'Fortress Europe' is the root cause for strains in EU-Africa relations

'Fortress Europe' is the root cause for strains in EU-Africa relations

By Shada Islam and Yasmine Akrimi

BRUSSELS - The search for an elusive "partnership of equals" between African states and the European Union remains a slow, unsteady and increasingly challenging work in progress.

Relations have been soured by disagreements over the unequal distribution of Covid-19 vaccines and the EU's shock at African states' hands-off policy towards Russia's war in Ukraine. EU hopes of engaging in connectivity diplomacy through the rolling out of Global Gateway projects in Africa are also being challenged by the fact that initiatives come with little or no fresh funding.

The European Union's 'Fortress Europe' migration policies, which are seen by many African countries as a reminder of Europe's colonial past and involvement in the slave trade, have become one of the biggest obstacles to creating a new EU-Africa policy due to their racist and discriminatory nature.

Recent troubling developments in Tunisia provide a cautionary tale on how the EU's approach to migration from African states has added to strains in EU-Africa relations. It also illustrates how Europe's migration panic and the free pass this gives to certain "transit" African countries is empowering populist leaders who are, in turn, unashamedly and deliberately provoking societal and political disruption.

Once viewed as the only 'success story' of the 'Arab Spring', Tunisia is currently on a perilous political course under president Kais Saied. Tunisian leaders engaged in several democratic reforms between 2011 and 2019 — accumulating anger as well as economic and political mismanagement — which opened up a window for the election of the independent candidate Saied as president.

The new president went on to assume all powers through a 'constitutional coup', immediately freezing the unpopular parliament and then voting in a new constitution which consecrated extensive prerogatives for the head of the executive, a limited role of the parliament and an inexistent independence for the judiciary.

Since then, the regime has been targeting counterpowers, such as harassing and imprisoning the president's main political opponents. The most recent arrest was that of Rached Ghannouchi, prominent opposition leader and head of the Islamist party Ennahdha, which played a significant role in the country's mismanagement post-2011.

Yet, in the absence of an independent judiciary and considering Ghannouchi was arrested for mere commentary, even those who were asking to hold him accountable for years do not consider this good news.

The president has also alienated Tunisia diplomatically and economically, notably through repetitive sabotaging commentaries towards traditional partner countries, international financial institutions and humanitarian organisations. The latest was Saied once again denouncing "foreign diktats" imposed by the IMF — a legitimate concern if the government he formed hadn't been negotiating a deal with the same institution for months.

He has also consistently used inflammatory and unverified narratives on migration, which have ongoing consequences for both the EU and Africa.

For instance, in late February this year, the presidency published a communiqué denouncing what it deemed as a "criminal plot aiming to demographically modify the Tunisian society's composition" through the mass immigration of sub-Saharan Africans.

Directly inspired by the microscopic Tunisian nationalist party's work, the claim is that there is a Western conspiracy to incite sub-Saharan Africans to remain in the country, notably through the work of humanitarian NGOs.

Unsurprisingly, this state-sanctioned racism sparked a wave of citizen and police violence against said migrants. Many lost their homes, their jobs, and were physically and verbally assaulted. A number of migrants also protested for weeks in front of UNHCR's office in Tunis, before being violently evacuated by the police.

Some are choosing to repatriate voluntarily, while others have been attempting to cross the Mediterranean in a rush, leaving Italy to deal with a record-high number of irregular migrants seeking shelter in the country.

No way North

But migrants are unlikely to find a safe home on the other side of the Mediterranean: "Fortress Europe" has been building steel walls and razor-wire fences.

This month, the European Parliament voted on an amendment endorsing the use of EU funds to help build "border barriers". Some lawmakers from the S&D group even broke ranks to support the initiative. Italy also declared a state of emergency on immigration.

"Fortress Europe" is also accelerating the transition of neighbouring southern countries from "transit" to "destination," with neither their consent, nor that of migrants themselves. For example, Tunisia's economy is fragile: it is extremely complicated for low-skilled migrants to obtain work permits, and its own youth is attempting to leave by any means.

The crisis in Tunisia is "very dangerous" according to Josep Borrell, the EU's foreign policy Chief. "If it collapses economically or socially, then we will be in a situation where new flows of migrants will come to Europe. We have to avoid this situation."

Meanwhile, Italy has called on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to release a $1.9bn [€1.73bn] loan to Tunisia because of fears that the lack of liquidity could further destabilise the country, potentially leading to even greater numbers of migrants departing towards Italy.

President Saied has manipulated a strong anti-colonial and anti-European nationalism fuelled by a mounting economic crisis.

Tunisia's political turmoil is also indicative of the African Union's limits in halting authoritarianism in Africa. In February 2022, the Union's political affairs commissioner stressed its "zero tolerance" towards undemocratic regime changes in Africa during the EU-AU summit in Brussels.

The AU was quick to condemn the Tunisian leader's "great replacement" speech, especially following a number of African countries' emergency repatriations of nationals. Yet, there has been no temporary suspension and certainly no expulsion of Tunisia, since there is neither a legal precedent for such a move, nor a mechanism to truly sanction a member state on grounds of racism.

As it seeks to re-engage with African states in a more modern and inclusive manner, the EU must take a clear-eyed view of how its mismanaged and messy approach to migration from Africa is causing societal and political disruption across the continent — particularly in its southern neighbourhood.

Of course, the EU is not ready to stop enforcing coercive measures to slow down migration, which means it is unlikely to stop supporting authoritarian leaders. Tunisia is no exception, especially considering how important the country is for Italy, a member state whose far-right leadership has been Kais Saied's main supporter in the past months. However, some measures could be taken immediately.

First, improving regular pathways for migration, starting with not using visas as leverage for pressuring Tunisia to take back its irregular migrants. Tunisians have to wait for months and pay exorbitant fees to secure a Schengen visa appointment, and they are increasingly and unjustly being denied. This not only reinforces resentment against Europe, but equally pushes people to resort to unsafe and irregular ways to migrate.

Secondly, the EU should refrain from supporting austerity policies in Tunisia — such as the ones prescribed by the IMF — which will tremendously impact the middle and lower classes and, in turn, boost irregular migration. If working classes across Europe are protesting neoliberal policies and calling out their governments for eroding their standard of living — as we have seen recently in France– imagine the impact austerity has on poorer, more economically volatile countries.

Tunisia is no longer the poster boy of the "Arab Spring". Instead, it has become a tragic example of the collateral damage caused by the EU's restrictive migration policies. "Fortress Europe" is the real reason why Europe and Africa are finding it so difficult to talk to each other as equal partners.

Authors

Shada Islam is senior commentator on geopolitics at the Brussels International Center (BIC).

Yasmine Akrimi is North Africa Analyst. The BIC is an independent, non-profit, think- tank, committed to developing solutions to address the cyclical drivers of insecurity, economic fragility, and conflict the Middle East and North Africa.

Disclaimer

This article is sponsored by a third party. All opinions in this article reflect the views of the author and not of CEMAS.

Why the new ECHR Ukraine-Russia ruling matters

By William Goodhind, The Euobseprver, 27 January 2023

LONDON - The European Court for Human Rights (ECHR) has made a landmark ruling recognising Russia's occupation of Eastern Ukraine since 2014. The finding, part of the Court's decision on the admissibility of Ukraine's case against Russia, has far-ranging consequences.

The ECHR announced on 25 January that Russia was in "effective control" of separatist regions of Eastern Ukraine from 11 May 2014. In doing so, the court has formally acknowledged the inter-state character of the conflict and Russia's culpability for human rights abuses.

The ECHR's decision marks an important step in progressing three inter-state applications submitted by Ukraine against Russia, one in conjunction with The Netherlands over the downing of Malaysian Airline Flight MH-17.

Moreover, this legal development aligns with the ECHR's 2021 finding that, since 27 February 2014, Russia was also in "effective control" of Crimea, more than a fortnight before the peninsula's staged 'reunification' referendum.

The ruling comes amid a surge of national and international judicial efforts to hold Russia to account for its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. A week earlier, the EU Parliament voted overwhelmingly for a UN-backed Special Tribunal to try Russia's political and military leadership for the crime of aggression.

Others, including former UK prime ministers Gordon Brown and John Major, have favoured a Nuremberg-style tribunal — a treaty-based court created by a collective of like-minded states.

Armed with the ECHR's legal position, the Ukrainian Prosecutor's Office, UN courts and national delegations now have a binding reference point on when and where Russia's military operations in Ukraine began.

But the significance of this finding goes far beyond just legal fora.

The ECHR's decision helps to set the record straight on the causes (and responsibility) for the 2014-22 war in Ukraine.

Dispelling 'civil war' myth

Russia has persistently framed the war in Ukraine's eastern regions along ethnic and linguistic lines. The portrayal of events as a domestic affair has served to perpetuate outlandish claims of a Ukrainian genocide of Russians in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

These lies set a path towards all-out war.

Putin's justification for the so-called Special Military Operation hinges on the false assertion of the need to 'protect' ethnic Russians from a fascist, neo-Nazi Ukrainian government.

Regrettably, this civil war mischaracterisation has lingered in Western thought for almost a decade, in part due to a concerted disinformation campaign that continues to this day.

Even in the face of damning evidence and Putin's own admission of a Russian military presence, media and policy commentators referred to the situation as an internal conflict. Rebels in the east were described as 'pro-Russian' or 'Moscow-backed', but rarely Russian-controlled.

On the contrary, in 2014, a fringe separatist movement was bolstered by a massive Russian military incursion, forcing Ukraine to capitulate to the Minsk Peace process. Then, as fighting continued, a Russian occupation regime emerged.

The Ukrainian government later changed the name of its deployment in eastern Ukraine from the Anti-Terrorist Operation to the Joint Forces Operation.

The re-labelling in April 2018 sent a message that Ukraine was, for all intents and purposes, at war with Russia.

However, it was only until Russia's disastrous 2022 invasion that mainstream media followed suit.

The ECHR's decision represents a small victory for Ukraine, who have doggedly pursued legal routes for redress. Similarly, Russian allegations of genocide are being contested in the International Court of Justice in what has been likened as a state defamation case.

The de-facto recognition of Russian occupation is not a silver bullet — it will be years before the ECHR's inter-state cases are concluded — but it marks an important turning point in history.

Just as it is making gains on the battlefield, Ukraine is seizing back control of the information space.

Author

William Goodhind was a monitoring officer with the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine between 2015-17 and 2020-22. He is now a consultant and deployable civilian expert with the UK government's Civilian Stabilisation Group.
Disclaimer

The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author's, not those of EUobserver or CEMAS.

Tirailleurs: Never forget France’s debt to African soldiers

Tiralleurs: Never forget France’s debt to African soldiers

By Yasser Louati, The New Arab, 13 January 2023

Omar Sy’s film telling the story of Senegalese colonial soldiers, has lifted the lid on the horrific treatment of Africans who were enlisted by France in WWI and WWII. This pressure must be capitalised on to bring justice, writes Yasser Louati.

The recent release of Tiralleurs (Father and Soldier, 2022), a film featuring renowned French actor Omar Sy, which tells the story of Senegalese troops who has been enlisted by their French colonisers, has received much right-wing backlash.

Indeed the subject continues to be a gaping wound that the French state has long attempted to ignore.

This is perhaps unsurprising given that it wasn’t until Ousmane Sembène released his film Camp de Thiaroye in 1988, that anything was really known about one of the most brutal colonial repressions initiated by France after WWII: the Thiaroye massacre.

During the First and Second World Wars, France heavily relied on troops from across its empire. According to Dr. Pierre Journoud, researcher at the University of Paul Valéry in Montpellier, over 500,000 colonialized people were “recruited, willingly or by force” to take part in the various war activities for France. Between 200,000 fought between 1914-1918 and around 100,000 defended the French territory from between September 1939 and June 1940.”

The tirailleurs, Senegalese troops who had been on the frontline fighting against the Nazis, paid a heavy price both from German troop and France.

Internal reports during the period highlighted the terrible conditions in which the colonial troops were living throughout the Second World War. They were poorly fed, poorly clothed, and brutally repressed. Some had also spent years imprisoned in occupied France, until their repatriation from 1944 onwards.

Resistance

Following the end of the war, ships were loaded from France with these soldiers who were to be shipped to Senegal, but hundreds refused to go because their pensions had not been paid. The situation worsened. In response to “insubordination”, the colonial administration decided to group them all together in shacks with only straw as a mattress to rest on.

This was all despite the fact that ministerial letters at the time had explicitly indicated that pensions were to be paid to these troops in metropolitan France before they left the country and literally boarded the ships back to Senegal.

Additionally, in a letter unearthed by historian Armelle Mabon, the French military were reported to have shot colonial soldiers who refused to board the ship back to Senegal. The letter, written by a Senegalese soldier, described the way French soldiers ruthlessly shot them. Several tirailleurs were seriously injured, or even dead.

The letter also described the inhumane conditions they faced at the hands of French officers who threw them in a camp surrounded by barbed wire and given little to no food. The former soldier explained that before they suffered “at the hands of Germans”, then France made them “prisoners of war” once more.

The Circasia, the ship on which the former Senegalese war prisoners boarded, left the French town of Morlaix on 18 November 1944. In his December 1944 mission report, Dr Pelage detailed how It was the terrible conditions onboard from the get go that were said to have created the breeding ground for the events that transpired.

Following a stop in Cardiff, the tirailleurs were held again in a camp until the next departure. As the ship prepared to leave for Senegal, 400 of the soldiers refused to board in protest against the conditions. On 21 November 1944, 1300 tirailleurs arrived and were immediately transferred to French army barracks in the town of Thiaroye located 10 miles east of Dakar.

Rather than defusing anger by addressing demands of payments, French officers let the situation deteriorate.

When the French commander of the Senegal Mauritania division, General Dagnan, visited the region, his car was blocked by unhappy tirailleurs who were demanding the pensions they were owed. Once the general promised he would discuss the issue with his superiors, they let him go. However, Dagnan considered his experience with the former soldiers as a hostage situation and so ruthlessly retaliated.

The massacre

In the morning of December 1944, as the tirailleurs were still demonstrating against their ongoing plight, under Dagnan’s orders, 35 were killed, 35 were wounded, and 45 were jailed. Amongst those arrested, 34 were tried and sentenced to between one to ten years for taking part in what the French government called a ‘mutiny’.

This scale of brutality finds its roots in the colonial administration’s obsession with the obedience within its colonies, which continued well after WWII, from the massacre of “colonial soldiers” in Yên Bái to those committed in Madagascar, Algeria and Morocco.

According to the French, the four years spent in German prisons had “intoxicated” the African soldiers with “nationalistic propaganda” against France. In response to the events that took place in Thiaroye, the general governor of French West Africa sent a letter to the Minister of the colonies in which he clearly expressed the grave threat of such “propaganda” in undermining the French empire.

Indeed, Thiaroye demonstrated the outcomes of colonial greed and contempt for enlisted indigenous troops, despite their contribution in liberating French territories. For decades, France’s whitewashing of history meant that the massacre was ignored. It took until 2000, when the archives started to be opened for people to access, in order for some records to be set straight. However, justice has yet to be served.

Not a single French officer was even reprimanded for ordering the killing and imprisonment of the Senegalese soldiers, nor has the French government ever honoured France’s debt towards the colonial troops.

These demands are unlikely to be met until adequate pressure reinforced by historians’ efforts, is placed on the former colonial power.

Film has clearly been a powerful tool in bringing the subject to the fore of French political discourse, and it is this that movements seeking to honour those killed, should capitalise on.

Indeed, despite the backlash from the French right, the expected success of Tiralleurs (2022) has already meant the horrific chapter in history can no longer continue to be buried. Furthermore, it is clearly already making an impact since the French government has since decided – over half a century later and as the majority of former soldiers are no longer with us – to allow the tirailleurs to live out their retirement in Senegal as they wished, and not in France.

Previously, then President Jacques Chirac accepted to pay the pensions owed to North African soldiers only following the film Indigènes (2006) was released. Clearly, France only acknowledges its freedom debt towards Africans when it is named and shamed, so let us continue applying pressure in this way.

Yasser Louati is a French political analyst and head of the Committee for Justice & Liberties (CJL). He hosts a hit podcast called "Le Breakdown with Yasser Louati" in English and "Les Idées Libres" in French.