The Long Wait     الانتظار الطويل

Nine years of long wait... 32 refugees from Chad, Cote d’Ivoire, Egypt, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Sudan have spent eight years in limbo in Tunisia - six years in the Choucha transit camp, since 2011, and two years in the capital Tunis, waiting for international relocation. After the war erupted in Libya on 20th February 2011, tens of thousands of people have tried to find refuge in the neighbouring country Tunisia. Most of them used the same entry point, Ra’s Ajdir, Libya’s most northerly town, and found shelter in the Choucha transit camp opened on 23rd February 2011 by the UNHCR in coordination with the Tunisian Army. However, the Tunisian authorities have systematically refused to initiate a proper asylum system, therefore the UNHCR have been conducting refugees’ status determination procedures, as they do globally in places that do not have refugee legislations. On 20th June 2017 the camp was dismantled, and these 32 men were sent to the capital Tunis, in La Marsa neighbourhood, where they now live in accommodation offered by the Tunisian Ministry of Sports. These men are stuck in the place that sparked the Arab Spring in 2011 and gave hope to millions with its presumably successful revolution; a place that however has failed to offer them a new life over there or to facilitate their resettlement to a new home. In these past 9 years, the 32 refugees have been taken through a process of identity reshuffling, being referred to as asylum seekers/refugees/undocumented migrants/nomads/people of the desert...