TUNIS: Libya and Tunisia announced on Thursday they had agreed to share responsibility for providing shelter for hundreds of migrants stranded in a border area, many of them for a month.
Faker Bouzghaya, a spokesman for Tunisia’s interior ministry, said during a meeting with Libyan authorities in Tunis that they have agreed to share the migrants’ groups who are at the border, AFP reported.
The migrants, primarily from sub-Saharan African nations, had been taken to the desert area of Ras Jedir by authorities in Tunisia , according to rights groups, witnesses, and UN agencies.
Aid groups said three groups of about three hundred migrants in total remain stranded there.
Bouzghaya said that Tunisia will take charge of a group of 42 women, 76 men, and 8 children.
He said the groups were shifted on Wednesday to reception centers in the cities of Medenine and Tatouineand provided with health and psychological care, with the support of the Tunisian Red Crescent.
Libya to take charge of 150 migrants
Under the deal, Libya will take charge of the remaining 150 migrants.
The Libyan interior ministry earlier on Thursday said the bilateral deal to end the crisis of irregular migrants stranded in the border area.
Racial tensions had increased in Tunisia’s second largest city of Sfax after the 3 July killing of a Tunisian man following an altercation with migrants.
Nearly 1,200 black Africans were expelled, or forcibly shifted by Tunisian security forces to desert border areas with Algeria and Libya, Human Rights Watch said.
Crossing attempts have increased in March and April following a incendiary address by President Kais Saied who had accused that “hordes” of irregular migrants were causing crime and posing a demographic danger to the mainly Arab nation.
Humanitarian officials have reported at least twenty-five deaths of migrants abandoned in the Tunisian-Libyan border area since July.
Xenophobic attacks targeting black African migrants and students have intensified across the country since Saied’s February statement, and many migrants have lost housing and jobs.
The two nations are major gateways for asylum seekers and migrants primarily from other parts of Africa, attempting risky voyages in often rickety boats in the hopes of a better life.
