“They know that their discourse is frivolous, questionable… They even like to play with words because by giving farcical reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors… for them, it is not a matter of persuading with good arguments but intimidating and disorientating.”

 

This Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in his analysis of antisemitic discourse.[1] The same approach is now needed to understand the vehement wave of racism against Black migrants and asylum seekers in Tunisia, which has no regard for facts, statistics, or the inhumane ramifications on its victims in its feverish effort to mobilize supporters and spread fear and fabrications.

 

Ambiguity surrounds the spread of this wave and the parties behind or active in it. Ostensibly at least, it began with a document published late last year by the so-called “Tunisian Nationalist Party” – which obtained legal recognition in 2018, supported Kais Saied’s presidential candidacy in 2019, and had no significant previous activity – about the “plan for Ajsi settlement to wipe Tunisia from existence”.[2] The party sent the document to several governmental bodies, including the President’s Office. It also launched a petition for the deportation of sub-Saharan migrants, labeling them instruments of this plan led by foreign forces, and the amendment of the 2018 Anti-Racism Law. In its first weeks, this petition attracted the attention of only a few dozen of the party’s Facebook followers, who numbered no more than 3,200 in late January. However, simultaneously, media figures and a former minister of state property began promoting crude racial ideas about an excessive increase of “Africans in Tunisia” and the danger of a “great replacement”.

 

In mid-January, the campaign began to resonate more as the Tunisian Nationalist Party announced the beginning of “fieldwork” whereby two of its personnel would collect signatures for the petition in Raoued in Ariana Governorate, central Tunis. The campaign gained increasing visibility on social media, especially TikTok, and the private and national media with various forms of content (e.g. videos and articles).

 

The campaign culminated in the president’s statements in a National Security Council meeting he called on February 21. In the session, he adopted the “great replacement” conspiracy theory and implicated sub-Saharan migrants, accusing “hordes of irregular migrants” of “violence, crimes, and unacceptable practices”. These statements had the expected effect. Testimonies circulated about attacks on Black foreigners and even Black Tunisians, who – by some civil society estimates – constitute 10-15% of the population.[3] There was violence, arbitrary arrests based on skin color, humiliation, vandalism, workplace dismissals, evictions, and incitement to violence. Fear spread among sub-Saharan migrants in a climate reminiscent of the White man’s colonial paranoia about Black people.

 

Thus, within a few weeks, sub-Saharan migrants and asylum seekers became the central political “issue” in a country where, according to government statistics, they only constitute 36.4% of all foreign residents (who constitute no more than 0.5% of the population). Additionally, government figures from two years ago indicated that over 65% had no intention whatsoever to settle in Tunisia.[4]

 

The “Benefits” of the Fifth Column

 

It is difficult to concede that this campaign emerged and escalated spontaneously. Since launch, it has benefited from the authority’s decision to ignore it in clear contravention of Tunisia’s Anti-Racism Law. Media platforms were subsequently opened for the campaign, the governor of Ariana received one of its activists, and the President’s Office ultimately endorsed its settlement conspiracy thesis. The argument that settling migrants pose a fifth-column danger, which has been consistently promoted by far-right and conservative-right politicians and governments in numerous parts of the world, conceals political goals, namely to restore these figures’ shaken legitimacy and win them political recognition.

 

For example, in 2019, when economic conditions in India deteriorated and unemployment reached new heights, drawing severe criticism from the opposition, Narendra Modi – in his new electoral campaign – ignited a frenetic assault on Bangladeshi migrants, accusing them of threatening security in the country in order to portray himself as the national savior. In France, the media strategy of far-right figure Eric Zemmour, who takes pride in his Islamophobia and justifies colonialism, was based on the “great replacement” theory. He thereby transformed from a mere media polemicist to a significant presidential candidate.

 

The Tunisian version of “great replacement”, as promoted by the Tunisian Nationalist Party and adopted by the president, does not differ much from the original. The idea first appeared in Europe in the late 19th century and was then developed into a theory by author Maurice Barres – one of the most important thinkers of the French chauvinist far-right – in the interwar period. Since 2010, it has been promoted by far-right French author Renaud Camus, who has been convicted of inciting hatred. The theory that has imposed itself today in Western countries, which have been plagued by racist far-right movements and Islamophobia, postulates a conspiracy by globalist elites seeking to change the demographics of the native White Christian population and gradually replace it with foreigners, primarily Black and Muslim people from sub-Saharan Africa and the Maghreb.[5] As for the Tunisian version, it merely drops the Maghrebis and targets Black people, accusing them of attempting to eradicate Tunisia’s Arab-Islamic identity. In both cases, the people allegedly embroiled in the replacement conspiracy are the same: the weakest link in society, i.e. the ostracized group at the bottom of the social ladder that can readily be robbed of its dignity, incited against, and subjected to police harassment and economic exclusion.

 

These ostracized people targeted by the racist campaign come primarily from Ivory Coast, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Guinea, and Mali and are among the most vulnerable groups in Tunisian society. They have the youngest average age among all foreign residents in Tunisia (26.6 years) and the lowest rate of university education. The vast majority (over 98%) work in the least specialized and therefore most vulnerable, laborious, and exploitative sectors: 20.5% in construction and 60% in services (including the 21.5% employed in domestic labor).[6] In other words, their vulnerability and the state’s refusal to regularize their statuses has made them soft targets for their employers. Like us, they all hail from postcolonial countries suffering stifling economic crises, some of which have been devastated by armed conflicts and the systematic plundering of their resources.

 

The adoption of the conspiracy discourse and invocation of a Cold War-like image of an “enemy within” against the group in Tunisia today that is the least capable of defending itself and its rights cannot be divorced from its political functions. Firstly, the discourse legitimizes the state of exception because it delegitimizes confrontation, disagreement, and debate in the public sphere. It slaughters politics on the altar of security and validates the efforts by the ruler and his security agencies to exclude dissenters, punish critics, brand opponents traitors, and subjugate and tame all bodies considered rogue. This discourse – with its dependence on an “enemy within” whose portrayal harks back to the constant savagization of Black people in the colonial imagination –  propagates fear, fuels ethnic tension, and allows racial belonging to prevail over human belonging, class identity to be sacrificed for regional identity, and protest to be replaced by individual and mob action. It uses fear of the other as a political tool to justify control, subjugation, and domestic surveillance. It also diverts attention from the rising cost of living, depletion of basic goods, escalating poverty and marginalization, and the absence of any conception of a socioeconomic policy different from that followed by previous governments. And in our current situation, wherein the government seeks to conclude an agreement with the International Monetary Fund that obligates it to implement “painful reforms”, this discourse could provide cover for a coup de grace to the welfare state.

 

This discourse, which is aligned with the arguments of the European far- right, also has foreign benefits. On one hand, it reduces the Italian government’s pressure on Tunisia to intensify its “efforts to combat the informal migration phenomenon”[7] as the terror that it has created among sub-Saharan migrants has succeeded in driving many to seek to leave Tunisia and accept deportation. This is a result that Italy can only appreciate, with its far-right prime minister who has prioritized forced deportation. From another angle, the discourse brings European political recognition to the Tunisian authority by confirming its commitment to a security-based approach to the migration issue and its ability to continue playing the role of Europe’s border guard.[8]

 

The Taboo Subject of Anti-Black Racism

 

The proliferation of group and individual attacks on Black migrants and asylum seekers and incitement against them embodies the “morbid symptoms” that Antonio Gramsci discussed in his definition of structural crisis, which in Tunisia’s case has only escalated since 25 July 2021. However, it also lifts the curtain once again from the taboo topic of the institutional racism and structural exclusion afflicting Black people in the country, which is rooted in the institution of slavery.[9]

 

The hideous wave of racism today breaches the dominant narrative of a tolerant society and “the first Arab country to abolish slavery”. It calls to mind historical and social facts that researchers and activists have – thanks to the revolution’s momentum – strived to expose, deconstructing their historical denial.[10] Remnants of the institution of slavery still exist in Tunisia, not only in the collective consciousness but also – and in particular – in the political and power structures. Contrary to the dominant discourse, slavery did not end with the 1846 decree issued under Ahmed Bey. Rather, another anti-slavery decree was needed in 1890. However, although emancipated slaves were rid of “traditional slavery” and their circumstances gradually improved, they remained indebted to their old enslavers with a portion of their time and the fruits of their labor.

 

The post-independence state did not eradicate racism or the stigmatization of the descendants of enslaved Black people, as it preserved remnant forms of enslavement through social institutions such as khamessat and mrubbin.[11] Mixed marriage also remained prohibited, their identity papers included multiple references to their past enslavement, they were buried in a separate cemetery in the city of Djerba, and they remained invisible. The bulk of White Tunisian society remained in denial of racism, and “slavery and its aftermath have been erased from the collective memory of Tunisia, except for references to abolition”.[12]

 

Although the revolution provided space for Black activists to self-organize and for support to be rallied for the adoption of the Anti-Racism Law, the legislation was not followed by practical measures, and the state remained passive in handling physical and moral violence against Black people and protecting them from racist attacks. Indeed, eagerly playing the role of Europe’s border guard has only increased the incidence of tragedies among us and on the borders, and it has not spared us from a violent, racist record of derogatory and inhumane portrayals of Black people that once legitimized the European colonial offensives and their system of privileges.

 

This article is an edited translation from Arabic.

 

[1] Jean-Paul Sartre, Réflexions sur la question juive (Folio essais), 1985, p. 25-26.

[2] The term “Ajsi” is an adjective derived from the acronym for Afrikiya Junub al-Sahra’, i.e. Sub-Saharan Africa.

[3] Houda Mzioudet, “Mobilizing for Social Justice: Black Tunisian Activism in Transitional Justice”, Justice Info, 2018.

[4] All these figures are from the Report on the National Survey on Immigration issued by the National Observatory for Migration and the National Institute of Statistics. In comparison, Lebanon hosts 1.5 million Syrian refugees, who constitute approximately 30% of its total population according to European Union figures.

[5] We all recall, for example, the armed attack on two mosques in New Zealand by an Australian man after he posted a manifesto online about the danger of the spread of Islam and eradication of White people in New Zealand. The attack killed 51 Muslims and wounded 49 others.

[6] Report on the National Survey on Immigration, op. cit.

[7] This the Italian interior and foreign ministers reaffirmed during their visit to Tunisia last January. Raseef22, 27 January 2023.

[8] This is affirmed by all serious followers of the migration issue, such as the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights and Majdi Karbai.

[9] Houda Mzioudet, “Breaking the Racial Taboo: Black Tunisian Activism as Transnational Justice” in Transitional Justice in Tunisia: Innovations, Continuities, Challenges, Simon Robins and Paul Gready (eds.), Routledge, 2022.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ines Mrad Dali, “De l’esclavage à la servitude: Le cas des Noirs en Tunisie”, in Cahiers d’études africaines, 179-180, 2005, p. 935-956.

[12] Houda Mzioudet, “Breaking the Racial Taboo”, op. cit., p. 67.