From Dignity to Racial Purity? Saied’s Anti-“African” Agenda, by Shreya Parikh – 7 May 2024

From Nawaat

In a shocking display of President Kais Saied’s populist politics and anti-migrant crackdown, Tunisian police forcibly dismantled a protest camp of asylum seekers in Tunis early on May 3rd, expelling around 500 black migrants to the Algerian and Libyan borders without food or water. This brutal action underscores the Tunisian government’s increasingly explicit agenda of racial purification targeting sub-Saharan Africans, which human rights groups condemn as blatant anti-Black racism cloaked in anti-immigrant rhetoric.

According to a video released by “Refugees in Libya” on X (formerly Twitter), the protest camp in front of the UNHCR headquarters in Tunis was attacked by police early on the morning of May 3, 2024. “Hundreds of women and children have been crowded into buses,” the narrator of the video notes. Around 500 black migrants from Chad, Sudan, and South Sudan were taken to the borders with Algeria or Libya to be “dumped” there. Later in the video, a young migrant man on one of these buses notes (in Arabic), “we are being forcefully expelled to Algeria” without food and water. “Women and children,” different interlocutors reiterate, in the hope of arousing some pity among viewers. Black migrant men know that they are never seen as deserving of empathy!

The protest camp that was dismantled by the police was set up by refugees and asylum seekers in February 2023 in order to “demand protection and immediate evacuation to a safe country” from international bodies like the UNHCR and the IOM. After President Kais Saied’s anti-sub-Saharan migrant statement on February 21, 2023 which triggered state- and civilian-supported violence against anyone seen as “African,” over a hundred black migrants set up a camp in front of the IOM and UNHCR offices in Tunis, hoping to receive aid and support from these organizations. Yet they were met with the steady inaction of both organizations whose very mandate is to provide humanitarian support to migrants. Instead, the UNHCR and IOM regularly called upon Tunisian police to surveil on these migrants.

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Shreya Parikh is a researcher and lecturer at Sciences Po (France). Her work focuses on “race,” racialisation, migration, and citizenship in North Africa, in particular on the racialisation of Black people in Tunisia — both Black Tunisians and sub-Saharan migrants.

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