#4: "You cannot travel"
As the journalist attempts to go back to 'normal life', he gets thrown for a loop as he is blocked from leaving Tunisia...
NOTE: This is a continuation of a previous episode. For full context, please read episode #1, #2 and #3. If you’re reading the School of Tunisia for the first time, you can find an introduction to the page here.
In the immediate aftermath of the three days of interrogation, life wasn’t so bad. It was the weekend, the weather was nice, and my lawyer advised me to pause my journalism for the time being, which I honestly did not mind.
Being a freelance journalist - and especially an early-career one who still struggles to even get responses from editors to pitch emails - is stressful. It’s not a job you leave during dinner or during the night. At all hours of the day, I was thinking about how to land my next story, and with it my next paycheck. Being off work for a bit was a heavy burden lifted off my shoulders.
Not having a phone also made being a journalist difficult, so taking a break made sense. Of course at the time, I was not expecting the break to be longer than a month or so.
Prior to our arrest, Wifak had been planning a trip to Portugal to attend a work conference. As is usually the case for Tunisians seeking visas to the EU, it was not easy to get. In fact, because it took so long to process, Wifak had to give power of attorney to a friend who picked up her visa at the Portuguese embassy on the Friday when we were being interrogated in the National Guard base in Laouina.
The following Monday - May 27th, 2024 - Wifak left the airport in Tunis on a flight to Porto with no intention of coming back. A friend in Europe got her another flight ticket to Stockholm where she had a few friends with an extra couch that she could crash on during the next six months before seeking asylum in Sweden.
So far, so good. I knew that I had done nothing illegal under Tunisian law. Wifak, however, was a different story. If our investigators found out that she had donated baby medicine and helped migrant women pay for their hospital stays, she would be at risk of prosecution on that basis, like many others. As a journalist, I knew that my role was different. I made a conscious effort to not go beyond that role, despite how difficult it is upon witnessing the misery that African migrants are subjected to in Tunisia.
So while I was sad to see Wifak go, I was happy that she got out.
Normal life during a strange time
During these days, I was put in touch with the Danish honorary consul in Tunis, Leila Makhlouf, who takes care of Danish consulary support in Tunis and its surroundings, given the fact that the Danish embassy lies in Algeria. A Danish embassy will open in Tunisia in 2025 as part of Denmark’s new Africa strategy.
While the initial advice from the Danish ambassador was to maybe consider leaving, I was not ready to give up. I figured it would be suspicious to leave immediately after such a debacle, and I had nothing to hide. Additionally, I had a life in Tunis. However, I knew that the judicial system was under political pressure to investigate, detain and, if possible, convict individuals who, for a range of reasons, present an inconvenience to the government.
The Tunisian penal code is a hodgepodge of strange laws, many going back to colonial times, that rarely seem to be cleaned up or repealed. When the landmark 2014 constitution was passed, the constitutional court was meant to clean a lot of that up. But the parliament, which was mandated to elect some of the judges on the court, failed to ever do so. Why? It’s hard to say. But there’s no doubt that this legal hodgepodge is a convenient tool for those in power at any given time. Maybe it was just too tempting to keep it around.
As a result, with the right motivation, Tunisian courts can usually find a reason to convict, or at the very least detain (for months) and investigate, most people. Still, as a journalist and a citizen of an EU country, I thought that my privilege would cover me from such manipulation.
Leila’s advice, given that I was set on staying in Tunisia, was to never be alone - always have witnesses. The first couple of weeks were a bit tense. I was particularly nervous that the police would raid our apartment and take my laptop and camera. It already felt strange that they had made no effort to get a hold of the recording of my interview with Nelle (which I still have to this day). So I started joining my girlfriend at work every day.
Luckily, she works in a cultural center that’s open to the public. So I spent the first couple of weeks there, digging into one of the books on the shelves there: On China, by Henry Kissinger - a silly book as a historical work, but a fascinating primary source. The days drifted by slowly, but at least there was something to do.
My girlfriend was off work for a few extra days in mid-June because of Eid al Adha, and we had a chance to get away from Tunis for a bit. We had a lovely time in between Polish and Serbian tourist groups in a cheap resort hotel in Sousse for a few days. Though I was definitely freaked out when a taxi driver in Sousse looked at me the moment my girlfriend and I sat down in his car.
“You’re Danish?” he asked in Arabic.
“Yes, I am,” I responded in confusion. “How did you guess that?”
“Uhh, you just look Danish,” he said with great hesitation.
That man sure was a very culturally observant taxi driver.
Our time in Sousse was nice, but there was a headache on the horizon. As I mentioned in a previous post, my debit card was set to expire in July. Tunisia has strict laws regarding residents bringing in foreign bank cards, which when sent by mail are routinely caught and confiscated. If I indeed did have the eyes of the authorities on me, surely such a card would never make it in the mail.
And after the recent events, spending a week and a half with my family and friends in Denmark sounded really nice. So on June 10th, I booked a flight from Tunis to Copenhagen for June 25th, with a plan to visit friends and family, get my new debit card and return after a week and a half.
A week or so before flying, I also bought a new phone - a cheap and, honestly, terrible phone I could use temporarily (and, sadly, to this day). Traveling while fully disconnected felt strange, so I went through with it. I never bought a local SIM-card again, however, and used my Danish SIM-card in the new phone.
In the week leading up to my trip, the mood was a bit tense at home. I think my girlfriend and I were both afraid that I would be refused entry upon my return to Tunisia. Nervous about jinxing it, we didn’t acknowledge the feeling until the day before I left for the airport.
Time to travel?
I arrived at the airport about two hours before my flight. As a Tunisian resident, you have to pay an exit tax in the shape of a stamp at one of the bank branches at the airport, and sometimes there is a bit of a line. So I figured it would be best to arrive early. I checked my bag, got my boarding pass and my tax stamp, and I continued toward passport control. I figured they might pull me aside and ask me a couple of questions before letting me go.
I picked a line for passport control and slowly moved forward. It took about 10 minutes before I got to the front of the line. At this point, I had about an hour and a half until departure. The female cop who was in the passport control booth took my passport, barely looking at me, then stamped it and handed it back. I continued.
I had expected that they might pull me aside and ask me a few questions before letting me go. But for a second there, I thought to myself, “maybe this was never as big of a deal for them as it was for me.”
“Monsieur Jakob, monsieur Jakob,” I heard from behind me right as I was about to enter in line for the bag scan. I turned around, and the cop in the passport booth was waving me back. I could see her computer screen light up with a large red pop-up box saying “Personne Signalée” - “reported person.” The cop took my passport and had me wait behind her booth, as she called over a colleague named Mongi.
Mongi came over after a minute, took my passport from the booth cop and had me follow him to the left. We walked with passport control on our left and the security check on the right down to two bench racks bolted onto the end wall that seem to be reserved for people with travel document complications.
We made it and I sat down, facing where I had just come from. To my left was an open door into an office with a man behind a desk with a fancy name placard on it. I assume he must have been an airport police leader of some sort.
Two officers in civilian attire came over. One asked for my boarding pass, took it and walked off. The other stayed for a bit.
“Is this your first time?” he asked.
“Yes,” I responded.
He asked a couple more similar questions. A lot of people in Tunisia (though usually not foreigners) have their travel documents flagged and can expect to be pulled out for questioning every time they travel. I assume he was trying to gauge if I was expecting this.
At the end, he asked me if I was a resident, and I told him yes. He then asked for my residency card and walked off with it, presumably to the same place as they had taken my passport and boarding pass.
Sitting on that bench, I waited and waited. Using the airport WiFi, I found the website with Tunis airport flight information to keep an eye on my flight, still hopeful that I would make it.
I slowly became more and more anxious, afraid that I would simply miss the flight. With about 20 minutes left until my departure, I walked over to one of the guys working there.
“How long will this take? My flight is leaving in 20 minutes,” I told him and showed him the flight information on my phone.
He gestured for me to go back to my seat, then took out his phone and called someone. I overheard him asking in a shocked voice, “al-7aras al-watani?” (الحرس الوطني؟) - “the National Guard?” He must have been surprised that the National Guard had it out for this Danish guy in his late 20s with shoulder-long hair, Adidas track pants and a faux leather backpack so worn out it looked like it could fall apart any second. My guess was that it took them a while to figure out where in the Ministry of Interior system I was actually flagged, and who they needed to get in touch with to find out why.
I waited longer. With five minutes until my flight, I called the man over again and told him I had five minutes until my departure. He called the colleague from the fancy desk over, and they had another confused discussion that involved the National Guard and some neck scratching and raised eyebrows. I sat back down and kept following the flight. It seemed to be delaying, and I was wondering if it was waiting for me.
25 more minutes passed, however, and the flight status changed. “Departed.”
At that point, my mood changed from anxious to annoyed. I stopped caring to talk to anyone and just remained seated for another hour and a half or so.
Finally, a uniformed police officer came over and told me to follow him, which I did. We walked to the right, along the wall away from the desk with the fancy name placard, then turned right down a hallway. Down the hallway was a small police station, and I was seated in a new waiting room.
“Here we go again,” I told myself. “Time for another interrogation.”
I quickly texted my girlfriend and told her I had been taken into the airport police station. I figured they were going to use this as an opportunity to get me alone without access to a lawyer or anyone else, so I made sure my partner was able to inform people if I stopped responding to texts. However, after just a few minutes, someone called my name from the desk outside the waiting room.
They took me back down the hallway to the bolted bench rack and handed me over to the uniformed officer from before.
“You cannot travel,” he told me.
“I know that, my plane left an hour and a half ago,” I responded angrily. “But what do I do now?”
He gave me back my passport, my residency card and the small ripped-off end of my boarding pass (they kept the rest).
“To get information, you should go to…”
The officer stayed silent for a bit, then started murmuring “7aras, 7aras, 7aras” - “guard, guard, guard,” of course referring to the National Guard. It seemed he could not remember the word in English.
In the end, he told me to go to the Office for Relations with the Citizen at the Ministry of Interior to get more information. Then he pointed me to an exit along the wall, just next to the final passport control point, and sent me through. Three hours of waiting, and this is all they could give me.
Right before walking off, I remembered my luggage.
“Where’s my luggage?” I asked him.
“Number four,” he responded, presumably referring to the conveyor belt at arrivals.
What now?
I walked out, seething with rage. A young police officer stood at the exit gate and asked me what I was doing.
“Your colleague told me I’m not allowed to travel,” I told him with no effort to hide the anger in my voice. The young officer was about to walk back to his colleague to inquire further, and I was about to snap. Luckily the colleague waved at him to let me through, and the situation did not escalate further.
Back in the front hall of the airport, I now had the task of figuring out how in the world I would enter baggage claim without a ticket. After asking several maintenance workers, I finally made my way over to a customs booth, and a customs officer led me through the back way into arrivals. There, next to belt number four, stood my lonely suitcase waiting for us to go home.
“What now?” I thought to myself. Apparently, I could not travel. Was that normal? Why did no one tell me this? And how do we go on from here? I was aware of the risk that I would not be let back in after leaving. But being trapped in Tunisia? And what will I do when my card expires and I become fully cut off from my money?
I guess speaking with a black woman in Tunisia had serious consequences after all, despite chief Saidi’s insistence on the contrary…
I called and briefed my girlfriend, then speedwalked out of the airport. I could think of few places in the world I’d want to be in less than that airport at that time. I dodged the overpriced taxis at the airport exit and made my way out to the roundabout in front of the airport where taxis accept regular prices.
I reached the roundabout, and an entrepreneurial taxi driver with no clue that he had bumped into the grumpiest foreigner in Tunis that day, suggested I pay 20 dinars for the 11 dinar ride to my apartment.
“Do you think I’m stupid? I live here,” I told him in Arabic. Needless to say, I’m not proud of my behavior in that encounter. And at least he was nicer than the drivers at the official airport taxi stand who impromptu unionize at the sign of a foreigner and fix their prices at 60 or 80 dinars.
In the same moment, a free taxi appeared, I threw my suitcase in the trunk and hopped in the passenger side. We drove off using the taximeter with no questions asked - as it should be, and as it is in Tunis anywhere other than the airport.
“Where are you traveling from?” he asked me, making friendly small talk.
“From Denmark,” I lied, while trying to appear as if everything was fine.
At the end of the ride, the taximeter had reached 11 dinars. I handed him a 20 dinar note, and told him to keep the change. I explained to him that a previous driver had tried to upcharge me, and that I appreciated his honesty. Perhaps it was my way of dealing with my shame from the previous encounter.
Back in my apartment, I opened up my passport. A big, fat “canceled” stamp had been placed on top of the exit-stamp that the unattentive booth cop placed in there before she noticed the warning on her computer.
I hopped on my bicycle and took off to join my girlfriend at her work where I spent the afternoon updating her, my parents, my friend in Copenhagen whom I was going to stay with the first night there, Leila the consul and Anas, my lawyer.
In the next episode of the School of Tunisia, I’m trying hard to reckon with the shock travel ban. What does it mean for me, my place in the world and not least, my case? Does this mean things are worse than I previously thought? As two months pass and all attempts at gaining access to information on the travel ban mysteriously fail, I slip deeper and deeper into depression and hopelessness.
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