The UN refugee agency's Vincent Cochetel has said that the distribution of refugees and asylum seekers in Tunisia needs to be improved - in order to prevent a "concentration of traumatized people in the same space."
There were 1,581 asylum seekers and 211 refugees in Tunisia as of 31 March 2019. That's a total of 1,792 people.
The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) is currently seeing an average of 10 asylum seekers arrive in Tunisia per week.
Most of them were Syrian nationals (1,031), but there were also Eritreans, Ethiopians, Somalis, Sudanese, Iraqis, Yemeni, Palestinians, and Cameroonians.
The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) is currently seeing an average of 10 asylum seekers arrive in Tunisia per week.
Vincent Cochetel, the UNHCR's special envoy for the central Mediterranean, said that these people needed to be better distributed in the North African country. He focused particularly on the situation in the Ibn
Khaldoun reception center in Medenine, which was recently visited by the UNHCR special envoy. Tension has been rising between the 486 asylum seekers at the center and locals due to culture clashes between the two groups.
Situation in Medenine reception center
The
refugee
reception center in the southern part of the country
had not been designed to hold so many people, Cochetel said.
He added that the problems in the center were exacerbated by the fact that many of the asylum seekers there had arrived directly from Libya. Many of these people were dealing with psychological problems, the UNHCR envoy said, because they had been captured by human traffickers and been detained in Libyan prisons.
Tension over expectations on arrival in Europe
Cochetel went on to say that the difficult situation had led some of the asylum seekers to leave Medenine and camp out in front of the UNHCR headquarter in Tunis, yelling threats and demanding to be taken to European countries.
He said that it was necessary to come up with a better distribution of asylum seekers in Tunisia to prevent what he called a "concentration of traumatized people in the same space."
The UNHCR special envoy said that the tension was also due to the expectations of some asylum seekers that absolutely want to go to Europe, who are not willing to return to their native countries, and who refuse to remain in Tunisia.