Death, despair and duplicity under the Saharan sun
Not far from the Algerian border, the infant gave up its fight for life under the punishing Saharan sun. “The mother, she is a friend of mine. Her baby passed away in the desert,” said Thomas Howard, a painter and decorator from the west African state of Liberia.
Mr Howard and his friend had migrated north to Algeria looking for work but were rounded up, beaten and robbed by Algerian security forces before being put in a truck, driven back south and dumped in the desert. They were told to start walking as their captors drove away.
Since September, Algeria has removed more than 10,000 people to its southern border, leaving them to trek for hours without food or water toward border towns in neighbouring Niger. North African countries, with the full backing of Britain and the European Union, are trying to stem the flow of sub-saharan migrants heading north to the Mediterranean and ultimately Europe.
As the numbers crossing the Mediterranean fell from 215,997 in the first six months of 2016 to 40,944 in the same period this year, those set adrift in the Sahara Desert by Algeria have leapt. The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) says that in May 2017, 135 people were left to fend for themselves in the desert between Algeria and Niger. This increased twenty-fold in April this year – at 2,888.
The expulsions happen around the clock – when daytime temperatures hit 110F (43C), and at night, when migrants fumble blindly in the dunes, looking for shelter and safety.
Dozens, maybe hundreds, die of dehydration or heatstroke.
“At some point they decided they didn’t want them there anymore,” said Giuseppe Loprete, the head of the IOM’S delegation in Niger.
Most migrants simply want to work in Algeria, say officials, though some still head for Europe. Only a few make it to the boats, however.
Tighter security on Niger’s northeastern border with Libya, after a massive injection of European Union money, has forced people smugglers to re-route toward Algeria.
Algeria does not receive the EU money that has poured into Niger and Libya, but the crackdown is being felt across the region. The secretive North African state is in economic crisis and there is high youth unemployment, so government tolerance of illegal migrants has evaporated, endangering sub-saharan workers from Cameroon, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria and Senegal who were previously tolerated on building sites and as domestic servants.
“They are returned to the border without knowing why. Some of them were showing me that they were on a construction site and they are still wearing the clothes they were in,” Mr Loprete said following a recent visit to Arlit, the last city on the northern route to Algeria.
“Others left their savings, and that’s why some of them are trying to go back,” he added.
Under pressure from the EU, Niger implemented a harsh anti-smuggling law in 2015 and will receive €1billion from the bloc by 2020, specifically to deal with illegal migration. Several EU bodies operate in Niger, including Frontex, the border agency, and the security training body EUCAP Sahel, with the aim of stopping migrants ever reaching Europe’s shores. Both have declined requests for comment.
Thousands of the migrants dropped in the desert end up in Agadez, a dusty and lawless city known as Niger’s “smuggling hub”.
Some live in an IOM transit camp and agree to repatriation on UN planes, while others stay in squats in the sprawling, dirty streets. Prince Doe, a Liberian, lived in Algeria for four years, working in Oran city as a tiler. He lives with his wife, three-year-old son, and 10 others in a threeroom home with mud walls, sleeping mats on the floor and a dusty courtyard.
“Algerian police went to my house and told us to leave,” he said. “They said they want all black people to leave their country, that it was an edict from the interior minister.
“We got on a bus and put our luggage in a truck. We didn’t see the truck again”.
Tales of systematic theft by the police of money and possessions are common among the expelled West Africans. The Does were bussed from a deportation centre, with hundreds of others, to the southern city of Tamanrasset, before being transferred to a truck and taken close to the desert border.
Abruptly, the police ordered them off, then drove away.
“There were a lot of children,” Mr
‘They said they want all black people to leave their country, that it was an edict from the interior minister’
Doe said. “Some of the boys died in the desert.”
The family’s ordeal ended when a pickup truck rescued them. But others reported walking for up to six hours in the blazing heat.
Mr Howard said police took mobile phones off the migrants to stop them filming their abuses, after torture videos began appearing on social media. “They will beat you unmercifully,” he added.
Others reported racially motivated abuses at the hands of the Algerians while living there.
Victoria Bebu, a 35-year-old Nigerian, said: “They came to my house when I was sleeping with my daughters. They set our house on fire. We lost our money and our things but thanks to God we did not lose our lives”.
Mrs Bebu also looked after a pregnant woman who had been gang raped but was too frightened to report the crime or seek medical help. “You see this skin? They hate this skin. They hate black people,” she said angrily.
The Algerian police came for her as she walked to work with her two daughters, aged 13 and 17, in the southern city of Tamanrasset. They did not allow her to return home and pack.
Algeria has rounded up students with visas, migrants without identity papers, and even refugees, witnesses say. Few passports are checked before they are ejected into the desert – they are usually judged “illegal” simply by the colour of their skin.
“It’s unfortunate this is happening in such a brutal way,” said Alessandra Morelli, Niger representative of the UNHRC refugee agency. “We appeal to the government of Algeria to allow them readmission as soon as possible.”
The Algerian embassy in Niger
‘They came to my house when I was sleeping with my daughters. They set our house on fire. We lost our money and our things’
declined a request for comment, but Hassen Kacimi, an official with the Algerian interior ministry, said last month that “whoever wants to cry over the outgoing migrants just [has] to put their hand in their pocket”, asking why UN agencies and African nations had not helped them deal with the migrant influx.
In fact, the UN is in advanced negotiations with the Algerian government to better facilitate safe returns from inside the country itself, but these have yet to begin.
Despite the horrors of the crossing, some will not be deterred from trying again. “I will go back to Algeria. It’s going to take some time to raise the money for it, but I will go,” said Ousmane, an Ivorian teenager who asked we use his first name only to protect his identity.
His family sent him to Mali when he was aged just 15 to look for work, and he crossed into Algeria a year ago, briefly working as a plasterer in Oran.
They are relying on him to raise money after paying for his bus fare to Mali. The shame of returning home empty-handed keeps him searching for a way back to Algeria.
“Sometimes I go for months without calling my parents. Some days I don’t eat. I’m like that,” he said.