Tunisians gather during a protest against Tunisian President Kais Saied in downtown Tunis, Tunisia, Saturday Jan. 14, 2023. Tunisians mark 12 years since Tunisian protesters unleashed Arab Spring uprisings around the region. The protest comes after disastrous parliamentary elections last month in which just 11% of voters cast ballots. It also comes as the country is going through a major economic crisis, with inflation and joblessness on the rise. The banner in French reads: “leave.” (Credit: Hassene Dridi/AP.)
YAOUNDÈ, Cameroon – An African leader with Catholic Relief Services, the overseas development arm of the US bishops, has sounded an alarm about anti-immigrant rhetoric from the north African nation of Tunisia.
Tapfuma Murove, CRS country representative for Zimbabwe, was reacting to statements from Tunisian President Kais Saied, who’s claimed that flows of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa are part of a plot to undermine his country’s Islamic identity.
“The undeclared goal of the successive waves of illegal immigration is to consider Tunisia a purely African country that has no affiliation to the Arab and Islamic nations,” Saied said during a late February address to his national security council.
Saied, who’s positioned himself as a social conservative, charged international complicity in a “criminal arrangement made since the beginning of this century to alter the demographic structure of Tunisia”.
He talked up the idea of “Tunisianness,” saying that there were original Tunisians whose purity must be preserved.
Murove, the CRS official from Zinmbabwe, said such claims are opposed to Pope Francis’s insistence that, “Every human being has the right to freedom of movement and of personal development.”
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