Authorities in Tunisia are considering building new cemeteries, as the country runs out of space to bury the dozens of refugees washing up every day on its shores.
The first three months of 2023 were the deadliest for people attempting to cross the central Mediterranean since 2017, according to the UN, with an increasing number of boats carrying asylum seekers wrecked at sea.
Bodies, including those of children and pregnant women, often turn up on the beaches of Tunisia, where they are collected and buried.
Last year, according to the Tunisian Red Crescent, more than 800 bodies were recovered in the Sfax region alone, and more than 300 have been found since the beginning of 2023. As a result, funerals are held almost every day to reduce the pressure on hospitals, local morgues have exceeded their capacity, and burial space in many municipal cemeteries to bury refugees, especially from sub-Saharan Africa, is running out.
“Due to the influx of a large number of victims, more than 170 bodies have exceeded the capacity to accommodate the forensic medicine department of Habib Bourghiba university hospital,” said a statement from the Sfax governorate, which has held an emergency meeting with health authorities to find “radical solutions” to the problem. These include “quickly allocating a cemetery for immigrants and the provision of refrigerated trucks to transport often decomposing bodies”.
Since January, more than 35,000 people, almost four times more than in 2022, have reached the Italian coastline, with a sharp rise in the past month in refugee boats trying to reach the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa, one of Europe’s southernmost territories. According to data from the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, nearly 20,000 migrants have departed from Tunisia this year, and about 15,500 from Libya. However, more departures also mean more deaths, with the Italian and Maltese authorities accused of delays in the rescue efforts.
Filippo Furri, an associate researcher at Mecmi, a research group that seeks to examine deaths during migration, said: “The Tunisian system for receiving and managing the bodies was not prepared for such a situation.
“The forensic medicine departments are collapsing, the cemeteries are collapsing. The bodies of migrants are suspended in limbo.”
Furri added: “Tunisian coroners who perform autopsies on the bodies of sub-Saharan asylum seekers serve to establish the causes of death and not the identity of the victim. There is no obligation for the authorities to identify a body. If, in addition, there are no family members who report a disappearance, the identification becomes ‘irrelevant’ for the authorities.”
Silvia Di Meo, an anthropologist at the University of Genoa and a member of Mem.Med – Memoria Mediterranea, a project whose goal is to identify people missing in the Mediterranean – said many more people died attempting to cross than would be identified, or even found.
“There are numerous ghost shipwrecks and deaths that are not reported at a national level,” said Di Meo. “Based on the reports we receive from the families of migrants, we know that many deaths remain unknown. They are shipwrecked people whose bodies do not arrive on land or are not recovered at sea.”
She said there was no will to name these people “because this requires an assumption of responsibility and the recognition of various crimes”.
“The memory of these deaths is politically very inconvenient,” she added.
To counter the emergency, some Tunisian municipalities have authorised the burial of migrants in their local cemeteries. In one of the cemeteries in the coastal city of Sfax, located 170 miles (270 km) south-east of Tunis, the authorities have already designated an area for the burial of sub-Saharan migrants, with empty and nameless tombstones waiting to house the bodies.
“One of the main problems in the recovery of migrants stranded on the Tunisian coast is that of identifying the victims,” said a civil society activist who helps to recover the bodies. “It’s a very complicated task considering that the majority of bodies are found without documents and in an advanced state of decomposition, which suggested they were in the water for several days.”
Italy and Malta, the two member countries of the EU that under international law are obliged to intervene to rescue asylum seekers in the central Mediterranean, have been accused of failing to respond promptly to various distress calls from sinking boats.
Since 2017, Libya’s coastguard has been patrolling the Mediterranean in an agreement with Italy that empowered it to return people to Libya, a country where aid agencies say they suffer torture and abuse. However, since Tunisia has surpassed Libya as a principal departure hub for migrants, EU foreign ministers have discussed how to respond to growing instability in a country that is a gateway for African migration to Europe.
Although EU countries were wary of supporting President Kais Saied, who has shut down Tunisia’s parliament, rammed through a new constitution giving him sweeping executive power, and cracked down on political opponents as well as African migrants, on Friday the European commissioner for home affairs, Ylva Johansson, expressed “the willingness to establish a stronger operational partnership on anti-smuggling” with Tunisia.
Black immigrants living in Tunisia have been living on the edge since 21 February, when Saied made a racist speech that claimed irregular migration from other parts of Africa was part of an international plot to change Tunisia’s character.
Soon after the speech, asylum seekers from sub-Saharan Africa were evicted from their homes, and entire neighbourhoods where they lived were raided.
Aid workers claim that many refugees, including from Yemen and Sudan, left the country immediately in shoddy metal boats. Many of them, they say, are still missing.