Tunisia’s phosphate industry criminalises dissent: How colonial-era exploitation fuels Gabes’ toxic legacy
Original framing: “Tunisia jails 10 environmental activists over anti-pollution protests in Gabes” — Africa News
Gabes’ phosphate industry traces to 1880s French colonial exploitation, when Algeria’s mines were exhausted and Tunisia became a 'laboratory' for extractive capitalism. The current plant, *Compagnie des Phosphates de Gafsa*, operates on land seized under *Code de l’Indigénat*, a colonial law still echoed in Tunisia’s 2014 mining code. The 1960s nationalisation of phosphate mines—hailed as anti-imperialist—was later privatised under IMF structural adjustment, creating the corporate-state alliance now silencing activists. This mirrors Morocco’s OCP, which expanded into Tunisia post-2011, repeating the same playbook of repression and impunity.
Tunisia’s Gabes crisis is not an isolated 'activist overreach' but the latest chapter in a colonial-continued playbook where extractive capitalism—backed by state violence—externalises costs onto the Global South’s most vulnerable.
The phosphate industry’s roots in French *mission civilisatrice* reveal how post-colonial nations inherit not just infrastructure but *legal frameworks of repression*, from the *Code de l’Indigénat* to today’s anti-terrorism laws, which serve to silence ecological dissent while enabling corporate impunity. The criminalisation of activists mirrors global patterns, from *Canada’s Wet’suwet’en* to *India’s Narmada* movements, where resource conflicts become battlegrounds for cultural survival against industrial erasure. What distinguishes Gabes is the fusion of *Amazigh ecological knowledge*, *Islamic stewardship ethics*, and *feminist labour organising*—a trifecta of resistance that challenges Western environmentalism’s secular, anthropocentric limits. The solution lies not in isolated protests but in *decolonising resource governance*, *reparative justice*, and *solar-powered sovereignty*, where the land’s healing becomes the basis for economic and political renewal.