The Mediterranean is becoming a graveyard as Europe looks to outsource the management of its borders, dealing out bribes to countries at its southern and eastern gateways. Stripped of their humanity, migrants are reduced to grim statistics. Journalists within the network Independent Media on the Arab World present readers with a series of articles exposing the exorbitant price paid by concerned populations, against their will.

The Mediterranean has started to resemble a mass grave. On March 14, 2024, a boat sunk off the southwestern coast of Tunisia left 36 people dead or missing. The day before, 60 migrants disappeared off the coast of Libya. On March 15, another 22 drowned near Turkey. While these are but a few of the most recent cases reported, the upward trend of such tragedies is clear: according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), 3,105 people died or disappeared in the Mediterranean in 2023, the highest number recorded since 2017.

In the same week, on March 17, the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, headed a delegation in Cairo to sign a 7.4 billion euro partnership agreement with Egypt which included a migration component^[1]. The idea is simple: continue to externalize Europe’s borders by supporting an authoritarian regime which can “manage” the population flow from sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, even Egypt itself. In the face of ongoing genocide in Gaza, European institutions’ astonishing silence and inaction (the European Union is Israel’s main trading partner; many EU member states including France continue to supply them with arms), leads one to wonder whether European diplomacy has been reduced to overseeing the externalization of its borders. Is this where the international ambition of the Union’s 27 member states lies?

“Managing the borders” thus amounts to stripping migrants of their humanity. Their identity, their lives, and their journeys are reduced to macabre statistics. The equation is presented as such: since the problem is a question of numbers, its “resolution” must also be achieved with numbers—even larger ones—disposed of as needed for the purposes of this so-called management. But why do people migrate in the first place? While the reasons are many (persecution, work, study, family, etc.), public debate is primarily focused on a binary opposition between political refugees and economic migrants, as if the former were more legitimate than the latter; as if “persecution” defined under the 1951 United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugees could not be interpreted in a number of ways or perceived in another light.

In an era that is witnessing the globalization of digital technologies, hyper-connectivity, and the instantaneous dissemination of information, inequalities and injustices are absolutely identifiable. This is what Nathalie Galesne explains in her article on BabelMed, “Tunisia, a country sealed shut?” [“Tunisie, un pays sous scellés ?“]. Galesne describes the indignity that arises from the contrast between the ease of border crossing for those with a “red passport” (as it is referred to in Tunisian) while Tunisians are finding it increasingly difficult to leave the country. A contrast which spurs a sort of wanderlust, an almost undeniable desire to leave that is fueled by the difficulties of everyday life and the impact of colonization on the subconscious, with a largely romanticized image of the West.

Product shortages, socio-spatial segregation, police violence, lack of prospects: how could this urge to leave not be attributed to the country’s rise in unemployment,^[2] inflation and political disillusionment more than 10 years after the revolution? A drastic decline in Tunisia’s birth rate^[3] is proof enough.

But as Marine Caleb demonstrates in her eponymous article for Orient XXI, one man’s misfortune is another man’s gain. The mass departure of skilled youth educated in Tunisia benefits the economies of the North, despite complex regularization procedures. And remarkably, there is no dialogue around the prospect of a more circular development between the two shores of the Mediterranean.

On the region’s northern side, Europe oscillates between militarizing its borders and outsourcing its migration policy. As Federica Araco notes in “The shadow cast by the fortress Europe,” [“L’ombre portée de la forteresse Europe”] on BabelMed:

Since 2014, the European border control agency Frontex has carried out several military operations to monitor and restrict migratory flows (Triton, Sophia, Themis, Irini) which have made the limits of this immense liquid continent increasingly dangerous for those who try to cross them.

Federica Araco

Including the use of Heron drones developed by Israel Aerospace Industries, whose arms are used extensively against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

Europe is also outsourcing the management of its external borders. Under the Dublin system regarding asylum, there is no European solidarity, and migratory pressure impacts  Mediterranean countries exclusively. All European states, on the other hand, share a common desire to externalize their borders so that they are directly controlled and strengthened by the Mediterranean’s southern and eastern countries. After Turkey, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia and Mauritania, it is Egypt’s turn to benefit from European funding, intended to prevent migrants from setting out to sea. In reality, this funding legitimizes a number of authoritarian regimes that overlook repeated human rights violations.

The result: nearly 30,000 migrants have died or disappeared in the Mediterranean over the past decade.

In her article, “In the hell of the last ones lost” [“Dans l’enfer des derniers disparus”] on BabelMed, Federica Araco examines the consequences of stricter migration policies regulating the three main maritime routes across the Mediterranean (Central, Western, Eastern) and over land, with the construction of barbed-wire structures along the borders. Far from mitigating the phenomenon of migration, these measures render it an ever more perilous endeavor. What’s worse: their deleterious effect upon migrants’ reception upon their arrival to Europe. The flagrant example of Italy, which Araco details in the article, reveals migrants’ increasing vulnerability due to informal work and criminal networks.

At the border between Algeria and Morocco, the strengthening of the surveillance apparatus by border guards and control towers has caused a shift in migratory flows. As elaborated by S.B and B.K in their article “At the Algeria-Morocco border, scars of migration tragedies caused by militarization, prisons and peril” [“A la frontière algéro-marocaine, traces des drames migratoires entraînés par sa militarisation, les prisons et les risques de mort”] (Maghreb Emergent and Radio M), the expulsion of thousands of sub-Saharan migrants from Oued Georgi at the border has forced the latter to attempt alternative clandestine routes. It was indeed border insecurity which spurred sub-Saharan Africans and Algerians to head east towards Tunisia and Libya. The same has been true for Moroccans, whose preference for crossing through Algeria is motivated by lower prices and more secure crossings.

These shifts have no positive bearing on living conditions for migrants in transit countries, Tunisia in particular. In her article “Tunisia Faces Influx Of Sudanese Immigrants: Report In Lac 1” [“Reportage au lac 1 : la Tunisie face à l’afflux de Soudanais”] (Nawaat), Rihab Boukhayatia details the miserable living conditions in the camps set up outside IOM offices in Tunis.

Overwhelmed as it is by the influx of new cases, the HCR cannot meet the demands of refugees without the support of Tunisian authorities. Tunisia’s legal procedures make finding work, shelter and access to education extremely difficult for asylum seekers and refugees. Moreover, although Tunisia adheres in principle to the 1951 Geneva Refugee Convention, the country has yet to adopt a national asylum system.

Rihab Boukhayatia

40% of the 13,000 refugees and asylum-seekers registered with the HCR in Tunisia are from Sudan, which has faced internal conflict for the past year.

In the olive groves near Sfax, migrants of different nationalities (Guinean, Burkinabe, Malian, Ivorian, Cameroonian) live and work in inhumane conditions. In her article “In the shade of El-Amra’s olive trees, endless crimes against migrants” [“A l’ombre des oliviers d’El-Amra, des crimes incessants contre les migrants”] on Nawaat, Najla Ben Salah exposes the plight of over 6,000 sub-Saharan migrants forced to take refuge in the olive groves near the city following racist remarks made by Tunisian President Kais Saied and campaigns to expel migrants from the country. Prey to police violence, sexual abuse, arbitrary arrest and confiscation of property, some are deported to Algeria and Libya without any legal guarantee. Women are the primary victims of this situation.

Although civil society—especially feminist organizations—are mobilizing, as Nathalie Galesne points out in “Damned of the desert, damned of the sea” [“Damnés du désert, damnés de la mer“], the situation on the ground remains extremely tense. This is true for all migrants including students, affirms Jean*, president of an African students association in Tunisia. “Since the beginning of the year, students have been arrested arbitrarily^[4] even though they have their papers in order. The justice system does its job and these students are generally released, but they may first face incarceration and the fees paid to a lawyer are not reimbursed.” Different associations and embassies of the countries concerned are trying to coordinate in order to put more pressure on Tunisian authorities, but with underwhelming results. In this difficult context, it is mainly the interpersonal solidarity among migrants (as portrayed in the film Me, Captain [Io Capitano] by Matteo Garrone (2024), also screened in Tunis) which restores a bit of humanity to these lives left to fend for themselves.

From June 6 – 9, European Parliament will hold elections. As with votes cast on a national level, the theme of migration remains crucial, and carries a number of clichés about the number of foreigners to arrive on EU soil, the so-called magnet effect, freeloaders and job-stealers. In France, 15 years after the sterile debate on “national identity,” more than a third of measures under the January 2024 law “to control immigration, improve integration” was rejected by the Constitutional Council. This scenario has enabled the current government to take center stage on the question of migration, a favorite topic of the right and far-right, at the expense of other political and social priorities. 

Not surprisingly, some polls suggest a breakthrough by the far-right in these elections. How to remedy this? Must Marine Le Pen, who insists ad nauseam on the need to set up a “maritime blockade” in the Mediterranean, be reminded that such a blockade already exists, and has indeed been in place since 2006, around the Gaza Strip? How to convince Fabrice Leggeri, former Frontex director and number 3 on the National Rally’s list? Or Giorgia Meloni, prime minister of Italy’s far-right government? Whatever its definition, nothing should put identity at odds with the values of hospitality and, above all, respect for human integrity and fraternity.

Five years after a first collection of publications by the network Independent Media on the Arab World, a new collaboration between media outlets spanning north and south of the Mediterranean has born its fruits. These reports and articles set out to contextualize migration dynamics, deconstruct prejudices, and, especially, restore a common humanity to this mass tragedy, the end to which is no where in sight.

^[1] Italy also recently signed an agreement with Egypt, although the relatives of Giulio Regeni, Italian student researcher killed by Egyptian intelligence in 2016, have still not won their case.

^[2] The director of Tunisia’s National Institute of Statistics, Adnene Lassoued, was fired on March 22, 2024, most probably due to publishing unemployment figures for the last quarter of 2023 which reflected an increase of 16.4%, and affected almost 40% of youth under the age of 24.

^[3] According to the Tunisia’s National Institute of Statistics, the fertility rate fell from 2.4 in 2016 to 1.8 in 2021.

^[4] On March 19, 2024, Christian Kwongang, outgoing president of the African Students and Interns’ Association of Tunisia (AESAT), was arbitrarily arrested before being released.

This collection of articles was prepared within the context of collaboration by the network Independent Media on the Arab World which brings together Assafir Al-Arabi, BabelMed, Mada Masr, Maghreb Émergent, Mashallah News, Nawaat, 7iber and Orient XXI.