The Big 'Why'
Why was I persecuted? What message did they feel a need to send? And who were the benefactors of it all? This is my attempt at a political analysis of my seven months of detention in Tunisia.
As I’ve finished writing out the story of what happened during those seven months, I realized that while it has become an interesting - perhaps even captivating - story, it lacks the analytical aspects I intended for it to have. I cannot justify leaving that out. So today, after a while of inactivity on the School of Tunisia, I’m proud to present my very best attempt at an answer to the big why-question.
If this is your first time on the School of Tunisia, please find an introduction to the page here. The entire Substack is dedicated to my experience as a journalist being subjected to seven months of politically motivated persecution in Tunisia because of my migration journalism. You can read about the entire seven-month ordeal in nine chronological episodes here, and here, you can also read a translation and transcription of the interview I was midway through conducting when plainclothes police officers arrested me and took me to the station in May of 2024 to kick off the entire saga.
Why did I have to go through these seven months of political persecution? It’s a big question - and I cannot provide a certain answer. That would require access to the ongoings inside the heads of the persecutors. But rather than an answer, perhaps the question calls for an analysis that concerns itself less with intention, and more with concrete outcomes and their benefactors. This post is my attempt at providing one.
But first, I need to set the stage.
For decades, European countries have been working with their Tunisian and North African counterparts to try their best to regulate migration across the Mediterranean Sea from Africa to Europe. During the entirety of this partnership, Europe has wielded an upper hand of sorts, using its control over the migration lever to manage the domestic European labor market.
In times of need, migration was made easier, and migrants found themselves crossing the seas to fill low-wage labor roles across Europe, undercutting local salary expectations and ensuring that European elites continued to have access to cheap services.
And in more recent times, migration was made harder, as anti-immigrant posturing became a recipe for great success in elections across Europe. Whether stemming from populist far-right movements that fear-monger about the ‘great replacement’ and Muslims’ alleged secret conspiracy to destroy Western civilization, or the liberal institutionalist elites whose rhetoric dons the ropes of humanitarianism, promoting “pathways for regular migration,” which in practice equates to the brain drain of airlifting those with desirable skills out of their countries and leaving the rest behind, European migration policy is becoming increasingly savage and violent.
But like the European slave holders of the West Indies who felt too pure to enact violence upon the enslaved with their own hands and therefore enlisted other enslaved people to do their dirty work, the EU of the 2020s remains allergic to enforcing its violent migration policy on its own soil. Instead, it outsources the violence to whichever country (or armed group) raises its hand to signal, “hire me!”
In the words of Josep Borrell, who was Vice-President of the European Commission until a few months ago: “Europe is a garden,” and “[m]ost of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden.” Luckily for Europe, the ‘jungle’ is full of guns-for-hire, and Europe takes little moral issue with hiring them.
Since the first large European ‘migration crisis’ in the mid-2010s, the EU and its member states have been trying to make deals with everyone from Turkey to Rwanda to Albania, from Niger to Mauritania to each and every Libyan militia that would listen to them.
That also includes Tunisia, the country I chose as my second home. There, the Ministry of Interior and all of its various police forces receive European funding, training and equipment to no end, as long as they do what they need to do to stop migrants from reaching Europe. With my arrest and criminal prosecution, that has come to include preventing European journalists from scrutinizing how this European funding is being spent.
No more migration journalism in Tunisia
On the 2nd of November, 2024, my world was harsh. I had been stuck in Tunisia for over five months and still had no idea how any of it would end. A few weeks prior, the French PhD student, Victor Dupont, had been arrested and remained imprisoned. I was afraid I was next - especially if the public were to find out about my situation.
That morning, I received a scary message from my francophone father. In an article in the French press, a journalist had mentioned my case: a European journalist was currently under criminal investigation and prevented from leaving Tunisia, the article read.
I panicked. If the Tunisian authorities read this, they would immediately know who the article referred to. I assumed they would interpret it to mean that I was beginning to break my silence - maybe they’d come for me before I got a chance to speak more? Or maybe they’d simply seek revenge?
I reached through my networks and managed to get the journalist on the phone.
“This is my case you’re referring to, right?” I asked the French journalist.
“Yes. But, Jakob, you know, everyone already knows about your case,” she responded, referring to everyone working in or around journalism, in and around Tunisia. The French journalist didn’t even know my full name - she just knew about my case.
I explained my fears to her, and she offered to reach out to her editor and have the identifiable information taken out of the article. Within a couple hours, it was taken out.
Why am I recounting this anecdote? Because it illustrates that in that moment, I was not an individual, but a representative. A representative of foreign journalists working on migration in Tunisia.
I was not Jakob Plaschke to them when I was arrested; I was whatever journalist happened to be there at the wrong time, at the wrong place. Any other foreign journalist ‘caught’ working on migration in Sfax could’ve been used to send the same message that they sent by arresting and opening up proceedings against me: “working on migration as a journalist in Sfax is a red line.”
And all the other journalists heard the message too.
After my arrest, several months passed before any foreign journalists reported on-the-ground from Sfax again. From my arrest in May, it would take four months before English-language foreign media published reporting about migration from Sfax again. The Guardian was the first to again publish one such article, at the time authored anonymously, alleging intense repression and sexual violence committed by Tunisian National Guardsmen against migrants in Sfax.
The article, whose author - the Guardian’s senior global development reporter Mark Townsend - has since been revealed, also goes into details on the techniques he used to avoid being detected by authorities while working in the city. It notes, without further explanation, that “Foreign media are not welcome in the city.”
I’ve reached out to Mark Townsend a few times to ask what he based this assertion on, if he was aware of my case at the time, and how it impacted his approach to his reporting in Sfax. He did not respond to my emails. But given the fact that I was in touch with a few of his colleagues at the Guardian a month prior regarding my case, I would assume that as an experienced journalist, he was aware.
When the media is gone…
Without free media access - local and foreign alike - the Tunisian authorities retain the ability to shape the narrative surrounding the ongoings in the olive fields. As journalists are unable to consistently access the areas without facing persecution, the Tunisian authorities have become the only source of information on Sfax’s olive fields, beyond the anecdotes brought out by journalists like myself.
Though the widespread and systematic nature of abuses against migrants in and around Sfax is the most obvious thing in the world for those of us who have visited migrants there, anecdotes hold no legal weight. And while the EU’s border externalization and migration management policy is cold-hearted and has no regard for the humanity of migrants, it is still subject to a relatively robust court system that would have to act if faced with real evidence.
The inverse is true as well: If abuses are prevented from becoming known by the public, there can be no accountability. And that is exactly what is happening in Tunisia, seemingly with European complicity.
I don’t want to delve too deeply into questions of complicity and intention - because ultimately, they’re close to impossible to prove. What matters in the end is who benefits and how. However, when those who benefit are so obviously faced with daily notifications of ongoing abuse and yet refrain from reacting, it’s important to take note.
Emily O’Reilly, the EU Ombudsman until recently, opened an inquiry in April 2024 into human rights compliance in the context of the 2023 Memorandum of Understanding between the EU and Tunisia. The MoU served as a blueprint for several similar migration-focused EU-agreements in the region.
O’Reilly did not call for respect for human rights - she simply called for the European Commission to be transparent about what they’d done to ensure human rights compliance in the context of the MoU. The European Commission initially lied and claimed that there was no ‘human rights impact assessment’ needed, then later refused to release the results of an assessment that they did in fact conduct.
In January 2025, the European Commission announced an “overhaul of payments to Tunisia” to ensure better human rights compliance. However, the promises of compliance echo those made many years ago in Libya that were never followed through on. Simultaneously, according to migrants on-the-ground in Tunisia, things continue to get worse month after month.
In this context, it’s difficult to believe that the EU is not consciously and deliberately supporting human rights abuses against migrants, despite the fact that the EU’s responsibility for human rights compliance is the same within its borders as it is without.
But if abuses are prevented from becoming known by the public, accountability cannot exist.
European interests and the chaos to come
In late November, I spoke with the Danish ambassador once again about my options for getting out of Tunisia. It was all detailed in the 8th episode of my detention story. I found myself faced with a strange choice: Should I accept the help of a large EU-country’s embassy with a heavy stake in EU-Tunisia migration cooperation? Should we do a backroom deal, get me out no matter the cost and pretend like nothing ever happened?
I have no doubt that the Danes meant well. And mental health-wise, I was struggling enough that I almost accepted the offer.
But one thought kept coming back to me: “How damn convenient.”
Because returning to the question of who benefited from my arrest and its consequences for migration coverage in Tunisia, the answer is easy. The more invested an EU-country is in the EU’s migration politics, the more they benefit.
In the end, the primary outcome is that the EU is a few steps closer to being able to do what it wants to migrants outside of the EU, through their de facto proxy-forces. The media is meant to provide accountability. So when European media is prevented from scrutinizing what European funding does, that funding loses its accountability.
A secondary outcome is that the Tunisian regime benefits. They receive access to equipment, funding and training. This makes a difference not just in dealing with migrants but also in continuing to expand the ‘counterinsurgency’ capacity of its security forces, which will inevitably target Tunisians in times of discontent.
In fact, the migration situation itself is already causing intense discontent, as Tunisia does not have the capacity for the de facto settlement of the tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of migrants that are stuck in limbo in Tunisia at the moment, unable to continue their journey and simultaneously unable to return home. While opposition to the Kais Saïed regime since 2021 has tended to criticize its anti-migrant violence, more recently we’re seeing oppositionists of a different persuasion - those who think Tunisia’s regime is too lenient on the migrants. It is an entirely unsustainable situation that threatens complete chaos.
Thirdly, and not unrelatedly, the EU is allowing itself to become dependent on Tunisian regime survival. This means that Tunisia will be able to count on European support whenever discontent runs amok - just like when the French government offered to supply security forces to the Ben Ali regime in its final weeks during the Tunisian revolution in 2010-2011.
I’m not naive. I know that this is Europe, and I have known that this is Europe - a primarily shrewd and self-interested grouping of countries that will prop up regimes anywhere if the price is right. It is a far cry from the story we Europeans tell ourselves of being the world’s civilized humanitarians who happened to - maybe even deserved to - fall into immense wealth.
But it’s still an eye-opener, as a European citizen, to experience becoming subject to the long arms of European oppression abroad that ensure the survival of Borrell’s garden back home. That’s why I was put through this.
That’s the big why.
This is it for the School of Tunisia, for now. I’m turning the page and moving on from this personal tragedy of mine - and I consider the story to be written out.
I’m still undecided as to whether the School of Tunisia will have a life beyond my story. If you have any feedback or inputs regarding this matter - or anything else you want to bring to my attention - feel free to send me a message on Substack or elsewhere. Likewise, if you are a journalist yourself (especially if you are a Tunisian journalist) and interested in hearing more, I continue to be open to talking about everything that happened, publicly and in detail.
If you’ve enjoyed following, please consider sharing my work with your friends, family and network - it would mean a great deal.