Arbitrary arrests of black Sub-Saharan students on the rise

Civil society and student organisations have warned about a sharp rise in arbitrary arrests of Sub-Saharan students in Tunisia.

The Association of African Students and Trainees in Tunisia (AESAT – Association des Étudiants et Stagiaires Africains en Tunisie) addressed a press conference on February 10 in which its leaders alleged an alarming increase in the mistreatment of Sub-Saharan students in the capital, Tunis.

Speaking to University World News later, Christian Kwongang, the president of AESAT, claimed the association had counted approximately 300 arrests of Sub-Saharan Africans, including many students, in the past six weeks in the Ariana municipality of Tunis alone – a neighbourhood with a large population of Sub-Saharans, including students.

He claimed: “We have seen that this wave of police aggression towards students of Sub-Saharan countries began in November with the arrest of a young woman who was sentenced to two weeks in prison,” for lacking residency papers. AESAT withheld her name and university for privacy reasons.

Kwongang claims that the alleged arrests and mistreatment reflect deep-seated racism as black students appear to be the target of this action, rather than whites and Arabs.

The AESAT president alleged Tunisian police were subjecting these students to arbitrary questioning and searches in Ariana’s metro station, cafés and higher education institutions, such as the École Supérieure Privée d’Ingénierie et de Technologie (ESPRIT – Private Higher School of Engineering and Technology).

Students humiliated

He said student “morale is very low”. As a result, he said: “A lot of people no longer go out. They [the police] have rounded up students from ESPRIT university and many of them are just 18 years old. It is very traumatising.”

Students, he said, claim they are intimidated by police, then arrested, taken to a police station where, AESAT formally claimed in a statement, they have fingerprints and DNA taken and are often photographed in a humiliating way “as seen in United States movies when criminals are photographed after arrest”, then released.

Some are then re-arrested and even taken to the Tunis-based detention centre, El Ouardia, where some students lacking papers are threatened with forced deportation which involves being taken to the Algerian border and abandoned, he said.

Kwongang welcomed that ESPRIT had issued a statement, reassuring students of the college’s support for students facing such law enforcement problems.

Modeste Coucou, a 25-year-old from Benin, currently doing in-work training in informatics management in Tunis, working with a training organisation which he did not want to name, told University World News that he had been arrested on 1 February.

A policeman demanded his papers and passport at Ariana metro station. “He began pushing me,” said Coucou. “I told him to stop bullying me, but he cornered me and took my passport.

“When I demanded why I was being arrested he insisted on taking me to the police station.”

Coucou’s ordeal included witnessing police brutality. “I saw them bring in a Côte d’Ivoirian guy and they were shaking him violently and treating him like he was just an animal.”

He also said that police tried to force him to sign documents in Arabic, without an explanation of their content and which he did not understand, “but I refused to sign them”.

Coucou alleged that the Tunisian government has been especially slow to process Sub-Saharan Africans’ immigration papers, leaving some in breach of their initial visas.

“I would qualify the arrests and the slowness to process our papers as racist because we are being targeted,” alleged Coucou, which is a pity as Tunisia’s higher education system has opportunities for study and professional training and experience unavailable in Benin. “I just want to finish my training and go home to my country,” said Coucou.

He added: “When we return to our countries, we students are ambassadors for Tunisia, but I would not advise any Benin student to come to Tunisia to study or train; the situation here is not comfortable.”

Decline in students from Sub-Sahara

Kwongang said that Coucou’s experience is similar to many Sub-Saharan students in Tunisia, who are also being attacked by Tunisian nationals in general, he claimed.

He showed University World News a video of a Sub-Saharan African student who had been stabbed by a Tunisian student.

He was bleeding from multiple wounds, suffering extreme pain on a hospital gurney while a doctor attended to him.

Kwongang praised the medical staff for their professionalism, but claimed this knife attack was not an isolated incident.

University World News has also witnessed violence by young Tunisian men against young Sub-Saharan males.

AESAT is working with French NGO Terre d’Asile to support arrested students by providing them with lawyers.

“AESAT is developing an app for their members to use in case of emergencies, for a rapid response from the AESAT team to come and help them if they are arrested or assaulted,” said Kwongang.

Coucou credits his swift release from police custody to the intervention by the president of the Benin section of AESAT: “If it was not for the president of AESAT, I would have been in that police station for six or seven hours or more,” he said.

Terre d’Asile is working with the World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT – Organisation Mondiale Contre la Torture) and the Tunisian civil liberties association, Arthemis (Association pour la protection des droits et libertés), to develop a monitoring programme to quantify and track police violence against this community.

“It’s a very serious situation; these arrests are just of black students,” Arij Djelassi, project coordinator for Arthemis, told University World News: “The ministry of interior has not communicated the number of arrests to the [relevant] embassies.

“We are currently coordinating with our partners from the Sub-Saharan community, including AESAT, to try to coordinate the data as best we can,” she explained.

“Next week we are meeting with Sub-Saharan community associations and civil society actors in order to better understand how community members are being affected, and what their needs are.”

Both Djelassi and Kwongang pointed out that, in any case, there has been a marked fall in the numbers of Sub-Saharan African students studying in Tunisia since the 2010-11 revolution that ousted authoritarian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

Djelassi cited Tunisia’s Institute for Statistics showing that, between 2000 and 2010, the average number of Sub-Saharan students in Tunisia was 15,000 and “now there are just 5,000”.

University World News contacted private universities about the allegations, but most were either unavailable or refused to comment.

‘We are all Africans’

However, a spokesperson for Sesamé University (L’École Supérieure privée des Sciences Appliquées et de Management) confirmed that Sub-Saharan African students were encountering delays in receiving residency cards.

The university had also contacted the ministry of interior regarding the increase in arrests but had received no response.

As for the declining numbers in Sub-Saharan African students in private Tunisian universities, she said that COVID-19 has been a problem, as “the majority of people in Sub-Saharan countries don’t want to get vaccinated, so they do not meet the entry requirements for Tunisia”.

Kwongang disagreed and argued that “students are preferring to go to Morocco to study over Tunisia”, saying Sub-Saharan African students were claiming Morocco is less racist than Tunisia and it is easier to live there as a student.

The Tunisian interior ministry did not respond to requests from UWN for comment on these claims.

Djelassi said that, going forward, Arthemis needs “to provide information to the Sub-Saharan community about their rights within the Tunisian law”.

She alleged that there was weak coverage of the arrests within Tunisian media and there was a hangover of discrimination from Tunisia’s historic slave trade and household slavery, which was abolished in 1846.

With many Tunisians being predominantly of Berber (Amazigh) descent, “we need to make people aware that we are all Africans”, she said.