Tunisia and the great illusion of colonisation
Populism has always been a breeding ground for anti-immigrant hatred.
People welcome migrants arriving onboard of the Sea-eye4 ship
Mehdi Mabrouk
February 28, 2023
Since the beginning of the 1990s, there have been radical shifts in the scene of migration in the Mediterranean. With Italy and Spain imposing visas specifically on citizens of the Maghreb countries, the first waves of secret maritime migration will erupt, or what is known in the Maghreb countries as "harga". People are still wondering what it really means; whether it means illegal infiltration, the burning of documents, etc., regardless of the deep connotations that social semiotics can give us, the functions of these countries have changed a lot, and their areas are no longer only a motive for their immigrants, but also a magnet for immigrants. They are also, at the same time, areas of transit visited by thousands of immigrants who are trying to reach the northern shore of the Mediterranean.
The cost is often high for such attempts: money wasted and lives lost in the Mediterranean. Decades later, given the tightening of immigration policies in EU countries, and even the countries of the Arab Maghreb, this region has turned into a trap that attracts migrants hoping to cross, but they settle temporarily, or for a long time in these countries. There is no doubt that the Arab revolutions and the collapse of the border system have, in turn, prompted dramatic shifts in migration. Borders were also used for extortion, as the late Libyan Colonel did when he publicly refused having his country play the role of the policeman guarding Europe's borders, and secretly blackmailed those countries in order to turn a blind eye to his many transgressions.
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While these immigrants usually prefer to settle in Libya, the rest of the Maghreb countries remained unattractive to them, due to many factors, including the economic conditions and security control over them. Tunisia generally remained a transit area, although some migrants chose to settle there temporarily, albeit illegally. Despite the high unemployment rates, the labour market in Tunisia was accommodating for these individuals, due to the Tunisian youth's reluctance to work hard while earning low wages, such as jobs in bakeries, cafes and restaurants, as well as collecting household waste and cleaning work in urban areas.
After the revolution, they benefited from the growth of a civil sense fuelled by civil associations working in the field of migrants' rights. During the past decade, they were not subject to arrest, except during aborded secret migration operations, which revealed that a large number of migrants were coming from sub-Saharan countries. However, the scene did not witness radical changes in the number of migrants. Statistics used to indicate that the number of nationalities of migrants arrested was nearly 70 nationalities annually, and this number is still almost the same.
The security approach adopted by the Tunisian authorities in what it calls "combating secret migration" did not bear fruit, for many objective reasons, including the length of the country's coastline, which extends for nearly 2,000 km (if we consider the circumference of the islands), in addition to the lack of logistical capabilities for the maritime border guard due to the suffocating public funds crisis.
Successive governments were not keen to deal with the migration file, and it remained a secondary issue, with the related legislation remaining outdated and not suited to international standards. The law of 3 February, 2004 does not talk about immigration but, rather, about travel documents. It also stipulates penalties that are considered the most severe in the world, without forgetting that Tunisia did not sign the 18 December, 1990 International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families. Only the 2014 Constitution, before it was replaced, referred in a single article, to refugees and prevented their extradition, although some practices continued not to comply with this.
The waves of illegal immigration have not waned, whether those pushing Tunisians to the Italian shores, or those inviting them to come to Tunisia, either to cross through it or to settle there. According to the most recent studies carried out by the National Observatory for Migration, in cooperation with the National Institute of Statistics, two public institutions that are considered references and which prepared the 2022 National Migration Survey, in cooperation with reputable international organisations in the field of quantitative migration data, the number of foreign immigrants in 2022 reached nearly 70,000 that entered the country, either legally or illegally. However, anti-immigrant voices, in general, continued to express, from time to time, their annoyance with them, citing the difficult situation of the country.
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For example, the National Committee against Trafficking in Persons (NCTIP), has addressed in its numerous reports the increased trafficking and ill-treatment against migrants. Since his election in 2019, President Kais Saied has expressed, on many occasions, his dissatisfaction with the phenomenon. He has taken the initiative to visit several coastal cities, hinting, at the same time, that it is the result of a conspiracy plotted against Tunisia. The hint was not clear at the time, until he openly announced it a few days ago during a meeting with what he calls the National Security Council. He expressed that the phenomenon of immigration falls within a big conspiracy against Tunisia, in order to strip it of its Arab-Islamic identity, and limit its identity to its African identity. He said that it is an attempt to change its demographic composition, in an effort to "colonise" it, denouncing the parties that received money to settle immigrants, referring to the organisations that fight to integrate these people, and prevent racist attacks against them, which have increased in frequency, despite the enactment of a law against all forms of racism in 2018. These shocking incidents sparked a wave of condemnation, at the national and international levels, especially since acts of violence accompanied these incidents and harmed some immigrants.
Populism has always been a breeding ground for anti-immigrant hatred.
This article first appeared in Arabic in Al-Araby Al-Jadeed on 27 February 2023
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.
Democratic pessimism in Tunisia
This article is part of the Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance Initiative, MEI’s look at the evolving threats to freedom, political rights, and civil liberties, as well as the struggles to achieve fair, transparent, and representative governance across the MENA region.
February 28, 2023
Fadil Aliriza
Tunisia’s current system of government is by all indicators continuing to move even farther away from a liberal democratic form envisioned in the 2014 constitution. This is particularly true in the post-July 25, 2021 period after President Kais Saied suspended parliament and assumed full executive and legislative powers. However, analyses that focus solely on Saied miss some of the broader social and political trends that were already rejecting the way Tunisia’s post-2011 “democratic transition” has unfolded. They also miss the nexus that has converged to maintain the current system, in particular between security forces, some sycophantic media, and key figures within the political, business, and civil service sectors.
Prior to Saied’s centralization of authority, there was increasing fragmentation within the executive branch, among state institutions, within and between political parties, within civil society, and even between regions of the country. While the normative ideal of liberal democracy presumes that competition for, contestation of, and checks and balances on power inevitably produce a relatively stable and legitimate governing system, the fragmentation seen at nearly every level of Tunisian society produced little of either and instead saw stagnation in terms of development and no cohesive national project. Since 2011 there have been nine prime ministers, even more ministerial reshuffles, and numerous parliamentary blocs forming, dissolving, and regrouping in parallel to equally mercurial party formations — all while spending on desperately collapsing public services in education, transportation, and health decreased in real (i.e. inflation and exchange adjusted) terms. With such political volatility and lacking a coherent vision for development, state institutions were unable or unwilling to make bold but necessary decisions on spending and real per-capita GDP fell steadily each year from $4,399 in 2014 to $3,498 in 2020.
That was the vacuum in which Saied’s centralization of authority (or alternatively the centralization of authority proposed by the then increasingly popular Abir Moussi) appealed to large numbers of Tunisians. This was exacerbated by the fact that competition and contestation in post-2011 Tunisia was not limited to domestic actors alone, as international financial institutions and foreign states have played vital roles in sustaining funding for Tunisia’s government and civil society activity — funding explicitly tied to policy choices often opposed by the public. For example, EU macrofinancial assistance has come with explicit conditions on Tunisian energy policy and public employment that have been at odds with popular protests over the cost of living and public hiring policies. Such unpopular austerity measures have also been among the conditions for International Monetary Fund loan programs since 2013. The World Bank’s hundreds of millions of dollars in loans for local governments in Tunisia since 2015 have come with a development model for decentralization that is at odds with those of local activists.
To be clear, democracy itself is not losing popularity — in the fall 2021 Arab Barometer polling, 72% of Tunisians still preferred democracy to any other system. But the same polling also found that a plurality of respondents believed that the system needs to be totally “replaced” rather than “reformed.” This seeming contradiction — Tunisians preferring democracy yet wanting to replace the system — is open to multiple interpretations. However, it is clear that many Tunisians don’t believe their “democracy” has actually been very democratic even before President Saied dismissed parliament.
The post-2011 consensus
The fruits of 2011 largely benefitted a new political elite: businessmen for whom the ruling family and/or strong state institutions had been an obstacle to greater profits, but also human rights activists and leaders of repressed political parties who had struggled for decades against the regime managed by Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Many of these figures joined political life and won positions as heads of key state institutions or as members of parliament. In contrast, the masses of people whose “everyday resistance” to the regime did not make headlines or earn them the label of “dissident” did not win positions of power in the post-2011 system: football fans who faced down police repression; participants in the Gafsa mining region’s 2008 revolt against an exploitative and deadly development model (a preview of the 2010-11 revolts); student unionists fighting to reclaim universities that had become the regime’s repressive and disciplinary tools; workers who, in the momentum of 2011, kicked out old management and chose their own or instituted self-management schemes; farmers who reclaimed land taken from them by the state.
These actors and their struggles played important roles in bringing down the former regime, yet they have often been sidelined by political actors in the post-2011 era, including by President Saied despite his initial pro-revolution rhetoric. The representative, liberal democratic system with free and fair elections and a new constitution that had been ushered in appeared to many Tunisians as having failed to solve — or even greatly exacerbated — the pressing problems experienced by ordinary people. On economic development, on policing, on regional injustices, on corruption, the few positions on which the “people’s representatives” in parliament found any consensus were either tangential to or at odds with “the people’s” demands. The lack of parliamentary consensus on appointing a constitutional court ironically facilitated Saied’s unchecked suspension of parliament on July 25, 2021, while the parliamentary consensus on a new anti-terrorism law ironically is providing a legal fig-leaf to the current wave of arrests of former MPs. While some analysts very early on diagnosed this consensus-seeking among elites as coming at the expense of social issues, many others preferred to hold onto a rosy narrative of Tunisia’s democratic exceptionalism in the region.
The new system
In the nearly two years since beginning his centralization of power, Saied’s mode of rule and the increasing police and judicial repression of politicians and journalists have understandably drawn sharp condemnations from human rights groups and democracy advocates. At the same time, many of Saied’s own supporters have lost faith in his capacity to replace the system in a way that is meaningfully different from what came before. While Saied’s new “hyper-presidential” constitution includes room for a legislative body with vastly reduced powers, the extremely low participation rates in the online consultation about the constitution, the referendum on the constitution, and the elections for the new legislative body suggests there is little popular faith that these legislative changes will accomplish anything positive — or that voting will have any effect on government. The latter may be interpreted as an acknowledgment that many people no longer believe they have any power over their own government, which is a deeply pessimistic reflection of the state of democracy.
And yet despite the centralization of authority in the executive, or rather because of it, existing fragmentation within Tunisian society is increasing. This includes the spectacular spike in racist violence against black Africans fueled by Saied and his supporters, which itself has provoked sharp polarization. Saied’s supporters also continue to cheer the arrests of opposition politicians, regardless of the glaring lack of due process afforded to suspects. Another example is that the minority who did vote in favor of Saied’s new constitution voted nearly unanimously: 95% in favor. This number is similar to the numbers Ben Ali and similar monarchical presidents in other countries used to win in elections that were neither free nor fair. Under those systems, voting was treated not as a practice of contesting power, but as a small interest group extending its power over the rest of society and sharing the spoils through the political machine. Contestation of power, though heavily repressed and often out of sight, happened elsewhere: within the single ruling Democratic Constitutional Rally (RCD) party, within state institutions, within unions or by unionists against employers and officials, in football stadiums, and towards the end of Ben Ali’s rule online on websites blocked by the government.
Until recently, Saied has had to do relatively little to repress the political opposition because they have remained largely unpopular. Now however, although the opposition remains unpopular, they appear to be working together better than in the summer of 2021, or at least media outlets that once ignored them are giving them more attention as media institutions themselves feel more threatened with repression. More importantly, the recent arrests of high-profile political figures have come with accusations by authorities that the accused were conspiring with foreign diplomats against state security. Regardless of the relative merit or baselessness of these accusations, they reflect President Saied’s acute attentiveness to perceived threats to his political project.
Without other organizational power such as a party to rely on, President Saied is highly dependent on security forces to carry out his orders and for the information he receives, meaning that while power is highly concentrated, the presidency is also isolated. This dependence in turn has further empowered security forces, who have since 2011 escaped civilian control or judicial accountability in what amounts to impunity. With fewer restraints on their powers, it is likely the latest waves of repression represent to some degree a score-settling by some factions within the security sector. As executive power continues to accumulate within the presidency and the security forces (a trend with some antecedents as far back as 2015), other political actors within business, media, and the civil service will increasingly look to these institutions to curry favor or preserve their own positions of power, thus reinforcing the trend. Meanwhile the judiciary’s capacity to hold the executive accountable is languishing even further, with the president’s new powers to fire judges weighing heavily on those who must oversee cases in which President Saied has made highly charged and prejudicial public statements about the accused.
These trends all point to a continued disintegration of the power of ordinary people to direct, change, or even affect how they are governed through formal mechanisms or organizations. If people power is to intervene in shaping policies, it will come through informal means. But because of the increasing repression, only the most dire of circumstances affecting the health and livelihoods of people are likely to break through what may be a new wall of fear. While the Arab Barometer polling found that 72% of Tunisians still preferred democracy to any other system, an even larger percentage — 76% — said they strongly or somewhat agreed with the sentiment that as long as the government solves the country’s economic problems, it doesn’t matter what kind of government is in place.
Fadil Aliriza is the founder and editor-in-chief of Meshkal.org, an independent news website in English and Arabic covering Tunisia, and a Non-Resident Scholar with MEI’s North Africa and Sahel Program.
Photo by Yassine Gaidi/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
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