A transit country for mainly Sub-Saharan Africans seeking to reach Europe by sea, Tunisia has been receiving EU support for border control since 2023, triggering an internal migration crisis that recently led to the dismantling of several camps.
The operation carried out by the National Guard followed anti-migrant rhetoric in the public sphere and a particularly hostile stance by Tunisian President Kais Saied, who claimed in February 2023 that “hordes of irregular migrants” were present in Tunisia as part of “a criminal plan to change the composition of the demographic landscape” of the North African country.
The speech led to waves of attacks against Sub-Saharan people, who were progressively pushed out of urban areas towards remote villages.
Approximately 20,000 migrant and refugees found shelter in 17 makeshift camps in the olive fields of al-Amra and Jebiniana, near the eastern coastal city of Sfax. But their presence sparked numerous protests from locals, who claimed they could no longer access their lands.
On 4 April, the National Guard started dismantling the camps, burning residents’ belongings and arresting those who protested.
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According to officials, most of the residents were displaced towards state-owned lands, while others attempted to build smaller camps nearby.
Said reiterated that Tunisia “will never be a point of transit nor a land of settlement” for people seeking to reach Europe, arguing that “those who have been trying since 2017 to turn Tunisia into a place of settlement for migrants, pocketing millions in foreign currencies, are constantly plotting from abroad against the country’s security”.
Meanwhile, he has pushed to accelerate the International Organisation for Migration (IOM)’s voluntary return programmes, leading to the launch of weekly repatriation flights in May.
Racist rhetoric
Analysts and activists say the current dismantling campaign is a direct result of widespread anti-migrant statements by some politicians, who present them as a danger and an existential threat to be kept at bay.
In February, independent MP Fatma Mseddi called for controls on migrant women’s birth rates, warning of the “risk” that soon Tunisians of Sub-Saharan origins could one day become MPs in Tunisia.
She then made a visit to the camps, which she described as “a state within the state” while warning against an “alarming” situation.
Anti-migrant discourse has also surged on social media, particularly targeting Sub-Saharan women, accused of heightened “fertility”, with users keeping track of numbers of births in Sfax hospitals.
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For Ahlam Chemlali, a migration researcher at Aalborg University in Denmark, these narratives are inspired by the Great Replacement theory – a far-right conspiracy concept that Tunisian authorities have adopted to claim that Black Africans plan to replace Tunisians – and are used to criminalise and pathologise Sub-Saharan women.
“This racist trope constructs Black and brown women as hyper-fertile and a demographic threat,” she told MEE.
“Black women, especially mothers, are surveyed, stigmatised and blamed for bringing children into precarious conditions, as if their reproductive choices were a political provocation rather than a survival strategy.”
Acting on these hate speeches, the authorities have sought to evict migrant people “as a way to make them invisible,” Chemlali said.
For Khaled Tabbabi, a migration specialist, “this is reproducing a colonial racist fantasy”.
“To protect the beauty of Lac1 [upper class neighbourhood in Tunis] and Sfax, migrants need to be invisibilised,” he told MEE.
Lately, online anti-migrant rhetoric and fear-mongering campaigns have also led to the creation of vigilante groups which have been seen patrolling in search for migrants to hand over to the police, often mistreating them in the process.
According to Mohamed Salah Chatti, a researcher in geopolitics and international relations, the government has no interest in stopping the phenomenon, even if it could spiral out of control.
“The authorities are not taking action against these groups and they are even benefiting from their role as informants and from their actions in chasing irregular migrants,” he told MEE.
European ‘carte blanche’ to Saied
In addition to local authorities, activists accuse the European Union of being behind this situation by outsourcing migration management to countries south of the Mediterranean.
After the 2011 pro-democracy revolution and the start of the war in neighbouring Libya, Tunisia began to be seen as a transit country, mainly for Sub-Saharan populations, and no longer just as a place of irregular emigration for its own nationals.
The EU therefore attempted to push Tunisia to adopt a national asylum law, present itself as a safe country for migrants and set up detention centres to process asylum requests to Europe.
However in 2018, Tunisia refused, tasking instead the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) with granting refugee status, while the IOM was mostly responsible for voluntary returns. This led to migrant people being stuck in limbo, with no opportunities for education or employment, and therefore vulnerable to abuse.
‘Vulnerability for migrants is created through migration policies. The objective is to put them in such precarious conditions that they would ask for voluntary returns’
– Khaled Tabbabi, migration specialist
Then in 2023, Tunis signed a controversial memorandum of understanding with Brussels granting the North African country $225m to deter migration to Europe.
The deal was criticised by civil society groups for lacking human rights safeguarding and risking making the EU “complicit in abuses” carried out by Tunisian authorities.
“The EU-Tunisia deal effectively gave carte blanche to President Saied to manage migration however he sees fit, as long as migrants are prevented from crossing into Europe,” Chemlali said.
Since Saied’s anti-migrant speech, Tunisia has been repeatedly accused of serious violations of their rights, including collective expulsions, mistreatment, sexual violence, as well as cases of human trafficking and sale of people to Libyan militias. Authorities denied what they called “malicious allegations” but refused to launch a public investigation.
Moreover, last year, Saied accused NGOs assisting migrants of being foreign agents, working in Europe’s interests to help the settlement of non-nationals in Tunisia.
The French NGO Terre d’Asile, local group Mnemty, and the Tunisian Council for Refugees, were all forced to shut down in 2024. As a result, asylum procedures have been suspended, leaving asylum seekers with no alternative to get permanent residency.
In addition, a dozen activists and NGO workers have been jailed and 40 others have faced criminal prosecution for their support of asylum seekers.
The crackdown has had “devastating humanitarian consequences for refugees and migrants in the country,” Amnesty International said this week.
For Tabbabi, the precarious conditions in which migrants are forced to live are a result of a deliberate European border control policy.
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“Vulnerability for migrants is created through migration policies. Migrants are marginalised from basic necessities, like food, shelter or healthcare… The objective is to put them in such precarious conditions that they would ask for voluntary returns,” he told MEE.
Activists also accuse the EU of increasingly involving civil society and international organisations in migration control to legitimise its goals and give a more human aspect to its border outsourcing.
“The IOM and UNHCR are complicit in creating these dangerous conditions. The process of asking for asylum is full of obstacles and blockages. It takes months just to get an appointment,” Tabbabi said, adding that both organisations are massively funded by EU member states.
“The IOM and UNHCR in Tunisia are playing their role in border management which consists in facilitating deportations. This is the only task they can fulfil as they were intimidated even in the president’s speeches,” Chatti said, in reference to Saied’s accusations that these organisations “only provide reports and communiques”.
Chemlali also noted that the Red Crescent and IOM staff seemed to assist the National Guard with the current dismantling operations in Sfax, which raised concerns about their involvement in the current crisis.
“Humanitarian organisations are supposed to operate with neutrality and independence. When they are seen collaborating with security forces in eviction campaigns, it blurs those lines. It undermines trust and raises serious questions about complicity in human rights violations,” she said, asking that their role be clarified.
MEE has reached out to the IOM, the UNHCR, the Red Crescent and the EU delegation in Tunisia for comment, but had not received any response by the time of publication.
While it has been reported that the EU is now developing “concrete conditions” for delivering its payments to Tunisia based on respect for human rights, that is unlikely to influence state policies, according to Chatti.
“Diplomatic pressure may impact the wording in the president’s statements and the discursive policies for a certain period of time but, at the level of practical policies, nothing will change,” he said.
‘Voluntary’ returns ‘doomed to failure’
Meanwhile, Tunisian authorities are promoting so-called voluntary returns as a solution to all migration-related problems.
In April, around a thousand people left the country using the IOM programme, confirming the upward trend seen in the past months. In 2024, 7,250 returned home, compared to only 2,557 in 2023.
However, for civil society organisations, these returns cannot be considered voluntary.
“When your home has been destroyed, your savings stolen and your children are without shelter or food, the IOM return programme becomes the only available option. That’s not voluntary, that’s survival under duress,” Chemlali said.
‘What we see is not an end to migration, but its transformation into something more fragmented, risky, and deadly’
– Ahlam Chemlali, migration researcher at Aalborg University
“It’s a form of forced displacement, dressed in the language of humanitarianism and consent.”
According to Frontex, the EU border agency, arrivals from Tunisia and Libya decreased by 59 percent in 2024.
However, for Tabbabi and Chemlali, this does not indicate that migration flows towards Europe will decrease or stop.
“What we see is not an end to migration, but its transformation into something more fragmented, risky, and deadly. People don’t disappear; they reappear elsewhere, often in more precarious ways,” Chemlali said.
“The number of migrants coming from the Mediterranean may have decreased after Europe closed off all pathways, but it created human tragedies in Tunisian seas and in border zones,” Tabbabi noted.
At least 600 people died in shipwrecks off Tunisia’s coasts in 2024, according to the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights (FTDES).
“A lot of migrants come here as a result of climate change, others are facing political or societal threats. These people are resisting to stay alive and their attempts to look for a safe space will never stop,” he added.
“The best solution is a human mechanism where the states equally share the responsibility of managing asylum seekers, each country according to its capabilities, instead of opposing geography and exposing their countries to instability,” Chatti stressed.
“Every other policy that goes against this direction is nothing more than a temporary solution that is doomed to failure.”
