GENEVA: Some 289 children are known to have died in the first half of 2023 while trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea to Europe, the United Nations said on Friday.

The figure is double that recorded in the first six months of 2022, the UN children’s agency Unicef said, as it called for expan­ded safe, legal and accessible pathways for children to seek protection in Europe.

Verena Knaus, a Unicef official, said the true figures were likely to be higher as many shipwrecks on the central Mediter­ranean leave no survivors or go unrecorded. “These deaths are absolutely preventable.”

Knaus said that in the first six months of 2023, an estimated 11,600 children made the crossing.

Stranded migrants

Tunisian rights groups called on Friday called emergency aid and shelters for migrants expelled from Sfax last week, as dozens of people protested in Tunis in support of their plight.

Hundreds of migrants fled or were forced out of Tunisia’s second-largest city after racial tensions flared following the July 3 killing of a Tunisian man in an altercation between locals and migrants.

The port of Sfax is a departure point for many migrants from impoverished and violence-torn countries seeking a better life in Europe by making a perilous Mediterranean crossing, often in makeshift boats.

Hundreds of migrants were forcibly taken to desert and hostile areas bordering Libya and Algeria after the unrest in Sfax.

Romdane Ben Amor, spokesperson for the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights, told reporters on Friday that between 100 and 150 migrants, including women and children, were still stuck on the border with Libya.

He said some 165 migrants abandoned near the border with Algeria had been picked up, without specifying by whom or where they were taken.

“Migrants are transferred from one place to another while other groups hide out in the wild in catastrophic conditions for fear of being detected and suffering the same fate as those stranded on the borders,” Ben Amor said.

He called for emergency accommodation to be given to the migrants and said the authorities must send “a clear message” to Tunisian citizens to help them, regardless of their status.

Around 100 protesters demonstrated on Friday evening in Tunis at the call of an anti-fascist coalition, expressing their “solidarity with undocumented migrants”.

The demonstrators also slammed Tunisia’s police for “expelling you (migrants) and repressing us”.

“Tunisia is African. No to racism, down with fascism,” they chanted.

Meanwhile, the head of a Cameroonian association claimed police had carried out “arbitrary arrests” of sub-Saharan Africans around the train station in Zarzis, south of Sfax.

“Around 300 have been arrested… just because of their skin colour,” said Eric Tchata, who posted online a video taken by a fellow Cameroonian purporting to show a group of people, including women and children, packed into a warehouse in Medenine, also south of Sfax.

Published in Dawn, July 15th, 2023