A personal account from Choucha, officially closed in 2013
This article was contributed by Oliver Tringham, a refugee advocate. It has been lightly edited for style.
All borders are porous. Despite the ditch that has reputedly been dug to deter people crossing irregularly between Tunisia and Libya, it is clear that crossings are still being made – and in both directions. In mid-September, I met six women who had escaped the killing in Timbuctoo and thought to find sanctuary in Libya (they said they knew they didn’t have enough money to get to Europe). They only found more killing in Libya, so came to Tunisia – where a kind Libyan drove them across the desert border in exchange for their last EUR 100 note. He pointed them in the direction of Choucha, and amazingly, they found their way to the camp – a camp that was officially closed on 30 June 2013, and no longer exists according to its creator, UNHCR.
What is left of the camp deserves an article in Forced Migration Review’s June 2017 issue (Shelter in Displacement) or would it be better in Resurgence? There can be few better places where the Four Rs have been so rigorously applied: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and Recreate. Arguably less virtuously, the Chouchans have become acculturated to the inhabitants of their nearest town – Ben Gardène – in their attitude to a fifth R: Rubbish. Still, the women from Timbuctoo had been happy to arrive there, to find people “like us” (they stroked their bare, black arms to illustrate) and somewhere to sleep and rest in peace aboveground.
Choucha’s inhabitants have all been men for some time, now. The arrival of the women was therefore especially welcome: they soon started cooking and traditional sub-Saharan society began to re-establish itself.
They had two days of delight, before they were rudely interrupted on the morning of Saturday, 13 August – a Tunisian National holiday for Women and the Family – by a raid from the Tunisian National Guard. The Guards violently rounded everyone up and made them all sit in the hot sun from eleven in the morning, until after the sun had set that evening. They then carted 33 people off to prison in Ben Gardène.
This is not normal practice: no-one can remember anything like this happening at Choucha before. Although the camp at Choucha no longer officially exists, the Tunisian Ministry of the Interior produced a communiqué the following day (on Sunday, 14 August) saying that 33 people had been arrested for illegally trying to get across the border from Tunisia to Libya. Three of the 33 were considered to be traffickers, as they been found in possession of cash (euros) and passports. While we don’t know in which direction, the remaining 24 were headed, it’s clear that the Ministry hadn’t checked with the women from Timbuctoo.
The three people arrested as traffickers were all from Côte d’Ivoire, and had been living in the camp, since arriving there from Libya in the Arab Spring of 2011. While the 30 non-trafficker travellers were released into the welcoming arms of the Tunisian Red Crescent (Croissant Rouge Tunisien – CRT) in the next few days, these three were kept in prison.
Fortunately, there were still some of the Ivoirian community at Choucha who were not incarcerated, and one of them got in touch with the Maison des Migrations in Tunis as well as with the author of this report. He thought one of the prisoners was still in Medenine, while the two others were in Tunis.
One’s first problem in these circumstances is to find out where the prisoners are. If two of the refugees were in Tunis, they were most likely to be in the Detention Centre at Ouardeya – somewhere that I knew from other occasions. It was almost by accident that I discovered they were actually in the prison at Mornaghia – when I asked a prison visitor from an ONG in Tunis, who had seen them a few days before.
The representative from the Forum Tunisien des Droits Économiques et Sociaux sent down to discover the nature of the situation hadn’t even been able to meet any of the 30 travellers in CRT’s care, let alone any of the imprisoned three.
Assuming that the other refugee was in Harboub, the prison on the outskirts of Medènine, the Ivoirian who was still free asked me to take some money to him there. As someone who knows Tunisia’s prisons well, has said: in prison, you have to get protection – either by having money; or, if you haven’t got money, by becoming a slave to someone who has; or else you join the Fundamentalists, although people with black skin are generally not welcomed by the latter.
I got in touch with a lawyer I knew in Tataouine, to see if he could find out if the third refugee was incarcerated in Harboub. He said that he was going to Court in Medènine the following day and would look up his name in the Court list, there.
The following evening, we met over a cup of tea in a café, outside under the stars and he told me that the refugee was not on the list of inmates. I insisted that we continue looking, as I felt sure he was there.
The following morning therefore, I went with the lawyer to the Court in Tataouine, as the Director of Harboub was meant to be turning up. The Court is a grand building, built by the former dictatorship in Tataouine’s new administrative district. It has a huge entrance hall, across which lawyers stride back and forth in their black gowns, under three gigantic chandeliers. The Prison Chief didn’t turn up, but there was someone there from the prison, whom we were able to question. If he worked at Harboub, I felt sure that he would know the person we were looking for, but he said that there were dozens of “Africans” in the prison – meaning that they all looked alike. He made some ’phone calls however, and it seemed possible that we had at last located our quarry.
The morning of the next day (a Friday), the lawyer and I went back to the Court in Medènine, to try to talk to the judge about the case. The judge was busy, as he was doing the Clerk’s job as well as his own (the Clerk hadn’t turned up), but we at least got the case number and the law under which he was being charged.
I got the impression that my lawyer had gone about as far as he was prepared to go on a pro bono basis. He said that the charges were serious and that the Government would appoint a lawyer for the defence.
I went to Harboub and tried to talk my way in to see the prisoner – and give him the money. After all, although only members of his immediate family are allowed to visit, there were no members of his immediate family in Tunisia – and he’d called me “Papa” often enough.
They kept me waiting on the doorstep, while two men, one young and one old, manacled together, were bundled into the prison. The older man, dressed in his traditional Tunisian jebba, now grey and stained, seemed to be almost weeping with shame. The Prison Director refused to grant me an audience, and told me I had to get permission from a judge or the Ministry of Justice in Tunis.
My next step was to contact a renowned lawyer in Sfax. When I rang him, he said that he was coming to Tunis the following day, and we could meet there. So I went back to the capital and waited… and waited… Eventually, several days later, this lawyer got in touch, with profuse apologies. However, by this time, I’d contacted Avocats Sans Frontières.
Like all organizations, ASF has its own agenda. As far as I could tell, they were interested in the new law on Human Trafficking and if the case I had brought them was an example of the application of this new law. They said that they would send someone down to the South the following week, and would get back to me with their findings…
More waiting…
I decided to go down to Sfax, myself – thinking of Mohammed and the Mountain. Then things started to move. The lawyer in Sfax rang to say that “our” refugee was going to trial this coming Friday, in the Tribunal Cantonal – the lowest Court – in Ben Gardène, rather than in the Tribunal de Première Instance in Medènine. The lawyer and I discussed what to do – whether to seek legal representation for the hearing in the lower Court. Considering the length of time our refugee had already spent in prison, the lawyer suggested letting the process run its course: he was likely to be released more or less immediately, with or without representation.
The lawyer did write me a letter however, for the Judge in the Tribunal de Première Instance, requesting that I be allowed to visit the prisoner, considering that he had no immediate family in the country.
I arrived at the Court in Medènine early, the following morning and sat and waited for a couple of hours, together with the general Tunisian population. I was eventually invited into the Judge’s presence – where I discovered that it was not the right judge. He made some ‘phone calls however, and assured me that our refugee would not be appearing before the Tribunal Cantonal, the morning after. His Clerk then took me to talk to the judge who was dealing with the case, who was much less amenable.
This judge insisted I sit on one of the hard chairs on the far side of the room, rather than the comfy ones next to his desk. He said several times that the refugee had “friends” in Tunisia, who had got hold of a lawyer for him. Indeed, this lawyer – a woman – had been to see the refugee, just the day before: she had come all the way from Tunis! So he certainly had no need of my visiting him, and he refused the letter and my application – although he pointed out that had I had a card from some organisation registered in Tunisia, his decision might have been different… Furthermore, the refugee would be coming to Court (the Tribunal de Première Instance) next Wednesday. The judge also deigned to give me the name and phone numbers of the lawyer.
I left the Court and went and sat outside in a café down the road, where I drank an entire bottle of water. I rang the lawyer and she invited me to come and talk to her in Tunis when I was back there. She said that the refugee was definitely not going to Court on Wednesday. When I asked, she also told me that the Maison des Migrations had appointed her to represent this refugee.
I took a taxi out to see the women from Timbuctoo, still in their CRT flat on the outskirts of the town. I brought them copies of the Rights in Exile Programme’s “Self-Help Kit for Asylum-Seekers” in French, although it turned out that they’d already made their asylum applications.
Before returning to Tunis, I made another visit to Choucha, picking up more information on the situation and their needs, and taking them lemons and bananas, tea, sugar and bread.
Although the Maison des Migration’s focus may be on trafficking and the problems of Sub-Saharan students (they work closely with the Association des Étudiants et Stagiaires Africains en Tunisie), it was good to see them taking on this case. We look forward to seeing what comes of it.
