The fishermen in Tunisia not only catch fish, but also drowning people at sea. Danny Ghosen sits with them in their boat on dry land and they show him what they found at sea. Phone, cracked screen, photo of a lifeless body. “A boy from the village. 24 years.” Next photo, of a woman washed ashore. “Mouna, 28 years old. Her eighteen-month-old baby was with her, but was never found.”
While Jeroen Pauw is investigating on one network what winter looks like for the Turks who lost everything in the earthquake this year, Danny Ghosen is on the other. Danny on the spot looking for what remained of Tunisia after the Arab Spring of 2010. The population turned against the regime, then president Ben Ali was deposed, there were calls for more democracy.
Tunisia, sees Danny Ghosen, is “back to square one.” The economy has collapsed, youth unemployment is as high nowhere in the world as there, the villages are being buried under the desert sand of the advancing Sahara, the drought is driving people from their homes in the countryside, the new president Kais Saied is beginning to show the dictatorial features of his predecessor to show. Tunisia is now at the center of the migrant crisis. A third of refugees arriving in Europe left by boat from the Tunisian coast. Eighty thousand a year. It is not known how many never arrive. With the Tunisia deal, Europe hopes that Tunisia will prevent refugees from leaving.
But Tunisia cannot even prevent Tunisians from fleeing the country. “Ask a five-year-old about his dream, and every child says the same thing,” says a father of a prodigal son. Europe is the dream. Danny Ghosen speaks to those left behind, the relatives of (mainly) sons who left. “They went to kindergarten together, they went to high school together, they went to Europe together.” Seventeen teenagers and twenty-somethings and one baby from the same village, together in a small boat. They left on a Wednesday and were missing on Friday.
Fishing fathers saw their bodies floating in the sea. One was recognized by his sister by his underwear after 27 days in the water. She had seen him laying out his clothes the morning of his departure. A fisherman sent the family a photo of his body. “I recognized him immediately.” It was Amin. Danny Ghosen speaks to Amin’s father who explains how difficult it has been for his wife and daughter since then, but that he is strong and temporarily less strict to give them time to process the grief. Danny puts both hands on his shoulders – no journalistic distance, no aloofness. He understands him – the Arab man, the “hero of the family”. And he tells him that he can also mourn the loss of his child. I don’t know any TV journalist who would dare do something like that.
Heap
It gets worse. The fisherman in the photos also lost a son himself, Louay, sixteen. He was in the boat that sank, but his body was never found. Neither does the boat, by the way, and he finds that strange. “The sea does not lie. She gives back what she takes. We find the bodies. A plastic boat doesn’t sink.” As long as the boat is missing and his son is missing, he has hope. “But if he had made it, he would have called.” He calls him, five times a day. In case he is in a Libyan prison.
Danny Ghosen asks this father what he would have wanted to say to his son if he had known about his departure. “I have another son,” says the father. He’s fifteen. Whatever he says to him, whatever he does, he won’t be able to stop him, he says. There’s no reason to stay.
“They’re going anyway.”
Reading list