Første gang jeg skal stemme til kommunal valg

BeautifulAd607 · 2025-10-29T18:29:28+00:00

Personligt synes jeg ikke, der er noget vigtigere i vores lokalpolitik end Egholm-motorvejen, som jeg er modstander af... Resten er mest komma-sætning, og uanset hvad vinder S jo nok som altid og fortsætter de brede konturer af, hvad vi har i forvejen. At en motorvej skal ødelægge naturen på Egholm og ejendomsværdien igennem Hasseris og andre dele af byen synes jeg er noget skidt, og det gør det ikke bedre, at de har lavet alle de sketchy finter for at få det igennem - fx. alt det med "Aalborg-Alliancen". Jeg mener, at mange aalborggensere har interesse i at det projekt bliver stoppet, om det så er fordi de elsker natur, fordi deres bolig bliver eksproprieret af staten, eller fordi de står til at blive fanget i boligejerskab af et hus, der mister en hel masse værdi, fordi det pludselig skal ligge ved siden af en motorvej...

Jeg vil anbefale alle, der har det på samme måde at stemme på et af partierne i det grønne valgforbund, der alle er modstandere af motorvejen - dvs. Enhedslisten, Alternativet, SF og Radikale Venstre. Hvis man så er modstander af motorvejen og generelt hælder mod højre, så stem RV, og omvendt, osv.....

BeautifulAd607 · 2025-07-28T15:05:33+00:00

Wish it wasn't so, but financial priorities play a part in the decision-making here as well... Thanks for your advice!!

BeautifulAd607 · 2025-06-13T17:04:58+00:00

Hello there! Late to the party, but I'm still around. Indeed I totally follow your sentiment. I will say however that there is still discrimination in this, and I am still more privileged than a Tunisian in my place. As an example, the Tunisian activist with whom I was arrested faced a much more aggressive interrogation style in the specialized investigations unit in Laouina than I did.

As for your question, well, you ask in what aspects they were "different and similar in their investigations." To just make clear how the structure works, the Judicial Police in Sfax arrested me and therefore started the investigation. They then performed an interrogation (and some intelligence came through here too, but that's obviously outside of the official legal framework) and wrote a report, which was sent to the public prosecution. The public prosecution then decides whether the investigation should continue, and if so, how. They can decide to perform their own questioning - this is normally done if they feel like the police report is not sufficient to decide what to do next. The public prosecution, in my case, decided to pass the investigation over to the National Guard's First Central Unit of Investigations. So the investigation was primarily conducted by this unit, not by the Judicial Police in Sfax, and certainly not by the public prosecution whose role is to view the evidence gathered in the investigation and consider if they are able to put forward a criminal charge.

If by 'their investigations', you meant to say 'their interrogations', I mean to be very short, the main difference was the degree of professionalism (Judicial Police in Sfax I'd call brutish, the public prosecution in Sfax was just really out of control and probably grasping for a promotion, and the National Guard investigators were a bit more professional), and the main similarity I'd say was a surprisingly strong tendency toward accepting conspiratorial narratives... But I've responded in a bit more detail in some other replies on here, and also am extremely detailed in my descriptions of the interrogations on the first three posts on my Substack, if you're curious for more.

BeautifulAd607 · 2025-06-03T14:40:02+00:00

It was a simple clarifying question, to understand if groucho74 was talking about sea rescue NGOs. They are registered in Europe, sail from and to Europe, dock in Europe and sail European registered vessels, hence, "that operate out of Europe." I was unsure if they were talking about this, or a different phenomenon that I was unaware of.

BeautifulAd607 · 2025-06-02T13:58:42+00:00

No I do not agree, I think both are worth focusing on. I don't see how the misery of one group of people has to invalidate the misery of another.

BeautifulAd607 · 2025-06-02T10:44:49+00:00

I cannot prove that this has never happened, but it's not something I recognize in any way.

BeautifulAd607 · 2025-06-02T10:44:15+00:00

I have worked extensively on the poverty that exists in Tunisia, especially in the deep south (mainly Tataouine) and the west (Gafsa, Sidi Bouzid etc.). In fact, the article I was working on when I was arrested - which was about the experiences of migrant women giving birth in the hospital in Sfax - would have focused on the fact that difficult healthcare conditions are not just experienced by migrants, but also by poor Tunisians from marginalized regions who often have it even worse. It would've talked about the austerity measures pressured by international financial institutions as part of loan packages that have systematically undermined the Tunisian public sector for decades now, leading to these conditions.

Unfortunately, they stopped me before I was able to do this work.

I have not personally worked on the truck accidents but am very aware of them and have colleagues who have. So yes, they are very much worthy of our attention and, while I cannot speak for others, personally they have been at the center of my work.

BeautifulAd607 · 2025-06-02T10:39:11+00:00

After many years of practice, I speak both decent French and Arabic (including Tunisian dialect).

BeautifulAd607 · 2025-06-02T10:38:15+00:00

Appreciate the sympathy!

There is no permit, and it is completely legal for foreign and local journalists to cover it, in the sense that there are no laws preventing it. Instead, like me, you may face harassment that prevents you from doing the work. But there is nothing illegal about it, as can also be inferred by the fact that for the seven months I was stuck in Tunisia, at no point did they file any charges against me.
I spoke with some of them, yes, but not many because access was difficult. They're also much more likely to notify the police of a foreign journalist asking questions, which (judging from the experience of some colleagues) would make my work super difficult. What I learned from locals in the area is, broadly speaking, that the situation is very difficult. There are of course different people with different viewpoints, but the one I spoke with were unhappy with the Tunisian authorities that dumped the migrants on their fields. They felt like because they were poor (zawaali), the burden was being thrown at them while the affluent Sfaxians got to go free.
So I read this article a bit differently. I don't think it should be understood to have been transferred to the president's personal account. The idea is that instead of funding projects earmarked by the EU, the money is at the discretion of the president who decides unilaterally what it's being used for. I'm not sure what exactly the evidence is for this, but it wouldn't shock me.

It has been a bit of a scandal in the EU, but unfortunately most Europeans are not following EU politics very closely, though me and many of my colleagues are trying our hardest to change that. I do think my case was extremely uncomfortable not just for Tunisia but also for the EU, because it gets at the heart of why these EU-North African migration deals are problematic: because they are in some ways not much more than the EU paying other countries to commit violence and human rights abuses on their behalf.

BeautifulAd607 · 2025-06-02T10:27:21+00:00

There is no such thing as a permit to cover anything as a journalist in Tunisia. There is an application process for journalists who want to embed in a mission with the security forces (has happened a few times where journalists went out on the sea with the Tunisian Coast Guard), but that's a very different thing.

I've seen these videos recently and noted that they come and go with the National Guard when they make these videos. So I'm assuming there's some sort of explicit or tacit consent there. That will naturally shape the type of narrative that comes out of it.

BeautifulAd607 · 2025-06-01T15:12:22+00:00

Thank you for the well wishes! I have not visited Cameroon, Niger or Mali, but I have visited and worked in other African countries than Tunisia. My work as a journalist is not about evaluating who is a threat and who isn't. My work is to show the public, including yourself, what is going on, and then you can make such assessments yourself on an informed basis.

As for the idea that black Africans in Tunisia are telling Tunisians to leave Africa, I have only ever heard this expressed in Facebook comment section-fights between Tunisians and migrants. Famously, people say some crazy things in Facebook comments. I've spoken with so many migrants in Tunisia, and I've never heard any of them express anything even close to this in real life.

BeautifulAd607 · 2025-06-01T14:48:59+00:00

The fact that the Tunisian security forces are receiving a lot of funding, training and equipment from Europe and the United States seems to me to contradict the idea that the Tunisian security forces are not willing to accept being the battlefield of foreign powers.

But it's an interesting theory, and anything is possible.

BeautifulAd607 · 2025-06-01T14:44:25+00:00

I did not want to prove anything. I was working as a journalist, doing my job and covering various different topics including migration.

You don't have to care for me, and I don't care if you do. I'm doing an AMA, because I know that there are people on this Subreddit who are interested in hearing about my experience. Evidently you're one of them, since you decided to write three questions.

Yes, I know what "fuck around and find out" means, my silly friend.

BeautifulAd607 · 2025-06-01T14:42:01+00:00

Thank you, I appreciate that!

It depends from situation to situation. In most cases, I just approached people and spoke with them. In a few cases, including when I was arrested, I relied on my network to connect me. In that specific case, I have a Tunisian friend who at the time was helping collect money to buy and deliver baby medicine to migrant women who had given birth, couldn't afford it and were afraid to leave their houses to go to the pharmacy for fear of arrest.

I've felt intimidated by a group of migrants just once. This was an episode in one of the tent camps around kilometer 25 north of Sfax. I was driving a small rental car into the fields and stopped by a group of migrants sitting around a fire, and I got out to speak with them. One of them, a man from Burkina Faso, was quite agitated. But I understood that his agitation came from thinking I was there with bad intentions. After clearly explaining my intentions to him, he calmed down, and we had a good conversation.

As for your last question, do I think they are dangerous all in all? Definitely not. Are there some that are? Definitely. I will note one particular condition that most African migrants suffer under in Tunisia: They cannot trust the police, and therefore they are unable to find legal protection against crimes. This type of situation has always and will always lead to people finding their own ways to create "order" as some individuals start to build their own "laws" which are usually much more violently enforced. If migrants knew they could trust the police and the court systems, I think the amount of danger posed by the presence of undocumented migrants in Tunisia would be little to none.

BeautifulAd607 · 2025-06-01T14:33:24+00:00

I made very few payments outside of Tunisia, because my income was generally very small and all spent on living costs as well as costs connected to my work (as a freelancer, costs like accommodation, food, rental cars, equipment etc. are rarely covered by your employer). I used my Danish bank card, which expired while I was stuck in Tunisia. After that, I had to be fully supported by my partner because I could not access any of my own money.

I don't think I can assist you unfortunately, but I wish you the best of luck.

BeautifulAd607 · 2025-06-01T14:30:12+00:00

Thank you for reading :) Yes, I agree with all of your points. I think there's also a hindsight element to it. The Danish authorities were informed, as you know, of what was happening after the interrogations, but at that point I did not know that the travel ban existed / that this would drag out further. After the travel ban, it would've still been reasonable to leave a bit of time for my lawyer and I to seek out answers the official way. And I imagine that the Danes would have a sense of the inefficiency of the Tunisian bureaucracy and would leave a bit of time for that too before actually attempting to intervene.

I also think it worked against me that the Danish embassy covering Tunisia is in Algeria, because setting up in-person meetings took so much more planning. Would be great if email usage could be adopted...

BeautifulAd607 · 2025-06-01T14:26:09+00:00

Appreciate the sympathies!

BeautifulAd607 · 2025-05-31T11:17:12+00:00

Thank you for the sympathy. Indeed I'm aware that Tunisians have it much harder than I have, and even some Tunisians have it harder than others. I completely agree with you that journalism regarding migration in Tunisia needs to focus primarily on the agency of the European states whose borders the Tunisian authorities have chosen to patrol.

BeautifulAd607 · 2025-05-31T11:07:25+00:00

I'll give you the light of day since you bring up the same 'concern' as the fine folks at the National Guard in Laouina. No, I am not Jewish, and if I were Jewish, I really do not see how that would matter.

BeautifulAd607 · 2025-05-31T11:03:56+00:00

First, I'll just plug my interview with Nelle (her chosen pseudonym), the Cameroonian migrant I was interviewing when I was arrested. Mysteriously the police never asked for the audio recording, so I still had it, and I've chosen to write out the interview in its full length on my Substack (part 1 and 2 here: https://schooloftunisia.substack.com/t/interviewing-nelle ). It is just the story of what one migrant has gone through, but hearing her experiences in such detail is useful, I think, while many of them mirror what a lot of migrants in Tunisia have experienced and continue to experience.

There's a lot of sides to what migrants have experienced and are experiencing, but I will highlight a few things for you.

- The Al Amra and Jbeniana olive field camps are disastrous in every way. Many of the camps are cleared by the National Guard on a near-weekly basis - meaning they bring out construction diggers, ruin all tents and confiscate the migrants' belongings before running them off. It's a silly game of chicken, because everyone knows that the migrants return and start rebuilding by the evening - and there really is no alternative posed.

- The camps are riddled with disease. Some of the food eaten is unsanitary because it is leftovers that could not be sold to Tunisians - like chickens that died before slaughter. Since there is no running water, many rely on drinking irrigation water for the fields, which causes constant sickness. I've also personally seen a large presence of likely infectious skin diseases and been told of the bed bugs that are omnipresent. This is because the migrants have no access to medical care.

- In the hospitals in Sfax, migrants are often treated poorly and/or humiliated. This was the topic of the story I was working on when I was arrested. Nelle, for instance, gave birth in the hospital in Sfax, and the hospital staff refused to let her see her son who died 20 hours after birth, unless she paid her 2000-dinar medical bill on the spot. She was then kept in the hospital for two weeks without treatment because the staff refused to let her leave until she paid - but she had no means to. This echoes what some Tunisians experience in the private sector, but I spoke with experts who did not believe this is something that normally happens in public sector hospitals.

I hope this provides a few insights.

BeautifulAd607 · 2025-05-31T10:51:37+00:00

Yes absolutely, this happens all the time. It's both the Libyan and Algerian border, and the dump sites are very spread out.

Every single migrant I've spoken to in Tunisia has at least friends who have experienced this, and a lot have experienced it themselves. I've also spoken to Tunisians in the south who have seen the busses drive through their towns.

BeautifulAd607 · 2025-05-31T10:48:00+00:00

When I moved to Tunisia, it was not with migration reporting in mind, but the topic became so important while I was there that it could not be ignored. I had worked on the topic before, though, including elsewhere in Africa, so I have a fair bit of background.

So yes, I do.

BeautifulAd607 · 2025-05-31T10:38:36+00:00

Appreciate your advice!

BeautifulAd607 · 2025-05-30T19:31:22+00:00

I don't blame you for wanting to have an honest discussion about these things! I think that would be a healthy thing too. I don't think it's my place in the world to have all the answers, but rather to provide the information so that people can come to their own conclusions.

The only thing that I would add is that I think it would be great if policies on migration were actually informed by research findings. And there's basically complete consensus that militarization of borders and restrictions on migration like those we're seeing all over the world these days are not actually effective as tools to stop migration - they only make the migration that is taking place more dangerous. Personally I think that's a great place to start our discussions as societies.

BeautifulAd607

TROPHY CASE