At last month’s Venice film festival, a fictional portrayal of African migrants seeking to reach Europe received widespread acclaim. Me, Captain charts the journey of two Senegalese teenagers as they navigate violence, extortion, detention and forced labour at the hands of corrupt police and traffickers in north Africa. It won a Silver Lion and standing ovations.
The movie is at times a heartbreaking watch. But Guardian reporting from Tunisia suggests that the reality is – if anything – grimmer, and that Europe is deeply complicit in the horror that is unfolding. In July, the European Union signed an agreement promising a substantial cheque to Tunisia’s authoritarian leader, Kais Saied, in exchange for a crackdown on irregular migrants seeking to cross the Mediterranean to Italy. According to testimony from migrants and NGOs on the ground, the result has been the brutal pushback, abuse and intimidation of sub-Saharan African migrants.
Our reporter was told that more than 4,000 people had been detained and then dumped in remote desert areas on Tunisia’s borders with Libya and Algeria. Some were beaten and robbed of their money by border guards. Scores are believed to have died of thirst, as they attempted either to make their way back to the coast or elsewhere. The Guardian spoke to one Cameroonian asylum seeker who became separated from his wife and child. When a photo of a mother and daughter lying dead, face down in the desert, subsequently went viral, he recognised them immediately. Such a sight, according to other testimony, is not uncommon.
This intolerable cruelty towards acutely vulnerable people should not come as a surprise. In neighbouring Libya, where an EU-sponsored cooperation agreement was signed six years ago, detained migrants have been routinely subjected to rape, beatings, extortion and collective expulsion. Mr Saied – who assumed repressive, dictatorial powers in 2021 – has used incendiary rhetoric that has licensed racist hostility to black migrants, with outbreaks of violence the inevitable result.
Nevertheless, the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, flanked by Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s radical-right prime minister, and Mark Rutte, the Netherlands’ outgoing leader, have seen fit to employ him as a kind of border guard. And at a European summit in Granada on Thursday, Rishi Sunak united with Ms Meloni in endorsing such deals. A partnership with Egypt may be next.
Craven complicity with human rights abuses, in the name of secure borders, is a betrayal of the values that Europe stands for. As Germany’s foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, argued: “Democracy, human rights and cooperation must guide us in our cooperation – something that was not given suitable consideration, in the agreement with Tunisia.”
This should never have needed to be said. But, as the Granada summit underlined, the challenge of 21st-century migration is in danger of unravelling the moral fabric of European politics. Insidiously, and incrementally, a fortress mentality has come to dominate the mainstream in a way that, even a few years ago, would have been inconceivable. Geopolitical instability and conflict, global inequality and the climate emergency mean that mass migration is a phenomenon of our age. That throws up great problems, dilemmas – and, for an ageing continent that needs to refresh its workforce, opportunities. But a “whatever it takes” approach that can countenance looking the other way, as desperate people die of thirst in the desert, is not a solution. It is a scandal.
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