Tunisia: Thousands of migrants ‘dumped’ in the desert

Deutsche Welle :
The fear is there, day and night, said Mamadou from Chad, who asked that DW not use his full name for fear of reprisals, recounting what happened to him earlier this month after he failed to reach the Italian island of Lampedusa with the help of human traffickers.

“The Tunisian Coast Guard officers took our cell phones and our money, then they drove us to the Libyan border where they stripped us and left us alone,” he told DW from his hiding place: An olive grove near Tunisia’s port city of Sfax. He said he had walked around 240 kilometers through the desert to get there.

The olive grove has become a notorious hiding place for around 80,000 sub-Saharan migrants waiting for a chance to cross the Mediterranean Sea so that they can get to Europe.

Lauren Seibert, a researcher at Human Rights Watch who focuses on refugee and migrant rights, said that what Mamadou and others had experienced was “an unlawful collective expulsion, or what people are calling ‘desert dumps.'”

Algeria, Libya and Mauritania had been “practising collective expulsions for many years,” she told DW, but in Tunisia it was a more recent phenomenon had appeared to become systematic since last year.

That view was echoed by an expert on Tunisian migration who spoke to DW on condition of anonymity: “In the past years, there have been a handful of cases, usually when smuggler boats from Libya were intercepted by Tunisian authorities,” he said.

“Now, expulsions seem to be more systematized, in part they involve urban detentions in places like Sfax and Zarzis and they also entail a shift in how migrants intercepted at sea are handled,” he added.

Earlier this month, Lighthouse Reports, an investigative news organization that collaborated with several international media outlets published a report about the increase of so-called “desert dumps.”

After a year-long investigation, it concluded that the Tunisian National Guard was at the center of these operations, with much of the finances coming from European countries.