The Tunisian Coast Guard announced on Thursday that it had recovered 13 bodies of migrants who were victims of a shipwreck off the port city of Sfax, where clashes erupted between migrants and local residents last week.
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“Last night, units from the Sfax (Middle-East) maritime region foiled an attempted illegal border crossing and rescued 25 migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, but 13 bodies were recovered,” the National Guard said in a statement.
Sfax, the second largest city in Tunisia, is the main departure point for emigration to Europe this year, as the Italian island of Lampedusa is less than 150 km from the Tunisian coast.
Last week, this metropolitan area of one million people was the scene of clashes that left a Tunisian man dead on July 3.
Hundreds of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa were then forced out of the city and taken by the Tunisian authorities to inhospitable areas bordering Libya to the east and Algeria to the west, according to NGOs.
According to the NGO Human Rights Watch, at least 100 to 150 migrants were still stranded near the Libyan border, heading towards Ras Jedir, in a militarized zone as of Thursday evening, without water, shelter or food.
On Wednesday, in a video sent to AFP, they launched an emergency call and said there were children and pregnant women among them.
xenophobic speech
According to HRW, another group of 200 sub-Saharan migrants were left to their own devices near the Algerian border in Tamaghza, 600 km south of Tunis.
Rescue teams are on their way to help them.
Witnesses told AFP about various convoys that had scattered dozens of migrants in 1,000 km areas near the border with Algeria.
The Tunisian Red Crescent sheltered 630 migrants between Sunday and Monday, some of whom spent a week in the Ras Jedir buffer zone on the Libyan border.
According to the latest figures from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), released in June, 51,215 illegal migrants arrived in Italy by sea this year, up 150% from the previous year. Almost half came from Tunisia and the other half from Libya. During this period, a thousand migrants died or disappeared in the Mediterranean.
An increasingly open xenophobic discourse has spread since Tunisian President Kais Saied, who assumed full power in July 2021, condemned illegal immigration in February.
He condemned the arrival of illegal “hordes of migrants” from sub-Saharan Africa in Tunisia and a plan to “change the country’s demographic makeup”.
Tunisia is going through a severe economic and financial crisis, which is also forcing hundreds of Tunisians to try to reach Europe by sea.