Some wooden boards scattered on the ground and torn tarps: not much remains of the hut that served as a makeshift shelter for Ibrahim (assumed name) and his relatives. The migrant camp, like many others around the city of El-Amra, on the eastern coast of Tunisia, where this 29-year-old Sierra Leonean has lived for about ten months, was devastated during the month of September by heavy rains.
The several hundred men, women and children in several countries in English-speaking Africa, already living in unsanitary conditions, without running water, without electricity and without sanitation, have lost almost everything. They don’t even have anything to eat anymore. “Some Tunisians have empathy and give us a little food, but it is very rarelaments Ibrahim. Our life here is miserable. »
The ground is still wet on this mid-September day. Only olive trees can be seen on the horizon. To the east, a long beach opens to the sea and the hope it represents. “We just want to leave!” “We did not come to settle here but to arrive in Italy”supports Ibrahim. But the strong police presence, on land and at sea, complicates this flight to Europe.
The migratory corridors, which cross the African continent and converge towards the Italian island of Lampedusa, located just one hundred kilometers away, now encounter the security system established thanks to an agreement signed on July 16, 2023 between President Kaïs Saïed and his European partners. Since the beginning of 2024, arrivals to Italy from Tunisia have decreased by 82% according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
A “single-person regime”
While Saïed appears to be the big favorite in the presidential elections scheduled for October 6, in which only two candidates (one of them imprisoned) will oppose him, the European Union (EU) is struggling to adopt a clear position. in the face of the authoritarian turn of the Tunisian head of state.
In a note distributed on July 7 to the twenty-seven Ministers of Foreign Affairs, which the world obtained, the European diplomatic service is concerned, among other things, by a “clear deterioration of the political climate and a reduction of civic space” with almost “Thirty politicians, activists, journalists, lawyers and businessmen arrested”of a “single-person regime with a highly centralized presidential political system” and of “I treat migrants, asylum seekers and refugees. [qui] causes growing concern ».
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