days ago. My whole body hurts. A lot of people in the camp had the same symptoms,” Solomon said.
Adding to the spread of the disease is the ongoing threat from the police. Camps around Sfax, where the undocumented shelters offer no protection from police surveillance, which has recently been extended to the skies.
“I saw the drones,” Solomon says. “I was at kilometer 31. It went up and down,” he says, waving his hand above his head.
Richard agrees that he was at kilometer 34, the names of the informal camps are based on their distance from the center of Sfax. He describes a raid last month in which refugees were able to film police burning tents and firing tear gas.
“The police came and burned down the tents,” explains Richard, showing the video of the raid on his cell phone. “I don’t know why they did that,” he says.
But this is just one of the daily raids on people living in the fields around Sfax, cut off from the world as police try to deny access to NGOs and curious journalists.
Both Richard and Solomon subsequently told Al Jazeera that they were not in the Tunis camps at the time of the police raid.
Kidnapped
With much of the sub-Saharan African refugee community living in an official vacuum, the kidnapping trade has been on the rise since at least late last year.
In Tunis, huddled on a broken sofa that was later swept away in the raid along with surrounding accommodation, three Sierra Leoneans reported being detained and tortured in Sfax upon their arrival from Algeria.
Tunisia is not safe. Please, we would like to leave before the election. Many women, nursing mothers and children have to sleep outside until their parents can repair their plastic houses. European migration policy perpetuates enslavement, killing, rape and exploitation on our own continent. 🇹🇳🇪🇺Are murderers https://t.co/S9ULWrwguu pic.twitter.com/mMZCL4Sfqp
— Josephus Thomas (@JosephusT001) April 6, 2024
They were held captive by an unknown number of Francophones, presumably Cameroonians, after being “sold” to them by Tunisian smugglers to whom they had already paid 600 euros ($644).
“They beat us with plastic pipes. First, he gets a bottle and burns it so the plastic falls on us,” said 29-year-old Hassan.
His friend, 34-year-old Izzi from Freetown, picked up the story: “They force us to call our families. I call my wife in Sierra Leone. I’m supposed to earn money for her and our three children. We all talk on the phone.
“We transfer the money. They leave us with nothing. They take our phones, everything.”
Reports of kidnapping, torture and human trafficking are widespread among the refugee community in sub-Saharan Africa. In March, the practice was denounced by a group of 27 international and national NGOs, including the regional office of Lawyers Without Borders, who said the spread of kidnappings was the result of official attitudes toward migration.
Determining how widespread the trafficking is — like trying to count total arrivals — when both the victim and the trafficker rely on secrecy is like trying to put your finger on liquid mercury.
“Since the end of last year, reports of such practices have been increasing, especially in Sfax, where migrants are kidnapped by other migrants, or in connection with Tunisian smugglers,” Romdhane Ben Amor, communications officer at the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights, said .
“They are then held in apartments or houses against their will.”
What is currently happening in Sfax is shameful. The worst thing is that the state and so-called politicians are all complicit. Remember that Tunisia has more than 12,000 refugees, mostly in Italy, where they are treated with dignity. pic.twitter.com/EHA7pNKsDC
– Karim Benabdallah (@karim2k) May 5, 2024
Translation: What is currently happening in Sfax is shameful. The worst thing is that the state and so-called politicians are all complicit. Remember it #Tunisia has more than 12,000 refugees, mostly in Italy, where they are treated with dignity.
The situation has worsened since authorities expelled undocumented refugees from sub-Saharan countries to the fields outside Sfax, Ben Amor continued.
In April, journalists from the French newspaper Libération reported on a police raid on a three-story building in a working-class neighborhood of Sfax, where refugees and migrants from sub-Saharan countries were sent to the roof by their black captors and told with threats to jump if they broke up the police are approaching.
Denigrated
Emboldened by a government that analysts typically describe as authoritarian and working with a largely pliable media, many in Tunisia are venting their frustration over declining living standards, shrinking freedoms and endemic unemployment among the black refugee and migrant community.
In Sfax, local lawmaker Fatma Mseddi has expressed much of that anger by calling for the deportation of irregular entrants and pushing a law intended to hamper the international NGOs she blames for supporting them.
A Tunisian NGO’s proposal to accommodate some of the refugees and migrants in a hotel has already been attacked in the press and the organization’s national credibility has been questioned.
Locally, community Facebook groups focus on this anger while ignoring their own contribution to the overall migration numbers. 17,322 Tunisian citizens traveled to Italy without documents last year.
However, with no long-term solution in sight, Tunisia continues to punish refugees and migrants for their presence.
How four-month-old Freedom and the other children from the Tunis camps could be responsible for their homelessness and misery is unknown.