Europe pushed Tunisia to keep migrants away. The result is tough.

For almost three weeks, more than 1,000 men, women and children from Africa have been trying to survive in the no man’s land on the border with Tunisia. A few scrub trees provide occasional shade, videos shot by migrants show, and border guards from neighboring Libya and Tunisian aid workers occasionally bring water and a little bread.

Otherwise there is nothing.

Tunisian authorities the African migrants dumped there after collecting them in the Mediterranean port city of Sfax, hours away, where more and more boats have been boarded for nearby Europe this year. Many were beaten by officers; a few have died in the desert, where there is little to no medical care, migrants and human rights organizations say.

Time and again they sent pleas for help from the dwindling number of phones they could charge:

“Please help us. We are dying,” one person wrote to The New York Times on Saturday. “We have no food or water,” another pleaded. “We are stranded. If you can help us in any way…”

By Sunday, the text messages had stopped.

Ended up with migration to Europe top level since 2016, the Mediterranean route from North Africa has once again presented a dilemma for Europe, where a burning anti-migration sentiment has played out in ugly scenes of coastguards stabbing some migrants adrift while hundreds of others remain behind drowning.

It’s in launchpad countries like Tunisia, which has caught up Libya as the main point of passage for Africans and others who dream of Europe, that European leaders hope to master the problem.

But critics of the deal say they only outsourced the ugliness.

On Sunday, Italythe The Netherlands and the European Commission signed a deal with Tunisia pledges more than $1 billion in aid and investment from the European Union to stabilize the country’s economy crumbling economy and strengthen border controls.

“We have all heard that the Prime Minister of Italy paid the Tunisian president a lot of money to keep the blacks out of the country,” said Kelvin, a 32-year-old Nigerian migrant, from the Tunisian border with Libya on Saturday. He declined to give his full name, fearing further harsh treatment.

Like other sub-Saharan African migrants, many of whom can enter Tunisia without a visa, he spent several months cleaning houses and working in construction in Sfax to scrape together smugglers’ money for a boat to Europe. Then, he said, uniformed Tunisians broke through his door, beat him until his ankle broke, and put him on a bus to the desert.

The EU-Tunisia deal went through despite the objections of some EU lawmakers and rights groups who accuse Europe of backing an autocrat in the making, Tunisia’s president Kais Saied. Mr Saied, who has a track record of defaming migrants, has spent the past two years dismantling Tunisia’s democracy, the only one born out of the Arab Spring protests that consumed the region more than a decade ago.

He has put in prison dozens of political opponents, instilled in the once independent judiciary, enclosed the news media And rewritten the constitution to empower themselves, all to muted response from Western allies.

Despite criticism, Tunisia took some migrants to shelters in the desert last week and allowed the Tunisian Red Crescent to provide some assistance. But human rights groups say hundreds are without shelter or food.

The president has dismissed reports of migrants being evicted from Sfax, claiming they were only receiving “humane treatment”. But the president’s claim contradicted testimonies, photos and videos from the migrants.

Rights groups have also accused the Tunisian Coast Guard of abusing migrants, including deliberately damaging their boats or beating passengers, even as European countries scramble to upgrade the force’s equipment.

Yet much of Europe is imposing restraints migration First.

“We have to be pragmatic,” Antonio Tajani, Italy’s foreign minister, said at a news conference last month.

For all being defectsthe nascent democracy of Tunisia after the Arab Spring cheered and coached by the West. Now, with every new check written to Mr. Saied, his critics say Europe and its partners in Washington are ending the experiment they once spent care, attention and money on, and like other regional strongmen, sacrifice human rights And democratic values for short-term stability.

“If we were more consistent in making it clear that we will be reluctant to support political repression in the region, leaders might act differently,” said Senator Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat who, along with other lawmakers, is pushing for a reduction in US military aid to Tunisia over Mr Saied’s actions.

While the Biden administration has cut some funding for Tunisia, it has hesitant to lower it further out of concern that the country will come under Russian and Chinese influence and that increasing migration will weaken Europe.

European officials insist they can better combat abuses against migrants by working closely with the Tunisians. And Western diplomats in Tunis argue there is no point in withholding aid from Tunisia’s 12.5 million people, who are already short of medicines and bread.

But according to some critics, Mr Saied is a bad bet as a border police officer, more likely to drive people to Europe than to drive them into Tunisia.

Saied and what he is doing to the country is the real driver of migration,” says Tarek Megerisi, a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. Europeans are “exacerbating the situation. They don’t really fix it,” he added.

Mr Saied has done little to rectify Tunisia’s economy, which had already stumbled before the Russian invasion of Ukraine sparked a global inflationary crisis. He brushed aside a $1.9 billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund on terms he called “dictates.”

With the economic outlook grittier than ever, more Tunisians came to Europe illegally last year than in any year in recent history, says the European Border Agency said.

“I hope I close my eyes and find myself in Italy,” said Mohamed Houidi, 44, a Tunisian fisherman in Sfax who is saving for the smuggler’s allowance. “There is no hope, no horizon, no future in this country.”

It is also under Mr Saied that Tunisia has become the main springboard for migrants from the Mediterranean. EU data shows that Tunisia is the largest contributor to the main migration route to Europe, the central Mediterraneanwhere the number of arrivals by boat has more than doubled since last year.

And every week brings more news of migrants drowning off Tunisian shores.

Expansion of smuggling networks and the perception that Tunisia makes a safer transit point than Libya has boosted the number of boats heading for Italy. But the departures intensified after Mr Saied claimed in February that sub-Saharan African migrants were part of a covert effort to turn Tunisia into “a purely African country with no ties to the Arab and Muslim nations”.

The speech echoed the racist “great replacement theory” – popular among the far right in Europe and America – that there is a conspiracy to replace white populations with others. Almost immediately, black migrants in several cities, some of which were legally studying or working, were evicted, fired, assaulted, robbed or forced into hiding, migrants and human rights activists said.

Mr Saied has denied that his speech was racist but has indicated that migrants are not welcome to stay.

“Tunisia is not a furnished apartment for sale or rent,” he said this month.

And it remains unclear to what extent the Tunisian president is willing to work with Europe to curb migration. He said this month that Tunisia “does not accept surveillance borders other than its own.”

Such statements have irked some European donors. European officials and diplomats say Tunisia is able to stop border crossings from Sfax, but may be hesitant to exert influence.

While Tunisia appears to be in no hurry to finalize the IMF deal, on which most of the promised EU aid depends, the bloc is already rushing more than $200 million to Tunis.

Others argue that Mr Saied is simply trying to salvage his declining popularity by vocally rejecting Western influence and scapegoating migrants.

Now migrants in Sfax are being deported and attacked again, human rights organizations say. Many, they say, are heading for the sea.

Imen Blioua contributed reporting from Sfax and Tunis, Tunisia; And Matina Stevis Gridneff And Monica Proncuk from Brussels.