Stop State trafficking of human beings between Tunisia and Libya
On Borders, The Routes Journal
Context and Reasons
Political and media discourse in Italy describes the Mediterranean as a natural barrier between distant worlds, a liquid frontier to be controlled and screened. It is a place where European policies of control and repression of mobility clash with the will of migrants to continue moving. But not only that. This sea is not only a border that separates, but has a history of encounters, crossings, exchanges. It is a crossroads and, in its waters, multiple actors interweave: migrants, fishermen, sailors, coast guards, European and state officials, humanitarian and solidarity operators, each bearing different interests and perspectives.
The Mediterranean has transformed into a deadly border, as a direct consequence of European migration policies based on the militarization of maritime and terrestrial frontiers. For these reasons, those seeking to reach Europe are criminalized, as well as those who offer support and solidarity to those in transit: the absence of legal pathways to access Europe leaves people with the only possibility of undertaking risky journeys on makeshift boats.
Yet, the Mediterranean space continues to generate relationships and practices that transcend social dichotomies, weaving stories and experiences into a complex fabric. A meeting place and a battlefield, a crucial space of contemporaneity where racialization processes linked to migration governance are reproduced, the Mediterranean is equally a horizon of desire and possibility. Living it, traversing it, observing it is the only way to truly understand it.
It is in this way that the Tanimar crew was born in 2022: from sailors, from researchers who decided to enter into relationship with this maritime space by inhabiting it, trying to realize an ethnography of the sea and in the sea, starting from the Strait of Sicily, continuing with Tunisia (2023) and with the Aegean (2025). A journey that intertwines with the routes of people in movement, to recompose memories and analyses, and make more visible the polyphony of voices and plurality of visions on the future of the Mediterranean, as in the recent project for a “Counter-dictionary of the border” articulated around subaltern and counter-hegemonic words and narratives.
The Tanimar Crew for f.Lotta. September 2025
This Mediterranean, which attempts to be closed with naval blockades, administrative blocks of civilian rescue ships, pushbacks operated by so-called Libyan and Tunisian coast guards and bilateral agreements that leave behind a trail of blood and death, remains nevertheless open and porous and continues to be crossed by any means by those who exercise their right to flight.
There are many ways to “be” in the Mediterranean: Tanimar, during its navigation, does so through storytelling, verbal and visual. Since its birth, the crews of this sailboat have chosen to be eyes and ears, civil witnesses of what elsewhere is hidden or reduced to spectacle.
For the action proposed by f.lotta, with its invitation to “massively occupy the Mediterranean”, the Tanimar crew will be composed of citizens from Africa and Europe, filmmakers, artists, social workers, refugees, researchers, navigators: beyond their background, functions and professions, they are united by believing in the laws of the sea, in the obligation to rescue, in the right of every single human to be able to choose where to live and not to be rejected, violated, commodified, subjugated, tortured. There will also be a ground team, in Tunisia and Libya, thanks to the contribution of correspondents from the Journal of Routes (an alternative communication project on the theme of impeded mobility animated by people traveling or blocked waiting to leave) and witnesses of the RR [x] report on the phenomenon of State trafficking.
Interweaving activism, art, sailing and ethnography, Tanimar and its crew want to continue telling the encounters within the Mediterranean through words and images, sounds and visions, in a weaving that is both political and poetic. The desire and will of the crew is to amplify the voices of those deprived of the right to move on the southern shore of the Mediterranean.
What Campaign We Carry and Why
Stop State trafficking of human beings between Tunisia and Libya.
As revealed by the Report (https://statetrafficking.net/) by RR [x] (an international research group that decided to anonymize itself under a collective pseudonym to protect its sources), presented to the European Parliament on February 25, the progressive tightening of EU border policies has generated a disturbing consequence: the sale and enslavement of sub-Saharan migrants by Tunisian military and police apparatuses. The State Trafficking report, accompanied by an accurate summary of human rights violations during expulsion and deportation operations curated by ASGI, intends to reopen the debate on the responsibility of the European Union and individual states in exposing people in transit to death and slavery, as well as on the status of “safe third Country” assigned to Tunisia, its role as partner and economic beneficiary in managing the EU’s external border. The Tanimar crew was able to enter in contact with the witnesses of the RR [x] report on State Trafficking between Tunisia and Libya and decided to contribute to amplifying their stories and their demands.
The RR [x] witnesses, after presenting the report to the European Parliament, and in Italy to the Senate and Chamber of Deputies, have presented numerous parliamentary questions without receiving any response from the institutions they addressed. The main request of this collective that the Tanimar crew wants to convey is the opening of a legal-humanitarian corridor so that the voices of State trafficking victims can reach a European tribunal.
During the days of embarkation, witnesses and correspondents still living in Libya and Tunisia will tell their experience of sale and deportation at the border, and their struggle for the right to mobility and to have justice and reparation. Through various channels – the Instagram page of the Journal of Routes, a network of student university radio broadcasts, the MeltingPot project – the Tanimar crew thus intends to contribute to amplifying awareness of a recent and still little-known phenomenon. Despite the EU rhetoric of fighting traffickers, border externalization policies have generated a paradoxical effect: at the Tunisian-Libyan border, the human trafficker now wears a uniform.
