Tunisia, with the Meloni - von der Leyen Memorandum on migrants we continue to look at the symptoms and not the causes

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Migrants, EU-Tunisia Memorandum of Understanding signed

Update July 18, 2023: On 16 July the European Union signed the memorandum of understanding with Tunisia providing economic support from Brussels in exchange for border control and the implementation of economic reforms.

According to the agreement, achieved by the Tunisian President, Kais Saied, the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, the Prime Minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, and the Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, the EU is committed to providing financial support to Tunisia to improve the its search and rescue system at sea, the patrolling of territorial waters and border control, while Tunisia will promote the repatriation of Tunisian citizens who arrived irregularly in Europe.Saied – underlines Annalisa Camilli – reiterated her intention not to open refugee camps or centers to which non-Tunisian migrants could also be sent, as had been proposed by the EU during the negotiations.

The funds will be used to support Tunisia's struggling economy, counter migration and finance undersea fiber optic and electricity cable projects between the EU and North Africa and energy cooperation projects [Arianna Poletti and Aïda Delpuech they told on Irpi of the project of a gigantic solar power plant in the Tunisian desert, with large consumption of water and transfer of the energy produced to Europe], and include 150 million euros of direct budget support.

According to what we learned from the site Euractiv, the Commission will provide €675 million to Tunisia this year from the European Fund for Sustainable Development.Of these, approximately 105 million euros will be allocated for migration management, including the fight against "irregular departures", the repatriation of foreigners present in Tunisia to their countries of origin, the repatriations of Tunisians without a residence permit currently in the EU and support to the Tunisian coast guard with new equipment for search and rescue activities.

“The European Union – adds Camilli – will give Tunis '17 re-equipped boats and eight new ones'.The European Union expects an increase in operations to intercept migrants at sea from the strengthening of the Tunisian coast guard fleet.However, the agreement does not include a search and rescue (SAR) area under the responsibility of Tunis".

However, the Memorandum makes no reference to the 900 million euros that the EU promised in June to provide Tunisia if President Saied's government accepts a loan program, worth 1.5 billion dollars, with the Fund International Monetary Fund (IMF).Nor is there any reference to the persecution of people from sub-Saharan Africa in Tunisia, or to the mass deportations in early July by Tunisian police on the border with Libya and Algeria, documented by multiple organizations and media.In this report on The Press Matteo Garavoglia he said the odyssey of some of the over a thousand sub-Saharan migrants arrested and deported from Sfax and abandoned in the desert.

In the aftermath of the agreement, Libya he spread the recording of the rescue operations of a group of eighty migrants abandoned, according to the Libyan authorities, in the desert without water, food and shelter.Only a few days before the signing of the agreement, Saied had once again spoken of "ethnic substitution" regarding the sub-Saharan migrants present (or arriving) in Tunisia who would "demographically" threaten the "Arab-Muslim identity" of the country.

Precisely on respect for human rights and international law, the Memorandum is very vague.The Memorandum, moreover, is in line with the rationale of the EU pact on migrants of last June which re-proposed the hegemonic vision on the management of migrants which continues to be a security and, at most, economic issue.
The implementation of these proposals will be discussed in the third quarter of 2023, he said Euractiv a Commission official, and an EU-Tunisia Association Council will be held before the end of the year.As a political agreement, the Memorandum will have to be approved by national governments.

It is Monday 12 June, and on Tunisian radio, the main source of information in the North African country, Italy is being discussed.The death of Berlusconi - to whom the current president's challenger in the second round of the 2019 elections, Nabil Karoui, was constantly compared due to his private television channel and corruption scandals - also finds space on the other side of the Mediterranean.What fuels the debate, however, are above all the recent visits of Giorgia Meloni, whose face appears in the paper newspapers still in circulation.In the space of a week, in fact, the prime minister visited the North African state twice, first alone, Then in company of the President of the European Commission Ursula Von Der Leyen and her Dutch ally, Prime Minister Mark Rutte.The goal it is now known:encourage the signing of a new Memorandum between the European Union and Tunisia, trading greater control of the borders of the central Mediterranean with a package of economic and financial aid that will allow the country to avoid bankruptcy, conditional on the signing of a new loan from International Monetary Fund.

The statements released by the President of the European Commission and by Meloni during a press point, which actually took place behind closed doors, without journalists, were not limited to a simple list of the measures discussed - a conditional loan worth 900 million euros, direct budget support of another 150 million, greater integration of the respective markets in the energy and commercial fields.Ignoring the resolution of the European Parliament on arbitrary arrests, violations of human rights in the country and of the law tout court in an increasingly authoritarian and repressive context, Meloni and Von Der Leyen also underlined with conciliatory and friendly expressions the potential "mutual benefits" of an EU-Tunisia agreement.

Among the future objectives of the memorandum, Von Der Leyen even cites the possibility of "bringing our peoples together", insisting several times on "mutual benefits".Meloni's speech is no different:the prime minister dusts off "our common history", making a turnaround compared to the positions of just a few months ago, when he was still declaring Tunisia and Tunisians caused the alleged "invasion" which justified the approval of the Cutro decree.Every reference to the migration dossier, however, has now been transformed into a "common fight against human traffickers", almost as if Italy was helping Tunisia to regulate an issue of internal crime and not delegating it to the North African country, as has already happened in Libya, the control of the Schengen border.

Migrants:after Cutro, the majority is preparing a new crackdown on residence permits

Twenty-four hours before Meloni's second visit to Tunis on Sunday 11 June, one of the most important international rating agencies (which therefore evaluates a state's financial stability and ability to repay its debts), the Fitch Ratings agency, has further downgraded Tunisia at the CCC- level, which translated means “high probability or imminent sign of insolvency with minimal probability of recovery”.The same category as Lebanon.These coded assessments are not without concrete consequences.The previous downgrading dates back to March 2022, and meant that, faced with increasingly uncertain repayments, creditors demanded advance payments in a context of liquidity crisis, leading to repeated shortages of goods imported into Tunisia, such as wheat, flour, sugar, feed, fuel.While the prices of these goods exploded on international markets following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Tunisia struggled to pay for imports.

The scenario painted by Fitch Ratings on 9 June seems to describe a different country from the one described in optimistic tones by the Italian Prime Minister and the President of the Commission just a few days later.For the rating agency, Tunisia's budget "depends on the IMF aid program which would probably not be fully paid this year anyway, even if the agreement were to be signed in the second half of 2023". According to Fitch, among other things, “the Tunisian government's financing plan is based on over 5 billion dollars in external loans (10% of GDP)”.In addition, this year the North African country will have to repay foreign debts worth around 3 billion dollars, let it be known the World Bank.In total, much more than what, in exchange for heavy and unpopular austerity measures, the IMF is offering Tunisia today:only 1.9 billion dollars.

The downgrading that brought Tunisia to the penultimate step of the international rating agencies' ranking was not mentioned publicly during Meloni's visits.The Italian government seems to want to ignore these data, and continues to lobby with the Fund, so much so that, while Meloni was in Tunis, Foreign Minister Tajani took off to Washington to meet representatives of the international financial institution.After around three years of negotiations with the IMF which, in 2021, still proposed around 3 billion dollars to Tunisia, it was the resounding "No" from the same president who today Meloni shakes hands with, promising support, that interrupted any discussion.On April 6, in fact, Saied he declared:“We reject the diktats of the IMF.We reject injunctions that will lead to general impoverishment.The alternative is to rely on ourselves."The day before Von Der Leyen's visit, Saied went to Sfax and, in a video in Arabic published on the Presidency's Facebook page, he announced:“We will not be the guardians of their borders.”In a communicated following the visit, the Tunisian Presidency then reiterated its refusal to accept the conditions that the European Union would like to impose in exchange for economic-financial support, i.e. to transform Tunisia into a hotspot where to "sort" migrant people, not only Tunisians, but also other nationalities.

Despite several foreign media they are expressing their doubts about the recent European and Italian pressure on Tunisia, in Italy the public debate continues to focus only on the imminent "migratory risk", which would justify the interventionist policies of the Meloni government in the Mediterranean and in Washington.The data on the increase in departures, which occurred among other things following a tough talk of President Kais Saied towards the sub-Saharan community at the end of February, seem to constitute the only indicator taken into consideration when drawing up agreements on foreign policy in the Mediterranean.A comment by analyst Emadeddine Badi, quoted by BBC, thus analyzes the measures announced in Tunisia by Von Der Leyen, Rutte and Meloni:“Once again, the EU is not looking at the root causes, but is focusing on the symptoms.”

To stop migrants we pay authoritarian, racist, violent governments:what is happening in President Saied's Tunisia

Tunisia represents a clear example of the limits of this short-term stopgap approach, which is far from new.The complex Tunisian context has often been summarized by the Italian media in recent weeks with the terms "chaos” or “powder magazine”, without the announcement of substantial funding being followed by a systemic context analysis.The flattening of decades-long political-economic processes and their current consequences, summarized in a generic and endemic "economic crisis", as if this were nothing more than a natural condition of the country, has justified simplistic responses, such as those heard in the repeated declarations by Meloni, but also by Von Der Leyen, on the "urgent stabilization of the country".Precisely the trap of stability, the illusion that guides Italian politics in the Mediterranean, has legitimized policies in support of authoritarianism in the post-2011 period.Precisely from that same authoritarianism, however, we escape:it is told, for example, by the great flight of the Egyptians, one of the first nationalities to land in recent years, one of Rome's partner countries despite the harsh repressive policies of the dictator Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi.

According to this profoundly Italocentric discourse, which measures the impact of the crisis according to the effect on our coasts, Tunisia has therefore been abandoned by the international community and should be "saved" to avoid new landings.“Tunisia needs aid”, he echoed several times Foreign Minister Tajani addressed Meloni, claiming that he wanted to apply "a pragmatic and non-ideological approach".Yet, the North African country has received millions of European and Italian funds since 2011, and not just for the militarization of the Central Mediterranean.Italy spends a total of 700 million euros on cooperation in the country, he remembered Meloni herself in Tunis on 6 June.In 2022, Italy overtook France to become its top trading partner.As for the EU, this represents the first export region of goods produced in Tunisia, where the currency exchange and the cost of labor represent a comparative advantage that has led several businesses and companies to relocate to the South of the Mediterranean.

The energy and trade cooperation measures proposed by Von Der Leyen in the form of aid are not new, but often the result of years-long negotiations.Today they are back on the table, just at the moment in which Tunisia finds itself totally dependent on new foreign loans to avoid financial collapse.Since 2012, for example, Tunisian civil society has been fighting against the signing of the free trade agreement EU-Tunisia, ALECA, which seems to be back in the news today after the last round of negotiations of 2019.The collective of Tunisian associations "block Aleca" has been asking for years to reconsider a project which, according to one of the representatives of the movement, Saleh Ben Yahia, would strengthen Tunisia's relationship of dependence on the EU: “The negotiations are not conducted on an equal footing, in the sense of common interests.Just think of the issue of worker mobility:Tunisians need a visa to practice a profession in Europe, but Europeans do not.We ask for balanced texts, because in the absence of a principle of equality, the will of those who can impose themselves prevails", he explained in an interview with the magazine Young Africa. 

On Tunisia, among others, he expressed himself recently on The Press also the former interior minister Marco Minniti, who later joined Leonardo.Minniti's premise is that “the dark continent is a front in the war in Ukraine.Putin attacks us in Chad, Burkina Faso and Mali."This political approach reduces Tunisia, and par excellence the entire African continent, to a great and passive Risk.States of which we are fundamental regional economic partners are then constantly analyzed through the sole lens of migration (Tunisia and Libya) or energy (Algeria), reduced to the status of "departure countries" or "areas of influence".Always seen exclusively from the North, in the collective imagination Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Algeria still seem to constitute an extension of Europe, so much so that in the dominant media discourse North Africa is often not even included in the foreign section, but treated as a question of internal politics.

In fact, it is often the Interior Ministers who negotiate with North African leaders directly, without migratory agreements, technical agreements, such as memoranda, being preceded or followed by public international agreements.Consequently, Italy and the EU they negotiate and strengthen repressive and security apparatuses.Piantedosi himself, in fact, went first to January, then to May, in Tunisia in preparation for the most recent official meetings.

The choice of expressions such as "small country" or "dark continent", the use of generic and unverified data to measure the level of poverty and potential departures, the constant reduction of complex political-economic relations to pure geopolitics means that, in our collective imagination, Tunisian, Libyan, Algerian, Egyptian, Moroccan citizens, but not only, are directly assimilated to migrants - victims or perpetrators - therefore private of every type of political subjectivity.Yet, for example, during Meloni's last visit to Tunis, Tunisian civil society he organized from one day to the next a protest demonstration against Italian migration policies.Talking about North Africa even when it "doesn't concern us", even when there is no landing, could ultimately allow us to understand in depth the dynamics that move an increasingly global Mediterranean, to analyze it with the attention it deserves.Precisely because what happens there also has consequences in Europe, but not only for this reason.

Preview image:Il Sole 24 Ore video frame via YouTube

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