2023-06-21 10:09:59
Article informationAuthor, Mike ThompsonRole, BBC News, Sfax
2 hours ago
As the number of migrants trying to reach Europe increases, so do the death tolls in the Mediterranean.
As EU officials struggle to contain the exodus, the plight of those fleeing poverty and persecution is leaving its tragic imprint on Tunisia’s shores.
As the sun begins to rise over the horizon off the coast of the eastern coast, fisherman Osama Al Dabibi begins to pull his nets. As he takes a long look at what he has caught in the net, sometimes fish are not all he finds.
“Instead of getting fish, I sometimes get carcasses and body parts. The first time I was scared, but I got used to it day by day. After a while, pulling a dead body out of my net was like getting a fish.”
Dressed in a short jacket and dark shorts, the 30-year-old fisherman says he recently found the bodies of 15 migrants in his nets over a three-day period.
“I found the body of a child. I sat and thought: what is the fault of the child? How can he be responsible for anything? I cried a lot. It is different for the adults because they lived. But the situation is different for the child, because he has not seen anything of the world.”
Dbebi has been fishing in the sea near Sfax, the second city in Tunisia, since he was 10 years old.
In those days he was one of many to cast their nets, but now he says most of the fishermen sold their boats for huge sums to people smugglers.
“Smugglers have often offered me unbelievable sums of money to sell my boat. I always refused because if they used my boat and one of them sank, I would never forgive myself.”
A short distance from Dbebi is another group of migrants from South Sudan – which has suffered from conflict, climate shock and food insecurity – since its independence in 2011.
Everyone hopes to eventually make it to the UK. One explains that they reluctantly abandoned a second attempt to cross to Italy because of the overcrowded boat and bad weather.
“There were a lot of people and the boat was very small. We got into the boat, but when we got away from the shore, the wind was very, very strong.”
According to the Tunisian National Guard, 13,000 migrants were forced to leave their often overcrowded boats near Sfax and back ashore in the first three months of this year.
Between January and April this year, some 24,000 people left the Tunisian coast in makeshift boats and reached Italy, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
The country is now the largest departure point for migrants trying to reach Europe. Libya had previously received this dubious honor, but violence against migrants and kidnappings by criminal gangs has led many to travel to Tunisia instead.
Although the boat involved in last week’s disaster off the Greek coast, which left at least 78 dead and nearly 500 missing, had set sail from Libya.
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Many African immigrants are determined to reach Europe in the hope of a better life.
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Most of the fishermen in Sfax sold their boats for huge sums to people smugglers.
Fishermen have many rusty pots lying either half submerged or piled in huge piles next to the port of Sfax. What constitutes a miserable reminder of the dangers of the deadliest migration route in the world. On the outskirts of the city, there is a cemetery that reminds of the danger of the migration route.
Rows of freshly dug graves lie empty in an extended part of the cemetery, awaiting the next loss of life at sea.
But it will not be enough. A new cemetery dedicated entirely to immigrants is now being planned.
In just two weeks earlier this year, more than 200 migrant bodies were recovered from the sea here.
More than 27,000 people have died trying to cross the Mediterranean since 2014.
This accelerating tragedy caused great hardships to the city.
The director of the regional health authority, Dr. Hatim Al-Sharif, says there are simply no facilities to deal with the high numbers of deaths.
“The capacity of the hospital morgue is 35 to 40 maximum. That is usually enough, but with all this influx of bodies, which is getting worse, we have exceeded the numbers we can take.”
Up to 250 bodies were brought to the morgue recently. Most of them had to be placed in an adjoining, refrigerated room, grimly called the “disaster room”, one on top of the other. Although Dr. Sharif was keen to point out that everyone will be buried in separate and numbered graves.
Many of those who died are unidentified, so DNA tests are carefully organized and the results stored.
The idea is to enable relatives looking for their loved ones to find out if they are buried here, by checking their DNA matches.
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African migrants in Tunisia say they have become targets of racist attacks.
Three hours’ drive northwest of central Tunis, several hundred members of Tunisia’s black minority, many of them women and children, are camped out in small tents outside the offices of the International Organization for Migration.
They were all evicted from their homes and fired from their jobs in the city after a racist speech in February by the country’s president, Kais Saied.
He claimed that hordes of illegal immigrants are entering the country as part of a “criminal” plan to change its demographics.
The comments are widely seen as an attempt to find a scapegoat for the country’s severe economic crisis, which has led many desperate Tunisians to emigrate themselves.
Referring to a stab wound in the arm, a young man from Sierra Leone – who is still recovering from a brutal civil war that ended in 2002 – says that since the president’s speech, local youths have knifed many people here.
“Some Arab guys came here to attack us. The police said they will keep us safe if we stay here. But if we go out of this area, we are not safe.”
It seems that this alarming situation, the continued imprisonment of dissidents and the erosion of civil rights by the country’s president, is not a priority for EU officials than curbing the flow of migrants.
So far this year, more than 47,000 migrants have arrived in Italy, three times more than in the same period last year, and demands are mounting for something to be done.
During a brief visit here earlier this month, a visiting delegation led by the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, promised a potential financial support package of around €1 billion, about $1 billion.
If approved, about a tenth of this amount will be spent on anti-trafficking measures.
Last week’s tragedy off the Greek coast only heightened demands for something to be done.
However, with so many desperate migrants and people smuggling so lucrative for human traffickers, it will be very difficult to stop the growing influx of small boats.
Crowds of immigrants from all over Africa and parts of the Middle East congregate in groups in shady spots on the streets of Sfax.
Some have money to pay for a place on a smuggled boat, others live in limbo, unable even to pay for their own food and shelter.
Many of them either lost their passports or had their passports stolen, while some did not leave their countries illegally.
Everyone has heard of the deaths of many trying to reach Europe, but desperation still seems to outweigh danger, as a young man from Guinea explains.
“We can’t go back to our country because we don’t have money or passports. I’m not afraid. I’m starving, we’re poor and my parents have nothing. I don’t want the children to live like this. I need to go.”
The tragedy is that this basic human aspiration for a better life often comes with a heavy price.
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