Tunisia’s Kais Saied Is Doubling Down on Xenophobia

TUNIS, Tunisia—Tunisian President Kais Saied’s clampdown on both political opponents and undocumented Black migrants has accelerated in the past weeks, turning Tunisia into a country that has become unrecognizable from the one that gave birth to the Arab Spring revolutions that swept the region in 2011.

“Hordes of illegal immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa are still arriving, with all the violence, crime, and unacceptable practices that entails,” he told his national security council on Feb. 21. As for those arrested, often without charge, they were simply called “terrorists” and “traitors.”

The conspiratorial thinking that has long defined the novice politician, who came to power in a landslide election victory in 2019, now looks to have spread across much of Tunisia, with the hitherto little-known Parti Nationaliste Tunisien (PNT) leading a campaign flooding Tunisia’s social media with attacks on the country’s migrants.

Elsewhere, newspapers and television channels devote airtime to the latest international and domestic conspiracies intended to destabilize Tunisia. All the while, gaps on supermarket shelves remain, and the long-promised International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout of the country’s economy is as distant a prospect as ever.

Outside the International Organization for Migration building in Tunis,, a makeshift village of tarpaulins and blankets—which has grown over the last few months—is now strained to breaking point, as more undocumented Black migrants from across Africa compete for space.

Stories of evictions are the norm. Accounts of attacks with machetes, knives, and beatings are common. Many people speak about the burning of property and the withholding of wages. Before the president’s speech in February, awareness of racism in Tunisia existed but was barely spoken of. Now, it has come to define their lives.

On one street, a young Nigerian couple and their baby nestle under nylon blankets on a makeshift bed, protecting themselves from a bitter wind that blows off the nearby lake. “We’ve been here for almost a week,” said the woman, who asked not to be named. Before that, they’d spent the last few months living in one of the working-class neighborhoods that skirt the capital. “Things are very bad now. No home to stay in. The landlord drives us out. The police and the people harass us in the street. No work, no money. Nothing.”

Asked how she will describe Tunisia to friends in Nigeria, she barely pauses. “I will tell them what I experienced. A lot of Tunisians are very good, but many”—she pauses—“are very bad.”

The number of Black migrants, just like the number of white migrants—who include Western aid workers, development officers, and a large number of Libyans living in the capital’s northern suburbs—is impossible to determine with any accuracy. All told, there are thought to be around 21,000 Black migrants overall in Tunisia; many of them, through Tunisia’s opaque bureaucratic systems, are without the correct paperwork—meaning that establishing legal residency is almost impossible.

The plight of Black migrants here is ironically familiar to the thousands of Tunisians who migrate to Europe without paperwork every year. 

As such, accommodations are often arranged informally, through friends or with pliant landlords, and income is generated through casual employment, a plight ironically familiar to the thousands of Tunisians who migrate to Europe without paperwork every year.

Any mention of the dissonance between the treatment of Tunisians in Europe and what is meted out to undocumented Black migrants in Tunisia elicits little but frowns in the working class reaches of La Soukra in Ariana, next to the capital. “The EU won’t let them in, so they’re forced back here,” Bassem Khazmi, a fruit and vegetable wholesaler, said of the Black migrants to a translator.

Asked how the relatively small number of undocumented Black migrants compare to the thousands of Tunisians who leave for Europe without paperwork every year, Khazmi swiftly changes the topic.

However, the scale of the violence that followed Saied’s comments has surprised many observers. Testimonies of those impacted are startling. Evictions of Black migrants are widespread, with entire families being displaced across the country. In the last few days, InfoMigrants, a news site dedicated to the issue of migration, reported that four Black migrants were stabbed in the central coastal city of Sfax, while in Tunis, four students reported being attacked after leaving their university residence.

Elsewhere, in many of the country’s cities, gangs of predominantly young men are nightly kicking down doors and dragging Black migrant families into the street, some to watch their possessions burn. Testimonies of those confined to their houses, too scared to emerge for fear of their neighbors reporting them, are legion.

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Few people would deny that some underlying racial tension has simmered under Tunisia’s ostensibly progressive surface for some time. However, since the start of February, a campaign calling on Tunisians to report undocumented migrants to the authorities by the PNT—under the leadership of Sofien Ben Sghaïer and recognized as an official party since 2018—has gained both traction and media coverage. In the first 25 days of February, spanning the period before and immediately after the president’s intervention, the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights told FP that an estimated 1,540 Black migrants were arrested.

“I don’t know what his motivations are,” Amnesty International’s Amna Guellali said, whe asked if the president’s comments were an effort to distract from his economic failures. “I don’t know if he’s surprised at the level of vigilante violence and xenophobia his words have unleashed … but he’s given the green light to a lot of people’s hatred.”

What difference that might make is unclear. Saied’s clampdown on the opposition has received widespread international criticism, from the United Nations to the African Union. His response has been to express surprise at censure and remind his critics overseas that Tunisia remains sovereign, risking future isolation and potential penury at a time when the country needs its allies the most.

However, what the president’s vision—either political or economic—for the country might be remains a mystery. As a potentially catastrophic default on Tunisia’s international loans becomes increasingly likely, Saied appears oblivious to the looming disaster. Rather than form a social contract with the country’s principal trade union—the Tunisian General Labor Union, which he will need to introduce the social reform he will likely require—he has expelled the union’s high-profile guest, European Trade Union Confederation chief Esther Lynch, for interfering in the country’s internal affairs during her address to a union rally.

Elsewhere, as negotiations on the IMF’s vital $1.9 billion bailout appear to have stalled, doubts over Saied’s willingness to engage in the international commitments and internal concessions needed to secure the loan are also finding voice.

In their place, he continues to target the “traitors” and “terrorists” of his opposition, accusing them of conspiring to assassinate him and selling out the country to unnamed foreign powers. With every showing, the president’s accusations have grown more idiosyncratic, with one list purporting to be of those conspiring against state security, including French public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy.

The scale and ferocity of Saied’s political purges are increasing daily. A growing number of the president’s critics and opponents have all been arrested—many without charge.

The scale and ferocity of Saied’s political purges are increasing daily. A growing number of the president’s critics and opponents have all been arrested—many without charge—in just the last few weeks. Those detained include key figures, from the leadership of the National Salvation Front and Citizens Against the Coup—groups dominated by many of the country’s former political parties—to the owner of a popular independent radio station to judges, lawyers, and businesspeople who have all been arrested by a freshly invigorated police force.

Some people have been accused of conspiring in the subsidized food shortages, and some are accused of increasing prices across the country. Others stand accused of plotting with the U.S. Embassy against Saied’s increasingly idiosyncratic rule.

Screenshots of representatives from Citizens Against the Coup, including what appears to be opposition activists Chaima Issa and Jaouhar Ben Mbarek setting up a meeting with the U.S. Embassy in Tunis, have been shared widely on Tunisia’s social media. Both Issa and Ben Mbarek have since been arrested. Issa has been charged with spreading false information; charges against Ben Mbarek are unknown as of time of writing.

In a statement issued to Foreign Policy, the U.S. State Department expressed its alarm that criminal charges against individuals in Tunisia resulting from contact with embassy officials may have led to their detention. The statement said: “A primary role for any U.S. Embassy or diplomat in every country in which we have a diplomatic presence is to meet with a wide array of individuals to inform the United States’ understanding of the different views and perspectives in that country. Tunisian and other foreign diplomats posted to the United States regularly engage in similar meetings.”

Irrespective of the details of any particular meeting, charges and accusations against many of the people now detained strain credulity.

“So much of what he’s saying is ridiculous,” said Hamza Meddeb, a fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center. “I mean, how can a few individuals in Tunis cause a national food shortage and price rises? However, many within Tunisia’s security services are going along with it. It’s a marriage of convenience. They get to close down the public space while escalating repression across Tunisia. They don’t need to worry about the logic of what the president is saying. It doesn’t matter. This is about power.”

Moreover, with many of those arrested perceived as members of the country’s elite and political classes—whom many citizens blame for their current difficulties—the recent round of arrests is working in tandem with the campaign to scapegoat Black migrants.

“It’s basically an essay in populism,” Meddeb said. It has also unleashed repressed racism.

In Tunis, with the memory of former autocrat Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali still fresh in people’s memory, an old man in the city center openly boasted to a camera that his ancestors had trafficked in slaves.

For many Black migrants, undocumented and increasingly documented, none of it matters. Standing outside the embassy of the Ivory Coast near central Tunis, a family of documented Black migrants are preparing to leave. “Since the president’s speech, it has been very bad,” the father said. Asked if the change in attitudes toward migrants was sudden, he added, “It was like a switch being flipped.”