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Ed Webb

Egyptian Human Rights Activist Arrested After Returning from Italy - 0 views

  • Egyptian police have arrested 27-year-old human rights activist Patrick George Zaki after he spoke out against President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi’s government. Lawyers for Zaki told the Italian press that the student—who was studying in Bologna, Italy—was detained at Cairo International Airport on Friday and roughed up by police. He is still in custody. Zaki had recently waged a campaign in Italy for greater transparency into the death of Italian Cambridge grad student Giulio Regeni, who was tortured and killed in Cairo in 2016 after researching opposition politicians and labor unions in Cairo. Zaki’s arrest is being described as a product of an unprecedented crackdown on dissident voices. Zaki had taken leave from the NGO Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights to work on a master’s degree in gender studies at the University of Bologna.
Ed Webb

Rights group: Jailed Egyptian activist's conditions worsen - 0 views

  • Police transferred an Egyptian activist who was arrested upon arrival at the Cairo airport from Italy to a “less favorable” detention facility Thursday, a local rights group said, just as his parents showed up for visiting hours.Officials detained Patrick George Zaki, 28, a human rights advocate and student at the University of Bologna in Italy, after he landed in Cairo for a brief trip home.When Zaki’s parents arrived at the police station to catch a first glimpse of their son, police directed them to another, more crowded facility a short drive away. By the time they found Zaki, less than a minute remained of visiting hours, his lawyer said.
  • Zaki has told his lawyers that while in custody he has been blindfolded, beaten and tortured with electric shocks while interrogated about his activism. There was no immediate response from Egypt’s Interior Ministry about the allegations.
  • accusations of spreading fake news and calling for unauthorized protests
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  • Recent laws in Egypt have expanded the definition of terrorism to include all political dissent, granting prosecutors broad power to keep people detained for months and even years without ever filing charges or presenting evidence
  • deeply rattled Italy, where Zaki is pursuing a master’s in Gender and Women’s Studies, dredging up painful memories of the disappearance of 28-year-old Italian researcher Giulio Regeni.
  • The move against Zaki is the latest in el-Sissi’s unprecedented crackdown on opposition. The government has arrested thousands —both secular-leaning activists and Islamists — and rolled back freedoms won after the 2011 uprising.
  • Egypt outlawed all unauthorized protests in 2013, months after President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, then defense minister, led the military’s ouster of the country’s first democratically elected but divisive president, M ohamed Morsi
  • Regeni’s battered body was found on a roadside on the outskirts of Cairo in 2016. Italy’s public prosecutor has opened an investigation into several Egyptian police and secret service members in connection with Regeni’s torture and murder.His death remains a source of simmering tension between the countries
  • Bologna’s streets, where hundreds took part in rallies this week to call for his release
Ed Webb

Sisi Is Too Scared of His Own Police to Care That Italy Recalled Its Ambassador | Forei... - 0 views

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    I broadly agree with Siobhan's account of the dynamics here.
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    I broadly agree with Siobhan's account of the dynamics here.
Ed Webb

Tunisian leader: Young are paid to migrate, harm Europe ties - 0 views

  • Tunisia’s leader claimed Sunday that some desperate youths are being paid to try to leave Tunisia illegally for Europe, saying the goal is to damage the country from within and hurt its ties with Europe.President Kais Saied made the remarks during a stroll down the iconic Avenue Bourguiba, the main axis in the Tunisian capital of Tunis, a week after firing the prime minister and other top officials and freezing parliament. He listened to passersby calling out his name and shouting “Tunisia!” but said nothing about his much-awaited next steps.
  • He claimed that some of his countrymen with political motives are paying desperate youth to make the trip, saying their intention is to repeat the mass illegal migration that began after the Tunisian revolution a decade ago.
  • Saied made the same assertion earlier Sunday when he formally accepted 1.5 million doses of anti-COVID-19 vaccines from Italy, warning against any “political exploitation” of the country’s youths.
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  • The Tunisian Coast Guard picked up 31 Tunisian youths on Sunday, a day after stopping three attempted crossings and seizing five small boats and a large sum of money. A total of 188 migrants, 56 of whom were Tunisian, were saved, while 11 other attempts to embark on the journey to Europe were stopped, according to the Interior Ministry.
  • dozens of migrants, most of them from Tunisia, reached the Italian island of Sardinia over the weekend
Ed Webb

Egyptian activist walks free after nearly 2 years in jail | AP News - 0 views

  • Zaki’s arrest and trial became front page news in Italy and sparked a wave of student protests there. For many Italians, his detention was reminiscent of the death of Italian doctoral student Giulio Regeni, who was kidnapped in Cairo, tortured and killed in 2016. Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi has vowed to continue following Zaki’s case.
Ed Webb

Beirut-Palermo - Carnegie Middle East Center - Carnegie Endowment for International Peace - 0 views

  • The parallels between Lebanon and Sicily are many, and may hold clues for why the judiciary has struggled to impose the law on societies that, in many regards, were built on foundations opposing the state. Both are places that have been conquered over the centuries by multiple powers, so that they have absorbed contradictory, even clashing, political legacies. In Sicily and Lebanon, traditional social ties have tended to displace mediation by the institutions of the modern state, while religion has been an instrument of debilitating illiberalism as well as an occasional driver of reform. And in both, the preferred traditional response to the abuses present all around has generally been silence
  • The mafia and the political class that so thoroughly dominated Lebanon at the end of the country’s civil war in 1990 had a very similar trajectory. Both exploited major transitional periods in their country’s history to, schizophrenically, anchor their criminal networks in the mechanisms of legitimate governance.
  • In Lebanon, the transition out of war in 1990 only perpetuated what had existed during the conflict. The main sponsor of the postwar order was not the Lebanese state, as it had been the state in Italy, but the Syrian regime. This allowed most of the sectarian militia leaders to shape the peacetime republic around their political and financial interests and patronage networks, which the Syrians were more than happy to endorse, as they too extracted tremendous rent from the corruption of Lebanon’s reconstruction period. Rather than resting on an understanding between the state and a criminal element, postwar Lebanon was entirely dominated by a sectarian political leadership that had sustained itself financially during the war years through criminal economic behavior.
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  • political leaders neutralized popular outrage by manipulating sectarian sensitivities, so that the investigating magistrate, Tareq Bitar, became a target of the political forces whose officials he later sought to question. Sicily was ahead of Lebanon in having a judiciary that was willing to go all the way, despite the tremendous risks, and politicians with residues of self-respect.
  • at the heart of successful criminal commonwealths is a pact between those who govern and those who commit crimes, so that the criminals take on certain responsibilities of the state, and the state relies on assistance from the criminals for what is legally prohibited
  • In Lebanon, however, we approximate a more perfect criminal republic. Here, the ones committing the crimes are those actually in senior positions of authority. They have infiltrated all state bodies, the security and national defense institutions, the judiciary, educational establishments, even sporting federations. So perfect are their crimes, in fact, that many of their actions are not regarded as criminal by most people in society. The Lebanese will blandly mention the politicians’ “patronage networks,” but under any lawful political system plundering the state to bolster one’s own political fortunes would be considered illegal.
Ed Webb

How Kais Saied uses irregular migration for political gain - 0 views

  • Since Kais Saied's assumption of the Tunisian presidency in 2019, the number of African migrants who have arrived in Tunisia without being stopped or registered has dramatically increased. “Officially, 10,000 irregular migrants have crossed the borders from Libya to Tunisia during the first half of 2022”, M.E., a former UNHCR employee in Medenine revealed. In reality, the numbers are much bigger.
  • it is believed foreign migrants in Tunisia far exceed a million. 
  • Since the start of his tenure, Saied has put the army and the police at the behest of his political project. After his referendum on a new constitution, Saied sacked and replaced nine high-ranking police officers. Furthermore, Saied's Interior Minister Taoufik Charfeddine has been appointing his own friends to key positions in the police and the National Guard.
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  • Tunisians have witnessed many Africans taking part in pro-Saied rallies in the past months.
  • Tunisia has always formally rejected calls to host migrants and refugees on a permanent basis
  • Migrants in these overpopulated, mostly working-class neighbourhoods “now have a sort of autonomous, independent communities. They have their own laws,” Zarzis-based activist Jihad A. told The New Arab, adding “migrants have strained ties with local communities. Clashes, sometimes violent, have often taken place in the past year."
  • “Unemployed, uneducated, and rebellious Tunisian youth have constituted a big challenge to the regime, since the Ben Ali era”, believes T.J., a blogger and civil society activist. “To get rid of these young people, mainly in the poor southern towns of the country, Saied’s authorities are shutting their eyes to the massive daily migration journeys from the south-eastern coasts of Zarzis, Jerba and Sfax to Italy”
  • more Tunisians sail to Europe from Tunisia than Africans
  • On August 1st, Italy’s Interior ministry revealed that the biggest numbers of irregular migrants who arrived in Italy from January to July 2022 are Tunisians, which is more than Bangladeshis, Sub-Saharan Africans, Iranians and others.
  • in Tataouine, there’s a flourishing network of migration for Tunisians to western Europe, via Turkey and Serbia.
  • individuals and families fly regularly to Istanbul. There, a Tunisian official sells them the official security document, which states that a person is ‘clean’, and not prosecuted in any legal cases in Tunisia. That document, which is never delivered in Tunisia because it is supposed to contain “classified” information, is strictly required by Serbia to allow Tunisians in
  • Medenine and Tataouine, two key regions for fuel smuggling and human trafficking, have remained without senior officials for months after President Saied sacked their old governors.
  • “Mayors can play a major role in monitoring irregular migration and in the hosting of migrants”, explains Boubaker Souid, Mayor of Tataouine. “But they are now left without any prerogative and who knows how Saied’s regime will get rid of them”.   
  • “It seems that one of the tactics of the Tunisian authorities is to empty the country of young people, who have always been the main source of contest and revolt”, says M.B., a civil society activist from Medenine.
  • On February 24, 2022, Kais Saied announced that he wanted to ban foreign funding for associations. For him, associations applying for or receiving foreign funding are “suspicious activities”. Consequently, the civil society ceased to play its role in monitoring and reporting migration issues and in delivering credible information and data about it.
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    Tendentious, but certainly a lot of complex, possibly related phenomena discussed in this anonymous article
Ed Webb

Analysis: Tunisia faces rising pressure, record IMF delay over lack of reforms | Reuters - 0 views

  • Tunisia reached a preliminary deal with the International Monetary Fund a year ago on a $1.9 billion loan programme, but 12 months later it has yet to receive any money and seems unwilling to implement the reforms needed to do so.
  • The one-year lag is a record delay between a preliminary deal and the final signoff, according to public data on over 80 cases compiled by Reuters. This compares to the median 55 days it took low- and middle-income countries between the two steps, and exceeds even the long waits of countries like Chad, Zambia and Sri Lanka.
  • Reducing the budget deficit, reforming large state-owned enterprises and devaluing the currency to prevent the central bank from using reserves to support the dinar are among the top tasks the government needs to address,
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  • Talks on the IMF 48-month arrangement have been in limbo after Saied rejected terms including cutting subsidies and reducing the public wage bill, saying the "diktats" laid down by the international lender were unacceptable.
  • has to pay back a 500 million euro bond maturing in October and an 850 million euro note due in February
  • "rising reserves and marginal fiscal consolidation have granted Tunisia some additional runway" thanks to a pickup in tourism
  • Tunisia also received $500 million of fresh funding from Saudi Arabia in July. A $1 billion European Union pledge of support is, however, conditional on Tunisia receiving an IMF programme.
  • The World Bank recently cut its Tunisian economic growth forecast to 1.2% from 2.3% for 2023 citing "very uncertain prospects" over debt financing and difficult conditions following a three-year drought that has pushed the government to raise tap water prices and threatened food security.
  • Tunisia can nevertheless count on support from some other nations under pressure thanks to its geopolitical and geographic importance, according to analysts.Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni maintains a close relationship with Tunisia. Record numbers of migrants setting off from the country have landed on Italy's far southern island of Lampedusa."Meloni is a staunch supporter of Tunisia because of the migration issue and that gives them more space to delay things,"
Ed Webb

How Tunisia dealt with the 'Islamic question' - Amanpour - CNN.com Blogs - 0 views

  • “There was some dispute about enshrining sharia,” he said, “that’s why we had to push away the controversy and we settled for what was said in the 1959 constitution about Tunisia as an Arab country.” 
  • constitutions are built on what's agreed upon
  • Rabbi Benjamin Hatab leads Tunisia’s main synagogue and said that Ghannouchi had reached out to the country’s Jewish community. "He declared that the country would not change and that the only difference would be that it would be more democratic than Ben Ali's Tunisia,” the Jewish leader told Ynet.
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  • there will be no sharia or anti-blasphemy laws in the Tunisian constitution
  • “I wanted to tell the Salafists that they must be - they must work under the law because the law will give them all the ability to form political parties, to work in societies, to work in mosques,” he said about the video. “What I wanted to do is to convince them to become part of the legal system, like other countries like us, like leftists or like radical groups in Germany or in Italy and Ireland, which left - which abandoned violence and now work under the law.”
  • Tunisian society is a Muslim society, but a moderate one. That's why there is no hope for any radical group to control the Tunisian society, because it's a society which went through a revolution against dictatorship and will not allow any group like that, even in the name of a religion
Ed Webb

Donald Trump's Media Attacks Should Be Viewed as Brilliant | Time.com - 0 views

  • the central idea of journalism — the conviction, as my old boss Peter Kann once said, “that facts are facts; that they are ascertainable through honest, open-minded and diligent reporting; that truth is attainable by laying fact upon fact, much like the construction of a cathedral; and that truth is not merely in the eye of the beholder.”
  • the responsibility to separate truth from falsehood, which is never more important than when powerful people insist that falsehoods are truths, or that there is no such thing as truth to begin with
  • a period in which the executive branch of government is engaged in a systematic effort to create a climate of opinion against the news business
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  • Ideologically, the president is trying to depose so-called mainstream media in favor of the media he likes — Breitbart News and the rest. Another way of making this point is to say that he’s trying to substitute news for propaganda, information for boosterism.
  • “Many people say” is what’s known as an argumentum ad populum. If we were a nation of logicians, we would dismiss the argument as dumb.We are not a nation of logicians.
  • The president is responding to a claim of fact not by denying the fact, but by denying the claim that facts are supposed to have on an argument
  • This is a version of Thrasymachus’s argument in Plato’s Republic that justice is the advantage of the stronger and that injustice “if it is on a large enough scale, is stronger, freer, and more masterly than justice.”
  • Truth is what you can get away with.
  • The interesting conversation concerns how we come to accept those lies.
  • If a public figure tells a whopping lie once in his life, it’ll haunt him into his grave. If he lies morning, noon and night, it will become almost impossible to remember any one particular lie. Outrage will fall victim to its own ubiquity. It’s the same truth contained in Stalin’s famous remark that the death of one man is a tragedy but the death of a million is a statistic.
  • Some people became desensitized by the never-ending assaults on what was once quaintly known as “human decency.” Others seemed to positively admire the comments as refreshing examples of personal authenticity and political incorrectness.
  • Here’s a simple truth about a politics of dishonesty, insult and scandal: It’s entertaining. Politics as we’ve had it for most of my life has, with just a few exceptions, been distant and dull.
  • it’s exhilarating. Haven’t all of us noticed that everything feels speeded up, more vivid, more intense and consequential? One of the benefits of an alternative-facts administration is that fiction can take you anywhere.
  • we adopt new metrics of judgment, in which politics becomes more about perceptions than performance—of how a given action is perceived as being perceived. If a reporter for the New York Times says that Trump’s press conference probably plays well in Peoria, then that increases the chances that it will play well in Peoria.
  • explanation becomes rationalization, which in turn becomes justification
  • anxiety and anger are their own justifications these days
  • In his 1953 masterpiece, “The Captive Mind,” the Polish poet and dissident Czeslaw Milosz analyzed the psychological and intellectual pathways through which some of his former colleagues in Poland’s post-war Communist regime allowed themselves to be converted into ardent Stalinists. In none of the cases that Milosz analyzed was coercion the main reason for the conversion.They wanted to believe. They were willing to adapt. They thought they could do more good from the inside. They convinced themselves that their former principles didn’t fit with the march of history, or that to hold fast to one’s beliefs was a sign of priggishness and pig-headedness. They felt that to reject the new order of things was to relegate themselves to irrelevance and oblivion. They mocked their former friends who refused to join the new order as morally vain reactionaries. They convinced themselves that, brutal and capricious as Stalinism might be, it couldn’t possibly be worse than the exploitative capitalism of the West.
  • I fear we are witnessing a similar process unfold among many conservative intellectuals on the right. It has been stunning to watch a movement that once believed in the benefits of free trade and free enterprise merrily give itself over to a champion of protectionism whose economic instincts recall the corporatism of 1930s Italy or 1950s Argentina. It is no less stunning to watch people once mocked Obama for being too soft on Russia suddenly discover the virtues of Trump’s “pragmatism” on the subject.
  • George Orwell wrote, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”
  • Not to look around, or beyond, or away from the facts, but to look straight at them, to recognize and call them for what they are, nothing more or less. To see things as they are before we re-interpret them into what we’d like them to be. To believe in an epistemology that can distinguish between truth and falsity, facts and opinions, evidence and wishes. To defend habits of mind and institutions of society, above all a free press, which preserve that epistemology. To hold fast to a set of intellectual standards and moral convictions that won’t waver amid changes of political fashion or tides of unfavorable opinion. To speak the truth irrespective of what it means for our popularity or influence.
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    Helpful in thinking about how people adapt to authoritarian regimes and societies, or don't
Ed Webb

Which Countries' Shadow Economies Are Biggest? - Hit & Run : Reason.com - 1 views

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    For purposes of comparison to non-OECD economies
Ed Webb

Tunisia: The battle of Sidi Bouzid - Opinion - Al Jazeera English - 0 views

  • The tacit contract that has defined the North African country since its independence in 1956 is the ‘bread’ provision - mostly subsidies - in return for political deference. With modest resources, Tunisia has historically funded subsidies of strategic commodities - bread, sugar, tea, coffee, kerosene - and education, health, housing in some cases, and even recreational activities, such as sport. The National Solidarity Fund and the National Employment Fund, still under centralised control, have had some successes. They have partly shifted the burden of providence from the state to society. Tunisians dug into their pockets to volunteer what little of their non-disposable income they have to the cause of poverty alleviation, and improvements of the so-called ‘shadow zones’ (bidon-villes), the misery belt suffocating the rich towns and suburbs. But even this system of quid pro quo bread and political deference has failed many Tunisians, leaving many hopeless and jobless.
  • The state is a control-freak to the point that it disallows the existence of any hint of an informal economy. There is one in Italy - even in America - but not in Tunisia. If the state is partly failing in its provision of jobs, then it is unwise to ban informal trade and work. A youth empowered by education but disempowered by marginalization can be the spark that ignites social upheaval and social tension. In Tunisia, marginalization is today being translated into irrational and tragic suicides.
  • the notion of ‘total state’ and ‘total politics’ may not be apt for successful social engineering and re-distribution. Total control can translate into loss of control.
Ed Webb

The Silencing of Writers in Turkey | The New Yorker - 0 views

  • it is one of the endless ironies of Turkey that the liberals and democrats who were among the first to oppose the putschists’ sinister attempts to overthrow the A.K.P. government would also become the first to be punished and silenced by that very same government
  • what we do not know are the effects of the ongoing crackdown on those of us who are “free.” As one commentator wrote on social media, “If all these writers are ‘inside,’ none of the other writers can really said to be ‘outside.’ ”
  • Since the Arab Spring, I have had many exchanges with writers from “wobbly geographies”—Egypt, Pakistan, Libya, Tunisia. We all know that when you are a novelist from such territories, you do not have the luxury of being apolitical. And although every discipline in the arts is susceptible to degeneration and manipulation under authoritarian regimes, fiction is particularly at risk in such circumstances—prose, rather than poetry. In “The Prevention of Literature,” George Orwell considered the fates of the two genres under nondemocratic rule. A poet could survive despotism relatively unscathed, unhurt, Orwell thought, but not a prose writer, who could neither control nor limit the range of his thoughts without “killing his inventiveness.” Orwell examined the ways in which literature had withered away in Germany, Italy, and Russia whenever autocracy was on the rise. Then he warned future writers, “Poetry might survive in a totalitarian age, and certain arts or half-arts, such as architecture, might even find tyranny beneficial, but the prose writer would have no choice between silence or death.”
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  • Nothing is sadder than the emergence of opportunistic “journalists” and “writers” under authoritarianism. Some of these figures will be older writers who have not had the kind of success they want, and are determined to take advantage of the crackdown, with hopes of climbing fast. Others will be neophytes eager to reap benefits from darkness and chaos. In Turkey, we now have a cohort of such people, who publicly call for the arrest of their colleagues and celebrate when their wishes come true.
  • Writers from wobbly geographies are being compelled to write and talk about politics like never before. Every day we face the challenge of how to balance the mundane and the momentous, the banal and the sublime, the “inside” and the “outside.” Every day we face the challenge of how to defend nuances in a culture of gross generalizations, how to build bridges of empathy where pitting one side of the society against the other plays into the hands of populist demagogues. And although the Turkish case is in some ways uniquely depressing, it is part of a much larger trend. Wave after wave of nationalism, isolationism, and tribalism have hit the shores of countries across Europe, and they have reached the United States. Jingoism and xenophobia are on the rise. It is an Age of Angst—and it is a short step from angst to anger and from anger to aggression.
Ed Webb

Covid-19 kills scores of health workers in war-torn Yemen | Yemen | The Guardian - 0 views

  • At least 97 Yemeni healthcare workers have died from Covid-19 as the disease ravages the war-torn country, according to a report that gives an insight into the true scale of Yemen’s poorly documented outbreak.Yemen, already suffering from a five-year war that has caused the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, has proved uniquely vulnerable to the coronavirus pandemic, according to data published by the medical charity MedGlobal on Thursday.
  • Yemen’s official total number of cases is 1,610, with 446 deaths, so the high number of healthcare worker casualties outlined by the report suggests the true caseload and mortality figure is far higher. For comparison, in badly hit Italy, where 245,0362 people have caught the virus, 35,073 people have died, including about 100 doctors. Yemen currently has a 27% mortality rate from the disease – more than five times the global average.
  • In a country where half of all medical facilities are out of action, and aid funding shortfalls are exacerbating the existing malnutrition and cholera crises, the loss of just one medical professional has a devastating exponential effect. About 18% of the country’s 333 districts already have no doctors.
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  • “We have lost our best colleagues, people who can’t be replaced easily,” she said. “Coronavirus is also killing the morale of medical staff.”
  • The loss of five gynaecologists and midwives will also have a disastrous impact in a country where one in every 260 women die during pregnancy or childbirth.
  • the number of Yemenis facing high levels of acute food insecurity is forecast to increase from 2 million to 3.2 million over the next six months – about 40% of the population
Ed Webb

How despair and misery fuel North Africa migration | The North Africa Journal - 0 views

  • With the coronavirus pandemic further squeezing already scant economic opportunities, Algerians and Tunisians are more determined than ever to reach Europe
  • 60 people, mostly women and children, drowned off the Tunisian coast. But this has not put Hamid off. An engineer by profession, he has work, but is forced to live with his parents because his salary is not enough to rent a separate apartment
  • The migrants are known locally as “harraga”, “those who burn” — a reference to successful travellers setting their identity papers alight upon reaching their chosen destination, to avoid repatriation
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  • as the unprecedented peaceful movement has been ever more harshly repressed and the oil-dependent economy has tanked on low crude prices, illegal departures have ticked up again
  • authorities arrested 1,433 people trying to depart illegally from Algeria’s shores in the first five months of this year — more than three times the figure for the same period of 2019
  • Sociologist Mohamed Mohamedi said the Hirak protest movement had offered citizens brief “hope of shaping a life” in Algeria. But, he said, “the return of the ‘harraga’ is due to the return of hopelessness”. Mahrez Bouich, a professor of philosophy and politics in Bejaia in northeastern Algeria, agreed that the lack of hoped-for changes, along with economic stagnation, were to blame. The pandemic has “exacerbated social inequalities and injustices”, Bouich said.
  • Aboard the boats are doctors, nurses, policemen, the unemployed and entire families, lawyer Zerguine said, arguing that the phenomenon cannot be explained by unemployment alone. Those who decide to leave “want to live with the times, they want more freedom and dignity”. Mohamed, the prospective migrant, said Algeria’s social conservatism had overlooked young people. “My grandparents are more open in spirit than my parents — it’s mad,” he said. “Society has regressed and I refuse to regress with it.”
  • In neighbouring Tunisia, clandestine departures towards Europe quadrupled in the first five months of the year compared to 2019, according to the UN refugee agency UNHCR. And while a growing number of migrants attempting the crossings are from West Africa, Tunisians also appear to have ever more reason to leave. Many are disillusioned with the aftermath of the country’s 2011 revolution, while the coronavirus pandemic has further crushed their economic prospects, said Khaled Tababi, a sociologist specialising in migration. Many jobs have simply disappeared, especially in the tourism sector, he said.
  • “Living in a foreign country hit by the pandemic is easier than living here without money, without prospects and with the unemployment that strangles us,”
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