Tunisian coast guards try to stop migrants at sea during their attempt to cross to Italy, off the coast of Sfax, Tunisia, on April 27, 2023.Jihed Abidellaoui/Reuters
Spring and early summer in Tunisia bring warm waters and winds, and long days, signalling the seasonal rebirth of an expanding activity that routinely proves deadly: migration.
In late May in Sfax, the coastal city halfway between Tunis in the north and the Libyan frontier in the south, an underground business was coming to life. Wooden fishing boats of six to eight metres were being built, bought or stolen, and banger outboard motors were being attached to their sterns.
Freelance agents were connecting wannabe migrants with captains to make the voyage across the Mediterranean to the nearest Italian ports. The cost for passage: about US$2,500.
One of these agents – he called himself a “middleman” – was Ahmed, a wiry, bearded 37-year-old Tunisian who works as a plumber and a mechanic in the off-season. Early this month, 24 middlemen and human smugglers were arrested, according to the Tunisian coast guard. (Since his job is illegal and he fears arrest, The Globe and Mail is only identifying Ahmed by his first name.)
Ahmed is not a typical middleman. He deals only with Tunisians who want to flee the country, not sub-Saharan Africans who have dominated the cross-Mediterranean flows in the past decade or so. High numbers of Tunisians are giving up on their country, whose economy is besieged by high inflation, rising poverty and crushing youth unemployment. The Tunisian statistical agency put the jobless rate among 15- to 24-year-olds late last year at 39 per cent.
“Tunisian migration is becoming a trend,” Ahmed said. “In every neighbourhood in Sfax, you can find people who want to leave. Young people, old people, even families and children are trying to get to Europe. Everyone is fed up here. There are jobs, but not many, and the salaries are terrible.”
The remains of boats used by migrants to cross the Mediterranean to reach Europe are scattered along the port of El-Amra in Sfax on April 24.FETHI BELAID/Getty Images
A joint report published in June by the International Organization for Migration and the UNHCR, the United Nations’ refugee agency, says 17,500 Tunisians arrived in Italy by sea in 2023 – second only to Guineans, at 18,000. Arrivals through Tunisia of nationals from Côte d’Ivoire and Burkina Faso were third and fourth.
The IOM-UNHCR report says the number of Tunisian nationals arriving in Italy climbed after September, but did not say why or give comparative numbers.
Overall, some 140,000 migrants and refugees of all nationalities attempted the journey from Tunisia to Europe last year, an increase of 138 per cent over 2022. About 30 per cent of them were rescued or intercepted after they left the Tunisian coast; 70 per cent arrived in Italy.
The voyage is sometimes fatal. In 2023 more than 3,100 migrants and refugees died or went missing crossing the eastern, central and western Mediterranean, up from 2,500 in 2022. Almost two-thirds of the deaths last year took place in the central route, mostly from Tunisia. “The increasing number and the proportion of deaths off the coast of Tunisia is unprecedented in the last ten years,” the report says.
In total, some 212,000 migrants and refugees attempted, or completed, crossings to Europe from Algeria, Tunisia and Libya last year, up 52 per cent from 2022 and the highest number since 2017. About 71 per cent of them landed in Italy, Greece or Malta; the rest were intercepted or rescued at sea.
Sea Attempted migrant crossings, 2023
2023 total: 212,100
Arrivals in Italy and Malta
FRANCE
Disembarkations
in North Africa
ITALY
150,300
GREECE
800
TURKEY
43,400
400
MALTA
Sfax
TUNISIA
17,200
ALGERIA
LIBYA
EGYPT
the globe and mail, Source: UNHCR
Attempted migrant crossings, 2023
2023 total: 212,100
Arrivals in Italy and Malta
FRANCE
Disembarkations
in North Africa
ITALY
150,300
GREECE
800
TURKEY
43,400
400
MALTA
Sfax
TUNISIA
17,200
ALGERIA
LIBYA
EGYPT
the globe and mail, Source: UNHCR
Attempted migrant crossings, 2023
2023 total: 212,100
Arrivals in Italy and Malta
FRANCE
Disembarkations
in North Africa
ITALY
150,300
GREECE
800
TURKEY
43,400
400
MALTA
Sfax
TUNISIA
17,200
ALGERIA
LIBYA
EGYPT
the globe and mail, Source: UNHCR
The number of Tunisians determined to build new lives in Europe has increased since the Arab Spring. That series of protests across the region began in Tunisia in December, 2010, when Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor in Sidi Bouzid, a small city in the centre of the country, set himself on fire in protest of the harassment and humiliation heaped on him by municipal officials. His death triggered nationwide protests that sent dictatorial president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali into exile a month later.
In 2011, Tunisia held its first free elections since 1956. Political prisoners were released, media freedom was restored and civil societies thrived. Later that decade, Tunisia could claim to be the Arab Spring’s only enduring democratic state. Revolutions elsewhere ultimately failed, restoring strongman rule (Egypt) or descending into chaos and civil war (Syria, Libya).
What did not thrive in Tunisia’s democracy was the economy. Investors, foreign and domestic, avoided spending money in what they viewed as a volatile political environment in the years after the revolution.
Unemployment, especially among young people, rose and three bouts of Islamic terrorism scared off tourists, a vital source of income for the state. As the economy deteriorated, the International Monetary Fund extended loans in exchange for austerity measures. Then the pandemic hit, killing tourism again.
Since then, another ugly factor has come into play, one which worries both skilled and unskilled Tunisians, sending thousands of them fleeing: the rollback in freedoms. It has effectively returned Tunisia to dictatorship under President Kais Saied, the retired law professor who was elected in 2019.
Tunisians protest in front of the Italian embassy in Tunis on April 17.FETHI BELAID/Getty Images
He has dissolved parliament and the Supreme Council of Magistrates, and rewrote the constitution, removing checks and balances. He has also imprisoned opposition members and journalists critical of his regime.
Two critics who were arrested were Ezzedine Hazgui, who spent much of the 1970s in prison as a radical-left political dissident, and his law professor son, Jawher Ben Mbarek. Mr. Hazgui, 80, was released in February after one day of detention; his son remains in prison.
“The president has stopped the dreams of people,” Mr. Hazgui said. “Young people have no future here. They have no work, no liberties. Thousands of engineers and doctors are leaving. They are our skilled taxpayers.”
Several young men contacted randomly by The Globe in the streets and shops of central Tunis all said they wanted to head to Europe. The unskilled ones, those incapable of securing work contracts with European employers, know they must take to the boats to make the dangerous passage to southern Europe.
One plotting his escape is Josef Wechtati, 19, who works at a shop in downtown Tunis that sells inexpensive clothing. He makes the equivalent of US$130 a month and said he can barely afford to feed himself.
“All my friends want to go to Europe,” he said. “The revolution was just a coup against Ben Ali. He was good for the poor people. Everything was affordable back then, not now.”
Migrants from Sub-Saharian Africa sit near tents at a camp in Jebeniana in Sfax on April 24.FETHI BELAID/Getty Images
Mr. Wechtati has already made two failed attempts to reach Europe by hiding in cargo ships. Sniffer dogs found him. He will try again soon – this time on a migrants’ boat.
“Lots of parents are helping their children to leave because they know their kids have no future here,” he said. “Sure, it’s dangerous, but I am dying anyway here.”
Tunisia finds itself in a difficult spot on all aspects of the migration crisis. Sub-Saharan Africans eager to reach Europe are now doing so largely through Tunisia, not Libya.
Mr. Saied has said the migrants are a threat to national security. (The European Commission is paying his administration in Tunis to curb irregular migration amid reports of widespread abuse of the migrants in Tunisia.) At the same time, skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled Tunisians are leaving in droves.
Messaoud Romdhani, former head of the Tunisian Forum of Economic and Social Rights, said the country is losing some of its best and brightest – the ones who should stay to defend democracy and build its institutions.
“The lack of democracy is a contributing factor to emigration,” he said. “Older Tunisians like doctors are leaving now, not just young people. It’s a brain drain.”