Visit our website:
http://www.france24.com
Like us on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/FRANCE24.English
Follow us on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/France24_en
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00 Pedram, a reporter with Inform Migrant, can tell us more. Arnaud, so first of all, tell us the
00:05 details of some of what you found out and how you found it out. Yeah, so we received a TikTok video
00:12 showing some people that were being kept in a place called, in a high school near Kibili in
00:18 southwestern Tunisia. It's just off the city and we were able to confirm that the authenticity of
00:26 that video using satellite data and finding direct testimonies from people there. So in these videos
00:36 we see about 50 people, all of them black Africans, from Senegal, Burkina Faso, Guinea,
00:42 all these countries. It's mostly men, some women, even a four-year-old woman. They don't have many
00:49 clothes, they don't have much food. Four-year-old children. A four-year-old girl, yeah. And they
00:55 don't have much clothes, not much food, and they also are not receiving treatment. And that's a
01:01 problem for one of the women here, there, that's suffering from diabetes. And that you can see in
01:07 one of the videos is suffering from her condition because for a whole month she was not able to
01:14 access her medication. So they're being kept there by armed guards of the national guard,
01:20 the Tunisian National Guard. We were able also to identify them in the videos and they're there
01:25 guarding the place 24/7. What do you know about how they got there? A lot of people were rounded up
01:31 across Tunisia for this specific high school. Most of them came from Sfax and then were deported to
01:38 the Libyan border. They were left there in the desert to die, basically, most of them.
01:46 Already 27 people died at that border since July. And on July 11th, 650 of them were repatriated
01:56 into Tunisia and spread across the country in high schools and other buildings. And until now,
02:02 we didn't really know what was happening to them. And now we can say that in at least one of those
02:07 high schools, they're being kept there against their will, without information about how they're
02:12 going to get out, if ever. They're not checking status. In these videos, you see a lot of people
02:17 screaming, "I'm a student here. I have a visa. I'm not a migrant." But it doesn't matter to the
02:26 authorities. All of those people are being rounded up because they're black and they're visibly
02:32 black. And so this is just to illustrate that this is not exactly about migration. This is about race.
02:39 And so what happens now? So yesterday, there was a deal struck between Tunisia and Libya
02:45 to move some of the migrants that were stuck at the border, because there are still a lot of people
02:51 stuck at the border. So some are moving to Tunisia and some are moving to Libya, which poses a lot of
02:57 questions because these are people who were in Tunisia. Some of them maybe were there illegally
03:01 to stay to study. So we don't know. And we don't know what is going to happen to them in Libya,
03:06 in the current situation in Libya. So that's for people at the border. For people in the high
03:10 school, yesterday, two days ago, we had a high school that was evacuated in Ramada, in Tataouine.
03:17 And we're hoping that maybe this is going to happen to other people in high schools. But we
03:22 honestly don't know because everyone's refusing to talk. The Red Crescent, the authorities,
03:26 the NGOs, no one wants to talk. The only one who wants to talk are the victims.
03:30 Thank you, Arnaud Pedram from InfoMigrants.