Dozens of African migrants have been driven out of the Tunisian city of Sfax which has experienced another night of violence after the death of a resident in clashes, according to testimonies.
It was the attack on a Tunisian, stabbed by African migrants on Monday north of the city, which set fire to the powder. The video of the attack is quickly relayed by a deputy, Tarek Mahdi: he then asserts that the assailants are “Africans”, and believes that “people must move”.
Mahdi was taken at his word: in several districts of this large city in the center-east of Tunisia, hundreds of inhabitants gathered in the night from Tuesday to Wednesday in the streets demanding the immediate departure of all illegal migrants, according to an AFP correspondent on site.
Police are chasing migrants
Some blocked streets and set tires on fire to express their anger after a 41-year-old resident was stabbed to death in clashes late Monday with migrants from Cameroon, authorities said.
In videos circulating on social media, police officers can be seen chasing dozens of migrants from their homes to the cheers of city residents, before loading them into police cars. Others showed migrants on the ground, hands on their heads, surrounded by residents with sticks waiting for the arrival of the police.
“Inhuman Night”
On the Facebook page of the local group Sayeb Trottoir, dedicated to the issue of illegal immigration, Lazhar Neji, working in the emergency room of a hospital in Sfax, deplored “an inhuman night (…) bloody”. According to him, the hospital received between 30 and 40 migrants, including women and children. “Some were thrown from terraces, others attacked with swords,” he said.
The Forum for Economic and Social Rights (FTDES), which monitors migration issues, and more than 20 other Tunisian and international NGOs, said in a joint statement that security forces on Tuesday took away a “group of 100 migrant and refugee people from the Sfax region to the Libyan border.
“The group includes several nationalities including Ivorian, Cameroonian and Guinean including at least 12 children aged between six months and five years”, according to the same source. About 50 other migrants had been taken to the same region on July 2.
Some of them were “beaten and mistreated”, added the NGOs, which called on the authorities to “provide clarification on these facts and intervene urgently to provide care for these people”.
“Not welcome”
Dozens of other migrants rushed to the Sfax railway station to take trains to other Tunisian cities, noted an AFP photographer.
“There is a serious problem in Sfax, there is a sub-Saharan who killed a Tunisian and suddenly the Tunisian population is angry with all the sub-Saharans and attacks them, and even the Tunisian police are trying to illegally arrest all sub-Saharans, to push them back into the Libyan desert,” one of them, Jonathan Tchamou, a young Congolese, told AFP.
“We are really afraid to be here, that’s why we want to leave Sfax at all costs,” added Tchamou, claiming to have come to Tunisia on a regular basis with a student visa. “Before Tunisia was a host country for us, we lived at ease here but as now we are not welcome, the solution would be to cross the Mediterranean to go to Europe”, he continued.
Tensions in February
The death on Monday of a resident of Sfax had sparked a torrent of reactions, often with racist overtones, calling for the expulsion of African migrants from Sfax, the starting point for a large number of illegal sea crossings to Italy. .
Tensions between locals and migrants escalated after a February speech by President Kais Saied slamming illegal immigration and presenting it as a demographic threat to his country. Most of these migrants come to Tunisia to then try to reach Europe by sea, landing clandestinely on the Italian coasts.
On Tuesday, Saied said that Tunisia “does not accept on its territory anyone who does not respect its laws, nor to be a country of transit (to Europe) or a land of resettlement for nationals of certain African countries”. .