Metal barriers block the street in front of the headquarters of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) located in Berges du Lac, an upscale business district near Tunis. Despite the rain, children play between tents and makeshift shelters. A hundred refugees and migrants – men, women and children – have been camping there for more than a month. “We can no longer stay in Tunisia”, deplores Mohamed Salah, a 35-year-old Sudanese with a calm voice. Holder of refugee status issued by the UNHCR – he fled the repression in Darfur in 2018 – Mr. Salah had been able to land in Tunis, where he had found work on the construction sites.
But his life changed on February 21, when the Tunisian president, Kaïs Saïed, launched into a diatribe against the “hordes of illegal immigrants”source, in his eyes, “of violence, crimes and unacceptable acts”. “After Kaïs Saïed’s declaration, it became hellish”grinds Mr. Salah, who immediately lost his job and his home. “We no longer have any future here”, opines Mohamed Ali, a young Sierra Leonean who also finds himself on the street. And hopes, camping in front of the UNHCR headquarters, that the international community will help him to return to his country.
The misfortune that strikes Mohamed Salah and Mohamed Ali is a symptom. The index of a new zeitgeist, that of identity tensions and xenophobic stiffening, targeting enemies from outside and their “accomplices” inside. This national-authoritarian regression seizes all the countries of the Maghreb, North African variation of the reactionary convulsions that shake many other regions of the world, including the West, prey to illiberal itching. Kaïs Saïed is the almost caricatural illustration of this new historical sequence, which closes the pluralist and chaotic parenthesis, born of the “Arab springs” of 2011. The affair is tied at the hinge of manipulations by States in search of consolidation and currents of opinion sensitive to the resurgence of nationalism, against a backdrop of aspirations to societal conservatism.
Wave of racist attacks in Tunisia
In Tunisia, the meeting between Kaïs Saïed, who continues to raise the specter of “conspiracy” (local and foreign) since his “coup” of July 25, 2021, during which he assumed full powers, and the xenophobic ideas of the small Tunisian Nationalist Party (PNT) has been explosive. On February 21, the Tunisian head of state opened Pandora’s box of the bad geniuses of racism by associating what he calls ” THE hordes of illegal immigrants” to one “criminal enterprise hatched at the dawn of this century, to change the demographic composition of Tunisia”backwards from sound “Arab-Islamic identity”.
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