Tunisia decides and youth runs away
2022.12.15 08:02
Tunisia decides and youth runs away
Budrigannews.com – On Saturday, Tunisia will hold elections, but teenager Ismail Challahki and others like him in the coastal town of Zarzis have no interest in the outcome. The chance to risk their lives on another smuggler’s boat headed for Europe is all they’re waiting for.
Poverty levels are rising and the country’s political system is nearly broken a dozen years after the revolution that sparked the Arab spring.
The vote on Saturday is for a new parliament, but it won’t have much say because President Kais Saied forced through a new constitution this year that concentrated power in his hands.
Nobody Reuters spoke to intended to vote on Saturday in Zarzis, where street walls display photographs of 18 local migrants who perished or drowned in a shipwreck in the fall for which the town blames Tunisian authorities.
“I will withdraw from the elections. It doesn’t interest me. I’d vote for a reason. The 19-year-old Challahki, who, like the majority of his friends, is unemployed, stated, “My country gave me nothing.”
He has attempted to illegally enter Italy four times despite the obvious dangers.
He stated that “people were crying and begging for us to return to Tunisia” when the boat encountered bad weather during his initial unsuccessful attempt. The waves were extremely large. It was awful for at least four hours. The boat eventually turned around.
Anger over the shipwreck has intensified the misery in Zarzis, which is on the southern coast. However, the state is failing an increasingly exhausted and desperate population elsewhere in Tunisia as well.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the economy contracted by 8.5%, and supermarket shelves have been emptied as the government seeks international bailout.
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The Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights, a group that helps migrants, reported in November that more than 17,500 Tunisians had arrived in Italy this year. compared to 15,000 for the entire year prior.
President Saied has vowed an examination concerning the Zarzis drownings, yet local people say nothing has changed.
They claim that authorities did not attempt to rescue anyone, and the bodies that washed up on the shore were buried in a cemetery for unidentified migrants.
“I hope this hurts no one. I can’t even stand to look at the water. “It breaks my heart,” Salim Zridat said.
Walid, his 15-year-old son, remains among the shipwreck’s missing despite his and other families’ efforts to identify their children in hospitals and funeral homes.
According to Zridat, the tragedy sparked weeks of protests, and bereaved families, some of whom are still holding a sit-in outside the town offices, refused to vote because they believed parliament could not alter the situation.
In a cemetery for migrants outside the town founded by Chamseddine Marzouk, a local who was saddened by the anonymous burials of strangers far from home, bodies from the shipwreck were buried among olive groves.
Marzouk stated that he would not vote on Saturday for the first time since the revolution.
“The revolution’s youth did not gain anything from it. They are absent from politics. He stated, “It was an old-age revolution that failed.”
Like other Zarzis occupants, Challahki joined the fights in October after the wreck – the differentiation obvious with his own most memorable experience of an endeavored crossing.
He said that it had been like a wedding when he and his brother and cousin started their journey, with cars in a line honking their horns.
More seasoned and maybe smarter yet unflinching by his own resulting brush with death, Challahki – like others in the town – will attempt once more whenever he has set aside up sufficient cash.
“I want to improve my life and my family’s circumstances. He stated, “I’ll go anywhere that uses hard currency.”
