Mariam Ben Slama, Johns Hopkins University
“For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.” Frantz Fanon – Wretched of the Earth (1963)
“We considered Chatt al-Salam a paradise on Earth – an oasis, the sea – until the port came… Initially, we didn’t realize the danger, until it began to bear its fangs.” Yasser Jradi (2023)
In the Tunisian National Anthem, previously known as the “Hymn of the Revolution,” written and composed by Egyptian poet Mostafa Saadeq Al-Rafe’ie and Tunisian poet Aboul-Qacem Echebbi, there is a line that reads “نَمُوتُ نَمُوتُ وَيَحْيَا الْوَطَنْ.” It translates to: “We die for the sake of our homeland.” This line, played every morning at schools around the country, and at the beginning of every football game, never felt more real than when shouted at protests from the avenues of the capital Tunis, or when chanted in the streets of the city of Kasserine and the public squares of the town of Sidi Bouzid.
Dying for the sake of the homeland has taken on a deeper meaning for the inhabitants of the governorate of Gabès, in the southeastern part of the country. In October 2025, residents faced pollution and harm caused by the residue of phosphogypsum released by the chemical complex located in the Gulf of Gabès. In a short period of time, the city experienced 300 cases of suffocation, most of them among school children in the Chatt al-Salam and Ghannouch areas adjacent to the complex, as well as chronic structural damage to the population and a triple ecocide of the land, water and air. The toxification of the environment and the spread of diseases like cancer and other respiratory illnesses have led to rising opposition voices in the region which called out the government’s neglect of the local population while denouncing regional segregation and social and environmental violence.
For Gabèssians, as inhabitants of a city on the margins, dying for the sake of the homeland looked more like the state sacrificing their bodies for the sake of profit making and the restoration of the country’s economy in light of the current crisis. Their land and resources were but a golden goose for politicians who did not search for alternative solutions that would ensure people’s lives and right to breathable air and drinkable water. These recent developments in Gabès are symptomatic of enduring patterns in Tunisian politics that can be traced back to French colonial rule and post-independence modernization projects initiated by Habib Bourguiba and continued under Zine El Abidin Ben Ali in the 1980s and 1990s.
In this essay, I situate the 2025 Stop Pollution Gabès (SPG) movement in a legacy of historical resistance to regional segregation dating back to colonial times in peripheral governorates like the industrial governorate of Sfax and the mining governorate of Gafsa. In doing so, I examine how the present-day governance of vast phosphate reserves and other natural resources, located in the country’s poorest regions, reinforces systems of colonial extraction and segregation. I show how this colonial legacy shaped the post-independence state and the system through which it governed natural resources and populations’ lives in Gabès. I interrogate the balancing act between financial stability and environmental preservation that Gabès residents have to perform in the face of the state’s neglect. I look at the strikes and mobilizations through which communities and families organized under Ben Ali through the post-2011 revolutionary context, culminating in the 2025 events in Gabès which President Kaïs Saïed’s regime failed in slowing down despite the continuous use of authoritarian and repressive strategies. Finally, I argue that shared perceptions of national dignity are at the center of Gabèssians’ struggle for clean air and water. I track a shift in the embodied experiences of dignity from a localized concept to a national demand aligned not only with Gabèssians’ demands but general Tunisians’ grievances. I put Gabèssians’ national demands for clean air in conversation with local conceptualizations of national dignity to better understand the intersection of colonial legacies of regional segregation and current conceptualizations of dignity as embodied lived experience.
Colonial Legacies: Sahel vs the Interior
State neglect and the marginalization of cities like Gabès and Gafsa reflect legacies of regional segregation inherited from French colonial rule and perpetuated after independence in 1956. An excess of racialized violence (in all its forms) in the colonies was necessary for the spread of capitalism (Challand 2020, 249). French colonial encroachment in Tunisia, from the 1880s onward, instituted a familiar pattern of racialization as a response to intensified economic exploitation and resource extraction. It began with the manipulation of religious differences between North African Muslims, Christians, and Jews, with the latter two being closest to the French colonialists because of discriminatory practices targeting Muslims. Then, it evolved into racialized distinctions with some groups equal to French settlers, while others were demoted to lower ranks. French colonialism heightened cultural divisions between the metropole and the colonies, placing indigenous Muslims at the bottom of the social hierarchy, with Jewish Tunisians elevated to an uncomfortable middle category after the Crémieux decree of 1870 (Challand, 249).
There were many manifestations and instances of violence throughout colonial rule in Tunisia. One of them was apparent through the application of Frantz Fanon’s statement of a world divided into two with the “frontiers shown by barracks and police stations” (Fanon 1963, 38). For Tunisia, the map of colonial violence directly overlaps with the location of phosphate mines, and processing industries. Most of these barracks and police stations were placed at the heart of the phosphate mines in the interior southern province of Gafsa and Gabès. During the protectorate years, the repressive security apparatus worked in collaboration with settlers to prevent and police mobilizations in the productive areas of the country, notably around phosphate mines in the center of the country and in the coastal city of Sfax (Challand, 250). The French colonial regime considered the regions between Bizerte and Tunis and South all the way to Mahdia in the Sahel (coastal) region La Tunisie Utile (the useful Tunisia), with the rest (including the southern territories along the Libyan border, like Gabès) described as La Tunisie Inutile (the useless Tunisia). The residents of “useless Tunisia” had less access to welfare services, more unstable infrastructure and lower employment opportunities.
This colonial discourse of a useful and useless Tunisia deepened the regional fragmentation of the territory with unequal access to state and police protection long after the end of colonialism. France saw little benefit in expanding its direct rule over the south and along the Libyan border. This “useless Tunisia” was presented as the territory of the fellagah(“bandits”), a pejorative term used to describe local, often rural, resistance fighters that fought against the French. Colonial authorities did not believe these rural population areas with low economic potential could be incorporated into agrarian capitalism or systematic economic exchanges despite their wealth in natural and mineral resources like phosphates. Rather than extending a unified rule over the entire protectorate or sending settlers into these landlocked areas, Tunis cemented alliances with tribal groupings living in the borderlands (Challand, 250). Violence was not only necessary but paramount to safeguarding economic interests and protecting “the useful Tunisia.” Those resisting these logics were persecuted with extreme brutality, like in the case of Sfax.[i]
Over time this direct racialized violence through the use of policing and physical repression shifted into indirect violence expressed through state neglect of the “useless” regions. The post-independence state moved to a more structural and symbolic form of violence that targeted the same marginalized communities by denying them a role in the new modern Tunisian state (Challand, 251). After independence, municipalities were established across most of the territory, but that did not include the cities of the interior. A large number of Southern and landlocked areas still lacked a local structure of authority remaining instead under the direct control of the Ministry of Interior for a long period after independence (Challand, 252). This strategy of differentiated state formation and economic integration was continued by Bourguiba and Ben Ali, both of whom originated from the Sahel region and were socially distant from the southern constellations of authority. This, over time, cemented a deep fragmentation of the national territories, with some regions treated better than others.
Before 1885, the Gafsa region was nothing but mountain heights and plateaus inhabited by a few tribes that depended on animal husbandry. This changed after the expedition led by French scientist Philippe Thomas confirmed the presence of extractable phosphate layers extending for 80 kilometers. French authorities took over the management of these resources and became the sole operators of the mines in Redeyef and Metlaoui (mining towns in Gafsa). The French faced some challenges when they decided to inject a capitalist enterprise into a rural environment under colonial rule including an insufficient population and a geographical isolation of the region (Nabli, 2022). Hence, they dispatched representatives to recruit foreign labor. Consequently, a mosaic of workers quickly formed, and towns with varying degrees of urbanization were constructed in the mining basin. The native inhabitants of Gafsa were uprooted from their desert, and their survival in this semi-arid climate became fundamentally tied to the mine.
From the beginning, the disparity was pronounced. European neighborhoods consisting of villas with red-tile roofs and containing all utilities formed the center of the mining towns, while on their periphery lay the neighborhoods of the natives and migrant workers living in tents, huts, and tin homes. This disparity inherited from the colonial era still frames the relationship of the mining basin’s inhabitants with the post-independence state, whose presence is limited to the Gafsa Phosphate Company (CPG). Phosphate exploitation did not bring deep socioeconomic changes. Instead, exclusive dependence on extractive activity would become more of a problem due to fierce global competition, decline in exports, and the closure and exhaustion of some deep mines. In 1976, GPC was nationalized, with a new company’s organic law which separated it from the railroad company.
In the case of Gabès, the Tunisian state decided to cease exporting crude phosphate in favor of beneficiating it in the late 1960s. During that era, the post-independence state was laying the foundations for its development plans and dividing economic activities among the regions. Gabès was removed from the state list of tourist regions despite its roughly 80 kilometers of shoreline, its unique landscape connecting the desert to the sea, the medical tourism in the El Hamma area, and the historical mountain tourism in the areas of Matmata and Toujane, which are home to indigenous Amazigh communities. In 1972, the first component of the industrial area in Ghannouch in Northern Gabès was established. This chemical complex spanning approximately 150 hectares specialized in processing phosphate, turning it into phosphoric acid and fertilizer. At the time, the state was not concerned about environmental issues, so it did not meaningfully consider the potential environmental and public health risks. Being a product of the state’s policy of industrialization, this chemical complex now structured around the state enterprise of the Tunisian Chemical Groups (GCT) was promoted as a pathway towards decolonization (Robert & Crisp 2021, 4).
The City of Gabès (Illustration by Diane Robert)
Since 1972, Gabès has suffocated under the pollution generated by the activity of the GCT, dumping approximately 5 million tons of untreated phosphogypsum into the sea every year. Water pollution leads to massive mortality of species including birds, fish, and crabs, which were often found dead on the shores. Air pollution produced by the emission of toxic gas emanating from phosphate processing factories has threatened the health of the inhabitants of the region, with children diagnosed with asthma and cancer at an early age.[ii] The establishment of the GCT also meant that water resources have been shared between traditional agriculture and the intensive chemical industry thus threatening the thousand-year-old oasis system in Gabès (the only coastal oasis in the world). On the other hand, in the context of extreme poverty, unemployment, and precarious infrastructure, the complex accounts for 4,000 to 5,000 jobs for workers in the region.[iii] The flight of residents from the region due to the spread of diseases fueled frustration and a sense of helplessness and abandonment. Setbacks in tourism, agriculture, and fishing caused unemployment to reach 25% in 2017.[iv]
In using the land’s wealth in minerals like phosphate and transforming it into a capitalist project of extraction and profit-making, the Tunisian state radically reorganized and simplified the flora to suit man’s goals in ways anticipated by James Scott (1998). The process that the factories were undergoing was one that aimed at making the terrain, its products and its workforce more legible, and hence manipulable, from all sides. The state by these means enhances its capacity to make interventions such as the use of police violence, surveillance and repressive measures aimed at silencing dissent. Mastery over the natural resources of the land has pushed Tunisian governments to simplify a complex way of life for farmers and residents, compartmentalizing it in a capitalist system of production that ensured profit-making on the back of Gabèssians’ lives and health.
2025 Stop Pollution Gabès Movement
Today, Gabès remains the epitome of Tunisia’s “development” model as a city that reveals the contradictions inherent in public policy, between official discourse on environmental protection and the transition to clean energy on the one hand and the catastrophic reality in which citizens are denied a dignified way of life with breathable air and drinkable water. After 2011, thousands protested in Gabès for reductions in polluting gas emissions (Robert & Crisp, 7). Extensive graffiti with inscriptions such as “Stop the Pollution” are an integral part of the urban landscape of Gabès (Rousselin 2018, 29). Non-violent protest actions targeted at transport routes are often organized in tandem with public concerts featuring local artists specialized in anti-pollution rap. Earlier in June, protesters who participated in demonstrations in Gabès were arrested and sentenced to prison terms ranging from two to four months for “disturbing public order.[v]
These issues came to a head in September 2025, known in Gabès as the month of asphyxiation. Toxic gas leaks from the chemical industrial complex caused a wave of suffocation, respiratory difficulties, and fainting. Several cases were reported in the regions of Ghannouch, Chatt al-Salam, and Bouchemma. A middle school in Chatt al-Salam alone reported over 50 cases among its students, some of whom were transferred to the regional hospital while others were rushed to Tunis. In an increasingly autocratic climate under the rule of current president Kaïs Saïed, parents have testified being denied their children’s medical reports by doctors while others were prohibited from documenting what was happening inside the hospitals. The Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights (FTDES) described the situation as “ecological terrorism,” explaining that the recent cases of asphyxiation constitute a “state crime that has been ignored.”[vi]
During the month of October, thousands of Gabèssians staged a demonstration to demand the closure of the chemical complex. When they arrived next to the plant, police fired large amounts of teargas to disperse the crowd, causing several people to faint, asphyxiating them further. During another demonstration, protesters were again hit with teargas, and army units were deployed. In response to the protests by an enraged population caught between precarity and slow death, Saïed criticized a lack of maintenance at the GCT and dispatched a team from the industry and environment ministries with no plan in sight. After having denounced what he called an “ecological assassination” in Gabès, Saïed proceeded to order the resumption of phosphate production and an increase in fertilizer production to capitalize on rising global prices and demands from European countries.
The specificity of the environmental hazards caused by industrial activities explains why the protest movements against them are mainly driven by locally organized groups and proximity networks (Robert & Crisp, 6). When Tunisian musician Yasser Jradi recalls how he learned to swim in Chatt al-Salam “diving and watching the fish and seaweed” and how “beautiful [it was] until the chemical complex began to change the landscape,”[vii] it is clear that Gabèssians’ relationship with their land, their air and their water, is one of ancestral connection, love and reciprocity between nature and man. Despite the unifying feeling of care for the land, exposure to environmental hazards in Gabès is spatially distinguished with different localities thus giving rise to local claims that are specific to groups in certain areas. In this sense, Gabéssians’ conception of dignity might differ depending on the specific environmental harms they are exposed to. For Gabès, gas emissions from the units have a substantial impact on localities situated around the capital of the same name and areas around it like Ghannouch, Bouchemma, Chenini and Chatt al-Salam. People living in these zones have developed specific diseases such as cancer and respiratory disorders. This dreadful collective experience triggered protest movements that arise in different neighborhoods but come together around common demands.
In May 2017, several primary school students living near the factories situated in the landlocked locality of Bouchemma were rushed to the hospital after they started to cough and vomit following a gas leak in the industrial zone. The children’s mothers then began blocking the road leading to Gabès as a protest against the health risks resulting from the proximity of the industrial zone, and a few days later initiated a general strike in Bouchemma alone. This climate of discontent led to the start of a sit-in, headed by unemployed youth from the locality, in front of the site of the Nawara project (gas transfer). Under sustained pressure from residents, the government eventually announced in June 2017 that the most polluting units would be relocated. Yet, eight years later, those units remain exactly where they’ve always been.
A year later, in December 2018, the government announced that it had chosen a site in Menzel El Habib to house the phosphogypsum slag heap and the new GCT production units intended to replace those in the Gabès industrial zone. The municipal council with the help of civil society organizations and local union sections rejected this project despite cleavages between those hoping to sell their land and get jobs and those worried about the impact on the water table in the agricultural region. The municipal council, the unions and civil society organizations in the neighboring delegation of El Hamma joined the opposition movement, once again organizing gatherings, marches and a widely followed general strike on 10 December (Robert & Crisp, 9).
Another space of resistance specific to Gabèssians’ struggle for a dignified life is football stadiums like in the case of the Ultras groups in Gabès. Ultras groups have been extremely involved in protests and mobilizations organized in their city to advocate for the right to breathe. Members go as far as denouncing the government’s policies which consider Gabès as “a testing ground for chemical products without any regard for the health of the people and their children.”[viii] These groups took their struggle a step further when they launched a campaign with the slogan “For a Unified Mobilization,” calling to combine their efforts and for mutual aid amongst all groups thus advocating for a minimization of differences and internal divisions to join forces against police repression which targets all groups without distinction across the country. This campaign demonstrated a clear shift from a localized embodiment of dignity to a more national one as the struggle of residents of Gabès continued throughout the years.
With dignity at the center of their demands, groups like SPG organized demonstrations and a general strike bringing the entire city to a standstill. Shops, markets, schools, cafes and even public post offices were shut down, halting economic activity in response to a call by the General Union of Tunisian Workers (UGTT). With slogans like “Gabès wants to live,” “Stop pollution in Gabès, stop pollution everywhere,” or “the people want the dismantlement of the polluting units,” crowds of young people, families and workers have expressed their anger and frustration at a government that refuses to act and a state that neglects and even violates their right to a safe and livable environment. In doing so, the social movement for Gabès has expanded with protests happening in the capital as a sign of solidarity and a more national understanding and embodiment of dignity.
At their core, these calls for dignity are demands for social equality and the right to live a dignified life with material, social, and human needs met. In this case, a loss of dignity is when the political process dehumanizes individuals, making them passive recipients of whatever crumbs the oppressor chooses to throw at them and dignity is reclaimed with the powerful act of saying no and instead, creating networks of care and help that affirm their humanity rather than annihilating it (El Bernoussi 2014. 374). In the case of Gabès, dignity meant the rejection of the chemical complex, the dismantlement of the polluting units, the preservation of the oasis and clean water, land and air for Gabèssians. Beyond democracy and representation, residents of Gabès, Gafsa, Sfax and other marginalized cities and towns demand the abolition of regional segregation, learning from the colonial legacy of “useful” and “useless” Tunisia, unified under a common struggle for national dignity for all. After reacting along these lines of differentiations through localized movements, Gabèssians seem to have changed their mobilization strategies, expanding towards a larger national movement.
Conclusion
At the origin of the 2010 protests in Tunisia was the January 2008 sit-in after Phosphate Company Gafsa launched a recruitment drive where jobs were awarded to candidates from outside the region. Convinced that the process was rigged, local applicants decided to stage a protest through a wave of sit-ins in the landlocked governorate. In the months that followed, these protests spread across the region in what became known as the 2011 Tunisian Revolution. Gabès has remained at the center of Gabèssians and, later, all of Tunisians’ struggle for a dignified life after the overthrow of Ben Ali and through the successive governments that followed. Slogans that were chanted in the streets across the country emphasized not only a fight against authoritarian rule but also one for “national dignity.” This concept, born at the intersection of experiences from economic hardships, political humiliation and environmental harms, has shifted from a localized embodiment to a national one that aims at challenging regional segregation and racist dynamics. Fourteen years later, places like Gabès are still fighting for a dignified life they have been denied since colonial times. Movements like SPG are understood as an accumulation of years of struggle in the interior city of Gabès and a material embodiment of a politics of dignity that manifests itself through lessons learned from 2011 in addition to a future oriented vision that fights for the right to breathe.
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[i] In 1881, the French conducted a massacre in the industrial city of Sfax because of the people’s refusal to accept the French protectorate and the inconsistent presence of “legitimate means of coercion,” with mixed policies targeting the resistance while granting privileges to the few tribes living in the southern and eastern borderlands amongst other things. At the time, the French used the town of Sfax as a bridgehead to colonize the interior and southern parts of the country, inviting local bourgeoisie to purchase land and large olive tree plantations in the south (Challand, 250).
[ii] The Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy. “Gabès, a Victim of Industrial Pollution in Tunisia.” https://timep.org/2022/10/27/gabes-a-victim-of-industrial-pollution-in-tunisia/
[iii] Simon Gouin & Sophie Chappelle, “The Curse of Phosphates: Behind the Scenes of Chemical Agriculture – a Polluted Wasteland,” Multinationals Observatory, 30 November 2015.
[iv] Hamadi Lasouad, “The Gabes Chemical Complex: A Monster Destroying Lives and Poisoning Children,” The Legal Agenda, 5 December 2025.
[v] Lilia Blaise, “Tunisie: deux à quatre mois de prison pour trois activistes environnementaux,” Radio France Internationale, 2 June 2025.
[vi] Statement released by FTDES.
[vii] Video Interview of Yasser Jradi (2023)
[viii] Testimony given by one of the members of the Ultras group in Gabès to independent online newspaper Nawaat.