“At work, and in my personal life, I can never be at ease, as long as the police are here in Gafsa. I can’t make any money, either—cops stop me on the road, demanding money,” said Aymen Slim, a 35-year-old clothing vendor who sells used garments imported from Europe in Gafsa, a city in southwestern Tunisia, over a choppy Facebook messenger call.
“If I don’t give them money then they open a court case against me, which costs me more. If I can’t pay that, then they take my car, and the goods.”
Gafsa city is the capital of Gafsa Governorate, and the main city in the El Hawdh El Menjemi, a prominent zinc, iron, and phosphate mining basin. Phosphate—of which Tunisia is Africa’s second-largest producer—is sought after worldwide to produce fertilizers and lithium batteries to power the global green energy transition. Whilst the global price of phosphate has climbed in recent years as a result and its mining and export to Europe is a key source of the Tunisian state’s income, Gafsans see little benefit, and their communities suffer from resource theft, economic marginalization, and environmental degradation.
The region has one of the highest poverty and unemployment rates nationwide, and is hit by acute environmental pollution, including discharging contaminated mining water directly into farms, with high cancer and lung disease rates amongst the local population.
“Here in Gsar [a poor neighborhood on the edge of Gafsa], we’re all just barely getting by. Especially the youth. If they want to open a business or some kind of employment project, the authorities—National Guard, the police, customs agents—will ruin it with bribes and harassment. They don’t want us to succeed,” says Aymen.
Indeed, police intimidation, corruption, and brutality have increased in the years following the 2011 revolution that only superficially established a liberal democratic system in Tunisia. The situation has worsened significantly since President Kais Saied took over most state powers, suspending parliament and ruling by decrees, following a coup in July 2021.
“Before, there used to be some kind of limit in police behavior. Now they do whatever they want to you and there’s no one you can run to,” continues Aymen, in a nod to the state crackdown on civil society and lawyers groups since 2021, which could provide some shield against police abuse.
In Tunisia, a system of abusive policing represses and legally stigmatizes Tunisia’s poor, pushing them to migrate irregularly across the Mediterranean to Europe, where they are often exploited as cheap labor. This system of interlocking problems, the nexus of security, labor extraction and migration reinforces Tunisia’s dependence on Global North states—Europe, in particular—keeping its people poor whilst solidifying its government’s authoritarianism.
Unemployment and the shadow economy
Critical levels of unemployment have been an ongoing feature of life in Tunisia since the colonial period. The country has amongst the highest unemployment rates in the Middle East and North Africa, standing at 16.2 percent in the first quarter of 2023.
Tunisia’s economy is characterized by high informal employment rates, accounting for more than 60 percent in some sectors. Informality rates are higher among younger and less educated people, according to the World Bank.
This unemployment has its roots in the period immediately following Tunisia’s independence from France, according to Fadhel Kaboub, a Tunisian professor of economics at Denison University. “After a brief period of decolonization efforts in the 1960s, Tunisia… was lured back into an extractive economic development model based on exports, tourism, and foreign direct investment,” he explained.
Tunisian farmers could not compete with subsidized farmers in Europe, and had to migrate to coastal cities to work in manufacturing, creating a low-paid urban working class. “As Tunisia began to increase manufacturing… The only competitive ‘edge’ was lower wages,” according to Kaboub.
This development model led to high levels of foreign debt. “The debt conditions stipulated serious disinvestment from… public services,” which drove rising poverty and migration to Europe.
All of this, Kaboub said, falls under the jurisdiction of the security apparatus of the Tunisian state that must police poverty and the outbursts of protest at unemployment and disappearing public services, with financial and material support from the EU.
Repressive security apparatus
The police in Tunisia have a history going back to the French colonial era, having served to protect and enforce labor exploitation and wealth extraction for the French. Police and gendarmes consumed a significant part of the colonial French budget, and were used intensively to repress organized labor activity as well as independence movements. Following independence in the mid-1950s, this national security model was maintained, and, indeed, intensified using mechanisms such as military courts.
Core elements of this framework for internal security survive in the present-day. “Let’s think of Tunisia’s resource-rich areas [such as those containing petroleum in the south]. Following security concerns, many of these areas were declared ‘militarized zones’ in 2017. Such zones mean they operate under a different section of the penal code and individuals arrested in these areas are subject to military tribunals, for example,” according to Rosa Maryon, a researcher at Cardiff University who focuses on the role of security policy in Tunisia.
She said that the logic behind the strategy was to secure key strategic industries representing foreign interests. “In many of these resource extraction industries it is global northern economic interests which are being protected by the roll out of the coercive apparatuses of the state.” In particular, the tough security model serves to cow dissent through security crackdowns on workers movements and political activism in resource extraction sites.
It is not only resource extraction that the Tunisian state’s police and security service protect—but simultaneously a socioeconomic order made miserable for ordinary Tunisians by decades of disinvestment in public services.
The violence generated by police repression, and impunity of the security forces, has itself become a push-factor for young Tunisians to migrate overseas, according to Maryon.
Hatem Nafti, a Tunisian writer focusing on authoritarianism in Tunisia, concurred: “Police violence, particularly against young people from working-class neighborhoods, fuels the feeling of hogra [Tunisian dialect for marginalization and dispossession]. Many sociologists cite this motive among the causes of departure, [with young Tunisians] preferring death at sea to permanent humiliation.”
President Saied has manipulated the discontent engendered by the defunding of public services and precarious employment policies of the years to ride into power, according to Nafti. Now in full control of the government, he has used it to further bolster the repressive apparatus. “What makes Kais Saied’s discourse successful,” Nafti explains, “is that it links the Western defense of liberal democracy to neoliberal reforms to result in a rejection of both.”
The intersection of security, wealth extraction, and migration has recently taken on a notably racialized dimension in Tunisia. While Tunisian society has historically struggled with anti-black racism, local security forces’ brutal anti-migrant violence has become distinctly racist in recent months. Notably, this escalation correlates with President Saied’s public support for conspiracy theories about Sub-Saharan migrants.
In February 2023, the president claimed that “hordes of irregular migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa” were part of a conspiracy to change Tunisia’s demographics. His comments triggered violent assaults on migrants by groups of Tunisians, with police present in several cases but refusing to protect those targeted. On May 6 of this year, Saied said that 400 foreigners had been expelled to the eastern border with Libya, where reports indicate Black Sub-Saharan migrants were left without food and water. In the same announcement, Saied accused organizations supporting the human rights of largely Sub-Saharan migrants as “traitors” receiving money from abroad to “settle these Africans in Tunisia”–overlooking Tunisia’s position in Africa.
These dumps of migrants in the desert are made possible in large part due to funding from the EU aimed at curbing migration coming from North Africa, according to an investigation co-published by several major media outlets. The investigation further states that the EU is fully aware of the operations and sometimes even directly involved with its personnel on the ground.
“For Tunisia’s Black African migrant population, the link between security force violence and repression and people seeking to leave Tunisia by any means possible is far more stark,” Maryon said.
Migration forces
Today, Tunisia has taken Libya’s place as the largest departure point for migrants crossing the Mediterranean. The European Border and Coast Guard Agency counted roughly 98,000 “illegal” border crossings into Europe from Tunisia, of whom 17,155 were Tunisians. This is likely a significant underestimate, as it only tracks migrants registered on arrival, and not those able to arrive on Italian shores undetected. In 2023, 2,526 people died on the Central Mediterranean migration route, which includes Tunisia, according to the International Organization for Migration Missing Migrants Project. Already in 2024, the same data shows 843 deaths on that same route.
Local civil society in Tunisia has reported that under the authoritarian rule of President Saied, Tunisian coast guards have used technology supplied by the EU to deliberately sink or strand migrants boats leaving the country, and assaulted them by firing tear gas into boats to provoke panic. Tunisia’s coast guards and border security units carry out such routine violence with political backing and funding from the European Union.
Security forces are simultaneously employed to repress the dissent in the aftermath of migrant deaths. In September 2022, a boat carrying 18 Tunisians, traveling from the southern city of Zarzis to the Italian island of Lampedusa, went missing. When families sought help, local authorities claimed the migrants were being held hostage in Libya. It was later discovered that authorities had found some of the drowned migrants and buried them without verifying their identities. This revelation triggered mass protests, which the police repressed with tear gas and batons.
Deconstructing western support
The EU support for these oppressive internal security apparatuses arguably further contributes to irregular migration to Europe. Various authoritarian states in the MENA region, from Morocco to Tunisia, Egypt to Syria depend on a vast network of internal security services to police not only activists and social movements, but workers and poor and more marginalized communities. Likewise, these systems are often supported at least in part by external actors, including the EU and US.
There have been countless attempts by the US and the EU, as well as United Nations initiatives to carry out “security sector reform” (SSR). This involves providing training to the Tunisian military and police units, as well as officials with the Tunisian Ministry of Defense and Ministry of Interior, to nominally respect international law and conventions on human rights. They also fund counterterrorism efforts in order to foster “stability” in the country. These efforts have largely failed because they focus on combating immediate threats and avoid deeper questions of whose interests these security forces serve, how they keep restive marginalized and exploited populations under control, the unaddressed social grievances like poverty, underdevelopment, and state violence which are driving “terrorism”, and the impact of policing and security on a democratic society.
Such trainings from foreign actors from the Global North also serve to further integrate Tunisian security forces’ command structure into the broader European, and to a lesser extent, American security apparatus. This ultimately makes these services more responsive to security policies from Global North states—with a stark example being the Tunisian Coast Guard’s recent utilization as an armed wing of the EU, pushing migrants away from southern Europe. This is a response to the demands of the growing dominance of right-wing and anti-immigration currents in European politics.
“Despite proclaiming ‘reform’, the SSR infrastructure serves not to transform the repressive elements of state security apparatuses but rather to enhance their capacity for violence,” argued Corinna Mullin, an academic at the John Jay College of the City University of New York and and former professor of International Relations at the University of Tunis.
The “security first” approach that policymakers in Europe and the US have committed to cannot be sustainable in the long term for anything beyond repression of the already poor and vulnerable, and is only making migration more lethal.
One way of addressing this would be to invest in community safety initiatives, instead of an unaccountable, militarized force that serves the interests of Kais Saied’s police state and his Global North backers. These Western governments need to work with grassroots civil society organizations in their communities and on their terms and give much more serious investment—both financial and political—to jobs programs that provide living wages and socially necessary labor, as well as infrastructure development in poorer peripheral urban areas and rural areas, like Aymen’s economically and environmentally pulverized Gafsa region.
In addition, the EU and US should encourage trade agreements with richer states of the Global North that provide greater economic advantages for Tunisians. Most importantly, these states have leverage to challenge instead of encourage Kais Saied’s police and repression-led governance model by defunding the police if deep justice-centered reforms are not implemented, withdrawing diplomatic support, and encouraging dialogue between Saied and Tunisian opposition groups and grassroots civil society.
As long as the current status quo persists, Tunisians will continue to face poverty, exploitation, and repression, compelling more and more to consider irregularly crossing the Mediterranean despite its lethal dangers. Indeed, when I tried to get in touch with Aymen in Gafsa again I couldn’t get through.
A local activist and friend of Aymen’s informed me, “His phone doesn’t work. I haven’t heard from him in weeks. And he’s not in Gafsa.”
She sighed. “I think he’s gone. He took a boat and migrated.”
Sam Kimball is a journalist currently based in Cyprus. He lived and worked in Tunisia for nearly six years, and followed the country’s post-revolution development.