Paul-Edouard has shared his life between olive plantations and coffee since he found a semblance of refuge in a rural area on the outskirts of the small town of El-Amra, with his wife and 5-year-old daughter. , after fleeing the anti-migrant violence which shook Sfax at the beginning of the summer. In this field which has become a dormitory, every evening he places his blanket at the foot of a tree, sets up his bed then lies down and falls asleep, waiting for another day to come. In the early morning, when the owner of the adjoining café opens his business, he migrates to the building and spends the whole day there.
That’s where Le Monde met him, on October 9. Sitting at a table, an espresso in one hand, a cigarette in the other, this 38-year-old Cameroonian says he tried to reach Italy three weeks earlier. But after being intercepted at sea by the Tunisian national guard, he was disembarked at the port of Sfax then transported several hundred kilometers by the authorities before being abandoned in a desert area on the Algerian border, without water or food. , nor any other form of trial. Supporting GPS data and photographs, it bears witness to these practices that the Tunisian authorities persist in denying. To protect his identity and those of other people interviewed, their first names have been changed.
His story begins like that of any clandestine crossing: on a beach, at night, the departure of the boat in the darkness, then quickly becomes that of any interception of an illegal boat by the national guard. The waves, the engine cutting out, the tension with the agents, the transfer on a speedboat. At midday, Paul-Edouard disembarked at the port of Sfax with 300 other people, according to his estimates.
” A ball in the head “
This is where the violence started. “When we arrived at the port of Sfax, we were beaten,” he said, describing the beatings carried out by security force agents. They are then held all day on the platform, “without having to eat or drink”, their phones are confiscated. At nightfall, four buses arrive and the migrants are forced to board, without knowing their destination.
They leave the port city, escorted by security force vehicles – as shown in a video he filmed, consulted by Le Monde. “We drove until 4 a.m. and then they dropped us off at a National Guard base,” he remembers. Analysis of transmitted GPS data reveals that buses travel nearly 300 km to Kef, in north-west Tunisia. They are transferred to the back of pickup trucks, “loaded like cattle,” then dropped off somewhere in the mountain.
Once the Tunisians left, the sub-Saharans faced the Algerian border guards and quickly understood that they were not welcome. “We suffered warning shots from the Algerian army who ordered us to return to Tunisia,” says Paul-Edouard. We had no choice, there were pregnant women, babies, a whole bunch of injured people. We were hungry, we were thirsty. So we came back to Tunisia. » As he turns back, he comes across the unit that expelled them. “They arrest us again, put us in the pickup trucks. They take us to another camp. It’s about 10 o’clock when we get there. »
Abandoned twice
They spent the day of September 20 locked in this national guard post not far from Thala, still in the same region of western Tunisia, waiting for night to fall. The agents then put them back in law enforcement vehicles and, at 10 p.m., they took the road towards the border town of Sakiet Sidi Youssef about a hundred kilometers further north. The national guards were then clear: “They promised us that it was our last day in Tunisia,” remembers Paul-Edouard. “And if we insisted on coming back, they would shoot us in the head. That’s what they told us. » Opposite Paul-Edouard, in this El-Amra café, Emmanuel, a young 18-year-old Cameroonian, present at the time of the incident, nods in agreement.
Abandoned for the second time, left to their own devices, the migrants decided to return to Tunisia in the early morning of September 21. They then walk for nine days, covering tens of kilometers on foot, between mountains and forests in order to avoid running into the country’s authorities again. Nine nights sleeping on the floor in “refrigerating” cold, Paul-Edouard recalls, his voice trembling. They end up reaching Tajerouine, a town in the region, and find clandestine transport that takes them back to the area around Sfax.
Two weeks after the events, Paul-Edouard and Emmanuel still cannot understand why the authorities subjected them to such treatment. In this café in El-Amra, their story resonates: many people also report expulsions over the past weeks and similar events. The phenomenon is not new. In July, several hundred migrants had already been abandoned in the desert by Tunisian security forces.
Images of these men, women and children abandoned along the Tunisian-Libyan border in extreme heat, without water or food, were widely circulated on social networks and in the media. But, at the beginning of August, the signing of an agreement between the interior ministers of the two countries to evacuate all the migrants remaining in the area gave hope for an end to these practices. However, a humanitarian organization based in Libya confirmed to Le Monde, on condition of anonymity, that at least 3,700 migrants have been expelled from Tunisia to Libya since June.
“Unfounded allegations”
The Tunisian authorities have never recognized these expulsions. Questioned by Le Monde, the spokesperson for the Ministry of the Interior, Faker Bouzghaya, refuted its practices, referring to an August 3 statement from his minister, Kamel Feki, in which he underlined “that the allegations on expulsions are baseless.” The spokesperson for the national guard, Houssem Jebabli, also denies such practices. “That’s not true, we have other testimonies saying the exact opposite. Tunisia welcomed these people, and the Red Crescent did its best for the migrants,” he says, without giving further details.
However, around thirty bodies were found in the border area, according to the humanitarian source previously cited, and 80 people are still missing. In El-Amra, the resumption of expulsions is terrorizing. “Overnight you can find yourself in the desert. Who isn’t afraid? Without food, without water, you are obviously afraid,” explains Amadou, who was driven to the Algerian border with his friend Félix at the end of September. At another table, Mohamed shows a photo on his phone of a young man sitting in a desert area on the Libyan border: “I have no news from my friend, we were separated there, I don’t know not what he became. »
After such a trauma, everyone already thought about returning home, but ultimately ruled out this option. “We might as well do the 150 km that separate us from Lampedusa. We cherish this dream,” concludes Paul-Edouard.