When he saw the Tunisian coast guard coming, Fabrice Ngo knew he wouldn’t make it to Italy that day. The young Cameroonian had pushed off from the shore of the Tunisian city of Sfax in a small metal boat with 40 others. They left under the cover of night alongside seven other boats. The small fleet motored north toward Italy, spread out, but all with the same destination. In the distance, the lights of seaside towns dotted the coastline.

The Tunisian coast guard found them two hours into their journey. As the police vessel approached, fear gave way to disbelief. The coast guards — in uniform and on an official ship — boarded the metal dinghy, dislodged and seized the boat’s motor and then sped off, motor in hand. The group of 40, most of them from West Africa, were left at sea with no motor. Panic ensued. Some began paddling with their bare hands.

“We didn’t know what to do. We couldn’t move forward. We started tearing up the fuel cans to paddle, everyone had their hands in the water,” Ngo told us. “Some brave ones undressed and jumped in the water to push the boat along.” (We have changed Ngo’s name to protect his safety.)

By mid-afternoon the following day, the boat had floated toward a small chain of islands off the coast of Sfax. Again, the Tunisian coast guard reappeared, towed the group farther out to sea and, again, left them floating at sea, still with no motor.

Then the weather started to turn — the waves grew choppy and water began to fill the dingy. 

“When we had advanced maybe 50 meters, that’s when the coast guard arrived,” Ngo told us. “They towed us back again in the middle, where the water is deep. The boat was getting weighed down by water. If it had continued to fill, we all would have died.”

Desperate for help, the group finally got the attention of a fishing boat that towed them to safety, ferrying them back to the coast near Sfax.

The Tunisian coast guard intercepted and then abandoned Ngo’s boat with the help of technology supplied by the European Union. In 2019, the EU inked a deal to provide nearly 20 million euros’ (about $21.4 million) worth of radar, undersea and airborne drones, radios and other technology, as well as training, to the government of Tunisia. EU officials made a similar agreement with Moroccan authorities. The Border Management Programme for the Maghreb region was designed to arm coast guard authorities in North Africa with new technology to be deployed along migration routes to Europe and to train them to use it. Tunisia recently surpassed Libya as the most heavily traveled route for irregular migration to Europe across the Mediterranean. 

Over the past decade, the EU has struck similar deals — exchanging hundreds of millions of euros worth of surveillance technology, other police equipment and accompanying training — with nearly every non-EU country that borders the bloc. At the center of these deals is the International Centre for Migration Policy Development, an innocuous-sounding international organization based in Vienna that has become one of the bloc’s go-to intermediaries for supplying surveillance equipment and training to police and coast guards in countries bordering the EU. 

The ICMPD’s clients are all either EU states or intergovernmental organizations — it receives more than half of its budget from the European Commission, the executive branch of the EU. Because the ICMPD is not a government institution, it can enable states to carry out operations along EU borders with much less transparency, accountability or regulation than what would be required of any EU government.

“The EU is breaking its own rules and values with the border regime we have built up: They partner with autocratic regimes and provide them with technology to use in the Mediterranean to keep people out,” said Ozlem Demirel, a member of the European Parliament from Germany. Demirel pointed to the ICMPD as an example of efforts by the European Commission to carry out this work with as little scrutiny as possible.

Hundreds of pages of documents we obtained through Freedom of Information requests, made primarily to the European Commission, shed light on the organization’s work along EU borders and go into minute detail about the ICMPD’s inner workings.

In 2019, the European Union provided top-of-the-line surveillance equipment to the state security service in Morocco, via the ICMPD, ostensibly to help the country tighten its borders and fight smuggling. But Moroccan authorities, already known for hacking the phones of independent journalists, activists and academics, could use this EU-provided technology to further perpetuate the same type of internal repression. In Libya, the ICMPD was paid by the EU to provide consulting services to Libyan migration authorities, including the Libyan Directorate for Combating Illegal Migration, which runs a network of detention centers that have been criticized by the U.N. human rights agency for the “unimaginable horrors” suffered by migrants detained there. In Bosnia, the ICMPD is building a new migration detention center. A spokesperson for Bosnia’s Ministry of Security told us that Bosnian authorities facilitated deportations to countries with which Bosnia has “good bilateral relations” but no deportation agreement. This is a dubious practice under international law.

And in Tunisia, the ICMPD is supplying technology and training to a coast guard that is increasingly being mobilized to carry out human rights abuses against migrants and refugees. The organization’s “Integrated Border Management Project” — funded by the EU and overseen by the German federal police — may look humanitarian on paper. But in practice, sources on the receiving end of the project say it is designed to prevent people from leaving Tunisia’s shores to seek refuge in Europe.

Ngo eventually made it to the other side of the Mediterranean, in another dinghy. We met him at a reception site for asylum seekers in northern Italy where he had befriended another asylum seeker — also from Cameroon. The two men fled the opposite sides of Cameroon’s civil war at more or less the same time. Ngo is from a French-speaking village and was forced to flee when his home was attacked by an English-speaking militia. His friend is an English-speaker and was a member of one of these same militias until his group was overrun by the Cameroonian military and he was forced to flee the country. But their paths have brought them together.

Both were able to flee Cameroon and make a home in Tunisia. For two years, Ngo worked as a car mechanic, while his friend worked in construction. Both lived in relative stability until, last February, they say they were forced to flee home, again.

In a televised speech on February 21, 2023, Tunisian President Kais Saied directly targeted Black Africans in Tunisia, referring to them as “hordes of illegal migrants” and charging them with carrying out “violence, crime and unacceptable actions.” Saied echoed the conspiracy theories of far-right political parties in both Tunisia and Italy, under Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, that tie intracontinental immigration to a “criminal plan” to change the “demographic landscape.”

The speech triggered unrest across Tunisia, where Black people comprise about 10% to 15% of the population. Within days, many people from countries in sub-Saharan Africa who were living in Tunisia, as well as Black Tunisians, reported losing their jobs, being evicted from their homes and facing arbitrary detentions by the police and violent attacks by vigilante groups. After Saied’s speech, Ngo’s boss told him to go home and not to return. For the first time, Ngo considered leaving Tunisia.

“These attacks made many of us want to stay indoors all day, like a cat,” he said. “We couldn’t live in this condition — I was in Tunisia for two years and never imagined taking to the sea.”

“Everything changed after the president’s speech,” said Mohammed Salah, a refugee from Sudan who has lived in Tunisia since 2016. Salah hails from the Darfur region, which became the ground zero for a genocide carried out by Sudan’s notoriously brutal Janjaweed militia in the early 2000s. Granted refugee status in Tunisia two years after arriving, Salah has been working in construction ever since. But after Saied’s speech, he told us, “they fired me from my job, they kicked me out of my home. All because the president said that we don’t like Black people.”

Salah came to lead a movement of people that has, for two months, camped out in front of the offices of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and the International Organization for Migration — in a plum neighborhood outside Tunis where many international organizations have their local headquarters. We spoke to Salah in April, just a few weeks after violence erupted in Khartoum, between the Sudanese army and the Janjaweed militia, which now calls itself the RSF. “I’ll go to Rwanda, to Europe, wherever,” Salah told us. “I just can’t go back to Sudan, especially now.”

But traveling by sea is becoming an increasingly dangerous option for people like Salah, as the European Union expands its cooperation with the authorities in Tunisia, with the ICMPD serving as a middleman. Sources at human rights and development organizations told us they were concerned that European policy in Tunisia will follow that of neighboring Libya, where the bloc began providing support for a coast guard intended to intercept migrant boats in international waters and to bring them back to the country from which they had just fled. The EU has been internationally condemned for its support of the Libyan coast guard, border police and migrant detention system, which, since 2016, has detained tens of thousands of migrants under inhumane conditions. An investigation by Amnesty International presented ample evidence of migrants being subjected to torture, sexual violence and even extrajudicial killings.

Before 2020, the Tunisian coast guard had a humanitarian focus, explained Romdhane Ben Amor, the director of the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights, a Tunis-based human rights organization. But in the past three years — and, Ben Amor notes, since the EU began its support for the country’s border authorities — his organization has documented extensive human rights abuses at sea by the Tunisian coast guard, similar to those seen in Libya.

In 2019, the ICMPD began supporting the Tunisian coast guard with a host of technical equipment and training, paid for by the EU. They have radar, communications equipment and drones — everything they need to stop people from leaving Tunisia’s shores or to frighten them away.

A report by Ben Amor’s organization that will be published in June, to which we were given advanced access, details a pattern of abusive behavior by the Tunisian coast guard against migrants at sea. Dozens of interviews, including with shipwreck survivors and fishermen, demonstrate a pattern of abuse by the coast guard and show that it routinely fails to perform its duty to rescue migrants in distress. Researchers documented multiple incidents in which the coast guard deliberately provoked shipwrecks or stole motors from dinghies and left boats full of people adrift — which is exactly what happened to Ngo. The report offers figures that speak to the scale of these operations: Between January and April 2023, the Tunisian coast guard intercepted 19,719 migrants at sea. During the same period, 3,512 were arrested for “illegal stay.”

“The Europeans hide behind this organization,” Ben Amor told us. “So it’s not the European Union that does this, but it’s ICMPD, it’s an independent organization.”

“There is political pressure on the coast guard to prevent people from leaving, whatever the price, whatever the damage,” Ben Amor said. “That’s how the violence started, and the coast guard is responsible for a lot of violence.”

The ICMPD was established in 1993 in response to the fall of the Soviet Union. “We in Europe feared a mass invasion of Russians,” wrote Jonas Widgren, one of the ICMPD’s founders, in a 2002 academic paper. Widgren was frustrated by the lack of a coordinated response by European states to what he saw as a “never-ending asylum crisis.” At first, the ICMPD acted as a mix of a policy think tank and a diplomatic organization, facilitating dialogue among states on issues related to borders and migration and publishing policy briefs.

The organization grew steadily over the years, but the tipping point came in 2015, when more than one million people came to Europe having fled the civil war in Syria. That same year, the ICMPD appointed a new director, Michael Spindelegger, an Austrian conservative politician. According to multiple former colleagues and development insiders, Spindelegger had the political will and the right connections to, as one former employee put it, “make the most of the crisis.”

“The European Union wanted to look like it was throwing money and equipment at the problem, basically throwing money to stop migrants,” recalled one former senior ICMPD employee, who spoke to us on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional repercussions. “Suddenly, there was all this funding available, which included border management training but also included equipment,” they said. “The European Commission can't just hand over equipment to, say, the Moroccan government, so they need someone like the ICMPD to do it.” If the Commission were to try to push through this type of transaction without a middleman like the ICMPD, it would need the approval of the European Parliament. This can be hard to come by even in a favorable political climate. But the grim optics of reported abuses in Libya would likely draw unwanted scrutiny to the project and potentially jeopardize its approval.

Before coming to the ICMPD, Spindelegger held a series of top government jobs in Austria, including as finance minister and foreign minister. In 2015, he went on to chair the Agency for the Modernisation of Ukraine, a NGO funded by the pro-Russian Ukrainian businessman Dmytro Firtash. The following year, Spindelegger took the helm at the ICMPD.

Known for his neoliberal approach to migration policy, Spindelegger expanded the ICMPD into new regions and began training border guards and procuring technology and equipment for the police in most countries that border the EU bloc. With that expansion came a bigger budget, increasing from 16.7 million euros (about $18 million) in 2015 to 58 million euros ($62.2 million) in 2022. In 2022, 56% of the ICMPD’s budget came from the European Commission. Just three years ago, in 2020, the Commission provided 80% of the ICMPD’s budget.

“Our aim still is to be the go-to organisation for European states on all matters related to migration,” wrote Spindelegger in 2023. The organization also began running vaguely-defined “migrant resource centers,” primarily in South Asia and the Middle East, that appear to be focused on dissuading people from pursuing migration without documents.

The ICMPD operates for the European Commission under a funding scheme called “indirect management,” whereby EU work is outsourced to external agencies and the Commission isn’t involved in how projects are carried out. Several sources told us that this means the ICMPD isn’t subject to the same transparency and accountability measures that it would be otherwise.

“By externalizing this work to an organization outside of the European Union, the Commission is making this work far less accountable, working in a sort of legal gray area,” said Demirel, the German parliamentarian. “The farther this action is from European institutions, the less we can control it — Parliament can’t look at contracts from ICMPD.”

This disconnect is practical, said Jeff Crisp, who worked for the U.N. refugee agency for decades. He pointed to “serious ethical issues that ICMPD doesn’t seem to have addressed.”

“There is a disconnect between some of the language the organization uses and the activities it’s involved in,” said Crisp. “They are making things sound very technocratic and apparently quite neutral, whereas in fact they have very specific political purposes, which are often contradictory to human rights values.” Sources also expressed concern about the overlap between the ICMPD and the EU bureaucracy when it came to staffing. Six former ICMPD employees and European development insiders all described a revolving door of former European Commission employees coming to work at the ICMPD and vice versa.

A spokesperson for the European Commission told us that ICMPD operations “continuously undergo audits, assessments and evaluations with regard to their compliance with rules and regulations of the EU, including the respect of human rights.” The spokesperson did not address allegations that these operations are contributing to human rights violations.

Outside the office of the International Organization for Migration in Tunis, Tunisia’s capital, just over 100 people were still camped out in protest when we visited in April. The headquarters is surrounded by tall white gates, with a plaza containing a small tent city stretching down one side of the building. Three people argued with the security guard at the gate, while others sat in the shade of one of the plaza’s two palm trees. 

One man from Guinea, who asked that his name be withheld for his safety, said he had been camped outside the IOM building to ask for medicine and a way out of the country. After the Tunisian president’s February speech, he was attacked by a group of locals who robbed him of all his belongings. When we met in April, his eye was still noticeably swollen.

“The first time I tried to leave, I was pulled back to shore,” he told us. “The second time, they stopped me on the shores and put me in prison for six months,” he said. He showed us a gap where his tooth once was, which he said he lost after being beaten by guards in prison. “Now I’ve lost it all.”

Ben Amor, the director of the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights, says this kind of indiscriminate violence has become commonplace for migrants and refugees throughout Tunisia, especially following Saied’s racist speech. 

“We are in the middle of a humanitarian crisis in Tunisia,” Ben Amor said. “And at the same time, ICMPD continues its border management project here — so they equip the Tunisian coast guard with drones, with a radar and with other surveillance systems to keep people from leaving.”

“All of this work is being masked to look like protection,” said Gabriella Sanchez, a migration expert at Georgetown University. Sanchez argues that the European Union carries out border projects with the ICMPD and other third-party organizations deliberately, as a way of avoiding responsibility and accountability. “It is the creation of this illusion that by giving work to third parties, the EU isn’t directly involved and aren’t necessarily morally responsible for the consequences,” Sanchez told us.

With a border control budget that leapt from 12 billion euros (about $12.8 billion) in 2014-2020 to more than 23 billion ($24.6 billion) in 2021-2027, the European Union is almost literally doubling down on its efforts along the border.

Back at the reception site in northern Italy, Fabrice Ngo said he is lucky to have survived his journey over the sea. On the day of his rescue, the fisherman who spotted them attached a line to their metal dinghy and brought them back to the coast. From there, Ngo remembers, the fisherman went back out to find the other boats that had departed Sfax together with Ngo’s. It was then that he found out that the other boats had also been left without motors by the coast guard. 

“They pulled back every boat except one. One boat refused the rescue, and they were left at sea,” Ngo remembered, shaking his head. “That’s how they shipwrecked. Many people died.”

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Sparked by unemployment rates that had worsened during the pandemic, the nationwide demonstrations, which began as clashes between police and marginalized youth in mid-January had broadened their scope. Around 1,700 protestors — many of them minors — had been detained and there were reports of police torturing and abusing many of those held in custody. In the capital, hundreds of young Tunisians and civil society activists peacefully took to the streets, calling for economic equality, an end to police brutality and the decriminalization of homosexuality and marijuana.

Photographs of Amdouni — who is openly lesbian and a committed feminist — had begun to circulate on Facebook back in October, when she had protested against a law that stood to shield security forces from criminal liability after the use of lethal force. But the online campaign against her reached its peak at the beginning of this year, when hundreds of photographs of her were posted by various Facebook users, accompanied by captions mocking her size, sexuality and appearance. Other messages threatened her life.

“I will destroy your vagina, you dyke” read one private message on Facebook. Some posts explicitly questioned her gender identity, speculating that she was a man. Others described her as “ungodly” and a “pervert.” Amdouni was also doxxed. After her address and cell number were published, her phone rang constantly with calls from unknown numbers. 

“I received so much hate, so many threats, that I became almost accustomed to it,” said Amdouni, sitting in a bar in central Tunis. “It really affected me. My psychological state is now very fragile because of it. I am so exhausted by these threats. I can’t even go out in the street alone.”

Amdouni had become one of the most recognizable faces of the protests, making it much easier for the police to identify her. She says that officers would frequently stop her and check her ID, sometimes delaying her for up to an hour and echoing the insults she had received online.

On February 27, Amdouni could not take it any longer and headed to her nearest police station to report the harassment she had been subjected to, both online and on the streets. She was arrested on the spot. Two days later, she was formally charged with insulting a police officer — a charge punishable by one year in prison — based on reports that she had shouted and cursed outside the station after officers failed to register her complaint. On March 4, she was sentenced to six months in jail.

Social Media and Surveillance 

Amdouni’s case is an extreme example of how social media is being used in Tunisia as an authoritarian tool. Activists fear that the right to protest in Tunisia has been on a gradual decline in recent years. Many believe that the country is reverting to the police state it was before the 2011 Arab Spring, when a popular uprising ousted the government of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

Arrests and prosecutions based on Facebook posts have become more frequent. Meanwhile, the police have turned to social media to discredit their critics and stoke violence. During recent protests, observers noticed that members of the LGBTQ community were being repeatedly targeted and mistreated by law enforcement. Despite its shift toward democracy after the revolution, Tunisia remains a conservative, predominantly Muslim society. Homosexuality is still a criminal offense, punishable by up to three years in prison. 

In February, Human Rights Watch released a report that collected testimonies and documented dozens of cases of online harassment, doxxing and forced “outing” of LGBT people. The organization noted that several protestors had also been subjected to arbitrary arrest, physical assault, threats to rape and kill, and that many had been refused access to legal counsel. 

A large number of the social media posts targeting LGBTQ activists were being published on Facebook pages affiliated with the Tunisian police. Much of the harassment Amdouni faced was spearheaded and encouraged by such groups, which activists say gave a green light for further violence and intimidation, online and in the physical world.

Dozens of Facebook pages are associated, both officially and unofficially, with Tunisia’s police unions. The largest, The Syndicate of National Security in Tunisia, has 430,000 followers and was created in September 2011. After the revolution, which called for the end of the country’s police state, officers took advantage of new-found freedoms to unionize and protect themselves. Today, the unions claim to have over 100,000 members, almost the entire number of police officers in Tunisia. 

Rights groups state that the Tunisian government allows the police to act with near total impunity and that such organizations have further entrenched their power. There have also been instances of unions mobilizing to obstruct justice. In 2018, dozens of officers stormed a courthouse in an attempt to disrupt a trial in which five colleagues were facing torture charges.  

The Facebook groups which represent national and regional unions, are very active, posting several times a day and attracting hundreds of likes and shares. Analysis of dozens of such pages found that the majority of the content posted serves to push security forces propaganda, portraying officers as heroic protectors of the nation. The pages mostly show posts about the latest drug bust or the arrest of petty criminals. There are also photographs of heavily-armed officers handing out flowers to women, assisting citizens in distress or posing with small children. Many are religious in nature, while others comment on the politics of the day.

What is of particular concern to rights' advocates, however, is the groups' use of disinformation to incite violence against specific sections of society. Nessryne Jelalia, president of Al Bawsala, a Tunisian NGO promoting democracy and human rights, says that this trend has grown over the past year, with police starting to publish photographs and publicly humiliate individual protestors. 

During the winter demonstrations, surveillance drones were often seen hovering over the crowds and plainclothes officers could be seen filming from rooftops. Aerial shots of the protestors, some with alternative haircuts or piercings, were then posted on Facebook. Images of same-sex couples kissing in the crowd were also captured. In a country where pre-marital sex is illegal and public displays of affection are taboo, the aim was clearly to identify and disgrace the demonstrators.

“The police are making intrusions into people’s private lives — especially gay people, activists and human rights defenders — in order to discredit them. That has always been a technique of the former regime, to discredit opponents,” said Jelalia.

Experts have also noticed that social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, previously vital to the success of Arab Spring movements, are now being used to attack pro-democracy activists. 

Marwa Fatafta, Middle East-North Africa policy manager at the digital rights group Access Now, says that this tactic is being reflected across the region. 

“Today, you can’t control the flow of information because, where people use social media to document human rights abuses and speak their mind, the counter effort from the government is to try to spread fake news or disinformation in a way to counter the narrative of the activists and to smear them. It’s hard for activists to fight against this,” she said.

Electronic armies

On a recent Sunday afternoon, Ragheb sat drinking beer and eating lamb couscous with his friends in downtown Tunis. Most of the people at the table were members of the local LGBTQ and minority rights group Damj. Several of the organization’s activists have been targets of online harassment and have collected evidence of it. It was a week or so after Amdouni had been sent to jail and everyone was on edge. 

Suddenly Ragheb got up and went around the room embracing each of his friends in turn. “I’m doing this because we’re never sure how much time we actually have together,” he said. 

Ragheb, who asked for his last name not to be used, had recently taken to wearing a Spongebob mask to the demonstrations, so that his identity would be hidden from the drones and cameras. Although he is out to his family, he comes from a small town outside of Tunis and fears that if neighbors were to see his photograph online, his relatives could be subject to intimidation. 

“The narrative being propagated by these police union Facebook groups is creating rifts within our society and it’s alienating us,” he said. “They try to stir up more angst and anger.” 

Many of the posts use offensive language to describe demonstrators and tend to focus on the most contentious aspects of the protest movement, such as the drive for gay rights and the legalization of marijuana. All neglect to mention that they were also out on the streets to demand economic equality for all Tunisians.

“The posts characterize us in a very specific, extreme way that is intended to offend and shock many members of our society. They construe us as drug addicts, sodomists, atheists,” said Ragheb.

One post, made in March on a page for a police union in the coastal city of Sfax, reads: “What you are seeing is an image of protest that has been imported from abroad —and in excellent taste! Gay boys, stoners, Satan lovers… this is a disgusting class of people who want anarchy.” 

Another, from February, appears to threaten human rights activists directly: “To the NGOs and NGO staff, the eunuchs, the homosexuals, the trashy gays, the revolutionaries, the human rights defenders and their followers: remember that we have the power of bullets — but the bullets are expensive and the target is cheap. Long Live the National Police Unions.” The page has 43,663 followers and the posts were liked and shared hundreds of times.

“We do not allow hate speech directed at the LGBTQIA+ community, harassment or death threats,” wrote a Facebook spokesperson in a statement to Coda Story. “These policies apply to everyone. We’ve recently removed a number of these pieces of content for violating our policies and we continue to investigate to find any others. Keeping people safe on our services is something we take extremely seriously.”

The two posts described above have since been removed. Ragheb explained that many of the posts tend to be disseminated by pro-police “electronic armies” comprised of bots and fake accounts, but also of profiles and pages associated with Tunisia’s leading Islamist parties Ennahda and Al Karama. “We call the Ennahda profiles “blue flies” and the Al Karama profiles “green flies,” he said. 

“Electronic flies” have caused similar havoc in online spaces across the MENA region, from Saudi Arabia spreading disinformation after the assassination of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi to Algeria’s attacks on the pro-democracy movement.

“Because it's a swarm of individuals — some real, some not — it’s hard as an activist to push against these troll farms or shut them down,” said Fatafta. It’s a way of intimidating and silencing activists — especially women and queer people.”

“Why did the police arrest me?” 

On 17 March, Tunis Appeals Court released Amdouni after 19 days in detention. Her case had been fought by at least 20 pro-bono lawyers. She believes that international attention helped to secure her early release.

Enjoying a beer at a popular bar in downtown Tunis a week after her release, Amdouni seemed upbeat and optimistic, already making plans for a performance piece based on her time in prison. A few days earlier, she had been sleeping on the floor of a cramped and filthy cell with 36 other women.

“Why did the police arrest me? Because I was among the main organizers of the protest, because I was very visible, because I declare that I’m a lesbian, that I’m a feminist, that I’m queer,” she said.

"In prison, I was strong but I was also very depressed, very wounded because I knew that I didn’t deserve this. It hurt me that my own country, my own government, was doing this to me. And why? All because I’m different.”

On April 5, Amdouni’s defiant resolve gave way. Left by herself for a moment at home, she took an overdose of medication and was rushed to hospital where she was treated for the next few days. According to friends she was distraught and overwhelmed by recent events. 

After being discharged, Amdouni took to Facebook: “Friends, forgive me, but I’ve recently lived through such disappointing and disgusting things. We make one desperate decision and, in a moment, we can lose everything.”

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Nouri has worked the surrounding waters since he was 17. He believes that his health problems are caused by pollution from a nearby industrial port. 

“The port has destroyed me, my health and my livelihood,” he said.

Sat on the floor in his living room, Nouri pointed in the direction of a large plant, operated by the state-run chemical company Groupe Chimique Tunisien (GCT). Dedicated to the processing of raw phosphate, its imposing chimneys belch fumes into the air and its drains discharge millions of tons of toxic black sludge into the sea every year. 

Gabès Governorate covers 4,450 square miles and is home to almost 400,000 residents. It is also the only coastal oasis in the Mediterranean. Once a pristine agricultural and maritime community, the region was famed for its abundant marine life and verdant rows of pomegranate trees, henna plants and date palms. 

Locals tell stories of visitors marveling at the land’s natural beauty, but any tourism potential was lost in the 1970s, when the government turned it into the main centre of Tunisia’s phosphate industry. Phosphate rock, mined 100 miles away, in the hills of the Gafsa region, are a vital component in the production of a variety of exportable goods, including fertilizers and food preservatives.

Industrial pollution is devastating coastal communities around the world, from France to India. In Morocco, another phosphate-rich North African nation, chemical plant workers have reported high rates of respiratory disease and cancer, according to the charity SwissAid, and local arable farmers have experienced depleted harvests. 

A similar story is playing out in Tunisia, but the subject of pollution and its effects on the environment and public health has long been ignored in Gabès. Under the Tunisian dictator Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, people feared the consequences of talking about it and efforts to carry out studies were routinely thwarted by the state. After Ben Ali’s fall in the revolution of 2011, residents hoped for something better. However, while people are now free to protest, little attention is being paid to their concerns and even less action taken. 

Ignoring the problem

In the city of Gabès, the governorate’s capital, an old electronic display board on the side of the road is supposed to show the levels of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and ammonia in the air. According to passersby, it has been broken for years. 

The sign was installed by GCT, the largest manufacturer operating in the port. In addition to three GCT factories, the area contains some 20 plants operated by private companies, including two other highly polluting facilities that produce aluminum fluoride for use in metal foundries, and phosphate salt, which is used in the making of detergents and ceramics. 

Trains deliver up to 3.5 million tons of raw phosphate to the GCT factories each year. It is processed and exported by container ships to dozens of countries abroad. Nearly 5,000 people work in the region’s chemical industry, more than 2,800 for GCT.

While the company brings much-needed jobs to the area, the effects of pollution are clear to see. The stretch of beach between the town of Chott Salem and the industrial zone, less than a mile away, is composed of a thick black layer of phosphogypsum — a waste product created during the production of phosphoric acid. A 2018 European Union report found that GCT dumps around five million tons of it into the Mediterranean each year.

Phosphogypsum is mildly radioactive and contains both uranium and radium. According to a 2012 government study, fish catches near the coast contracted by more than 30% between 1997 and 2006, owing to the effects of chemical waste. The document noted that the marine ecosystem has been “severely damaged and that the situation is now totally irreversible.”

Nouri says local fishermen have suffered a dramatic decline in income. “Since the 1990s there has been nothing here. You used to be able to bring home 150 pounds of squid in one day,” he said, adding that now, a typical haul has fallen to seven pounds. Now, he rents his small boat to a fisherman in another town and pays for his cancer treatment with donations from his neighbors. He misses his old life desperately. “My heart is the sea. I’m heartbroken,” he added. 

According to the conservation group BirdLife TunisiaAir, air pollution has contributed to a fall in bird populations. Rumors persist among locals of falling fertility rates and frequent miscarriages. 

In 2017, the Tunisian government pledged to dismantle the existing GCT factories and move them to a new location, far away from residential areas. It also promised to stop dumping phosphogypsum into the sea. No further plans have been announced.

This week, there were renewed calls from local environmentalists for increased regulation and the removal of the factories, after the death of five workers in an accidental fire at an asphalt factory in the industrial zone. 

“We fear that one day Gabès will be nothing but ashes,” said Haifa Bedoui, an activist with the local campaign group Stop Pollution, to hundreds of people gathered in front of governor of Gabès Mongi Thameur’s office on Wednesday. On a visit following the fire, President Kais Saied, acknowledged the environmental crisis in the region and promised a cancer treatment centre for residents. The Tunisian government has launched an inquiry to determine the cause of the blaze. 

Speaking by telephone, Moez Haddad, GCT’s secretary-general, insisted that there are no proven detrimental consequences of the marine disposal of phosphogypsum. “A few studies show there are small problems — not a big problem,” he said. He did, however, concede that GCT plans to fall in line with international norms and end the practice “as a precaution.”

When questioned further about high rates of cancer and respiratory problems reported by residents in the Gabès region, he added that “there are no official studies that show a causal link between health problems and the effects of Groupe Chimique Tunisien on the environment.” 

“Flagrant lack of information”

The residents of Chott Salem and Ghannouch can see and smell the pollution from the chemical factories in their homes. Traditional houses in the region are built around an open courtyard. This communal space is meant for people to congregate and children to play in. Now, parents tell their sons and daughters to stay in their bedrooms.

In 2017, nine students from a primary school in Bouchema, a town just over a mile away from the plants, were taken to the hospital with symptoms of asphyxiation after gases produced during the processing of sulphuric acid and ammonium nitrate were released into the air. The local governor brushed off residents’ concerns as mere “panic.” 

Local healthcare workers regularly treat patients who appear to be suffering from long-term health issues caused by pollution. Dr. Hamida Kwass, who works on the respiratory ward at Mohammed Ben Sassi regional hospital in Gabès, says that asthma is particularly common among children in the town of Ghannouch. 

“The factory is almost in their houses,” she said. 

Kwass plans to carry out a study on air pollution and its effects on inhabitants. “There are polluting particles from the chemical industry that are known to be associated with an increase in respiratory diseases, whether they cause a disease or are an exacerbating factor,” she added.

Awatef Mansour, 30, lives in Ghannouch and makes around six trips to the regional hospital each month. Her three children, aged three, six and seven all suffer from asthma. 

“When the wind changes direction to come from the port, my children find it hard to breathe,” she said. 

She noted that her children’s health problems cleared up last year, when her family briefly lived in the town of Zarzis, 80 miles down the coast from the factories. “The doctor says it is allergies from the port,” she added.

Samir Aloulou, head of Mohamed Ben Sassi hospital’s cancer ward, says that the incidence of nasopharyngeal cancer is alarmingly high in Chott Salem and Ghannouch. This particular form of the disease, which Nouri is fighting, affects the part of the throat connecting the back of the nose to the mouth. 

Aloulou believes that it is difficult to establish a “100% true link” between its prevalence and the chemical factories. “There is certainly a link between pollution and cancer, but cancer is a multifactorial disease — there is pollution, tobacco, food, obesity,” he said.

“There is a flagrant lack of information and credible data available from the Tunisian authorities,” said Mounir Majdoub, an economist who worked on a report, published by the EU in 2018, on air quality in the Gabès region. It found that elevated levels of particles that can easily pass into the lungs and have been linked to cancer and heart and respiratory infections. “The conclusions are not revealing of the real health situation due to pollution, they reveal the need for a study,” he added. 

However, other illnesses appear far easier to connect to the chemical industry. Rachid Ben Othman used to work as a mechanic for Flourine Chemical Industries (ICF), a private company in the industrial zone that produces aluminum fluoride. When we met, he held out his right arm in front of him, his elbow crooked at somewhere around 140 degrees. It wouldn’t move further. He suffers from fluorosis, caused by overexposure to fluorine. 

“It started in the wrists, and then the elbows. It is the calcification of the ligaments. Sometimes my knee just stops. It is like a car with no petrol,” he said. 

Othman first began to notice a problem in 2000. His joints were stiff to the point that he could neither fully stretch nor bend them. It became harder to work and, eventually, too difficult to put on gloves. But he was not successfully diagnosed until 2011. 

He says that he is one of the few ICF workers to have successfully claimed compensation for his disability — a payment of $135 per month and 40% of his medical bills. Othman suspects some of his colleagues have fluorosis too. “They talk to me about aches in their shoulders, aches here and here, the calcification. I know the symptoms,” he said.

A taboo subject

In addition to state inaction, organizations that should be standing up for the safety and wellbeing of workers are refusing to do anything. Executives at the local branch of the Tunisian General Labour Union (UGTT), do not consider it their role to speak out on matters of public health and pollution. 

When I brought up the subject to two members of the regional union’s executive committee in Gabès and a manager from one of the GCT factories, the latter laughed quietly and said, “That’s a taboo subject.” 

One of the union executives said that he didn’t want to talk about pollution because the factories have led to development in the region and provide employment for thousands of people. 

While Tunisia has long been one of the world’s biggest phosphate exporters, the industry has contracted in recent years, owing to political instability and frequent protests by unemployed young people demanding jobs in the phosphate mines. 

In the years since the revolution, Groupe Chimique Tunisien’s annual production has averaged less than a third of what it was in 2010, according to Habib Wahachi, deputy secretary general of the Gabès bureau of the UGTT. Tunisia was forced to import phosphates from neighboring Algeria for the first time last October. 

GCT has not made any new hires in the region since 2017. National unemployment is currently at 17.4%. In Gabès, it stands at 24% overall and more than 50% among young people.

Hundreds of Gabèsian youth blocked the industrial zone in Ghannouch and the GCT administration building in Gabès town center from late November into December last year. Many denounced the pollution yet demanded jobs in the factories. 

“Give me a job so I can survive — we are the ones directly affected by this pollution,” said Youssef Hajej, an unemployed university graduate, from Ghannouch. 

He insisted that the GCT owes local people work as compensation for the destruction the company has wrought on the area and its traditional industries. “They are destroying everything, it is normal that people here are asking to profit at least a little bit from that.”

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