Tunisian president Kais Saied has launched an authoritarian clampdown on opposition parties and media while inciting hatred against African migrants. But EU officials seem happy to embrace Saied as another thuggish border guard for Fortress Europe.
On Friday, July 14, a crowd gathered outside the front gate of the Tunisian journalists’ union headquarters amid the colonial-era French buildings in downtown Tunis. Activists, most of them old hands in the struggle who know each other, milled around the gates, chatting together with placards in hand, awaiting direction as they prepared to protest.
Later, they started down one of the main avenues, blocking traffic as they chanted militant slogans in Arabic and French. The emergency action was small and called in response to weeks of racist violence against sub-Saharan African migrants in Tunisia by citizen vigilantes, most flagrantly in the country’s second-largest city, Sfax.
The Tunisian military went on to expel the migrants to a military zone in open desert on the Tunisian border with Libya and Algeria. They were left without water or food in heat well over 110 degrees Fahrenheit.
The protest of perhaps a hundred people was the most recent action called by a newly formed Anti-Fascist Front. The Front had already called a much larger solidarity demonstration in February, after Tunisia’s autocratic president Kais Saied made a nationally televised speech propagating his own version of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory.
At the time, Saied had claimed that black migrants from sub-Saharan Africa were part of a “criminal plan to change the composition of the demographic landscape in Tunisia” by making it a “purely African” country. The president accused the migrants of violence and criminality, and his speech immediately set off a wave of violence against black people in Tunisia. It was just one of Saied’s many conspiratorial proclamations about purported enemies — “known parties” whom he never names, whom he charges with attempting to undermine Tunisia from within and without.
These proclamations are meant to distract the Tunisian masses from the real problems facing the country: crumbling infrastructure and public services, basic supply shortages, massive inflation, escalating police violence, drought and wildfires made worse by the impact of climate change, the ripping away of civic freedoms, and Tunisia’s subordinate role in the global economic system.