Dumped in the desert
Refugees targeted in Moroccan sweep Say police left them to die in the Sahara
TOUIZGUE, MOROCCO—
The 26year- old Nigerian left his home in Casablanca one afternoon to buy sardines for dinner. Police arrested him, seized his legal refugee papers and beat him, he says, displaying scratched and blackened wrists as proof of having been handcuffed.
Within 48 hours, he says, he and nine busloads of other Africans were dropped in the middle of the Sahara Desert, all left to suffer hunger and thirst — and some to die. The Moroccan government denies claims from human rights groups that it has been dumping Africans in deserts, abandoning them there as a way of coping with an influx of thousands of refugees trying to reach Morocco’s Spanish enclaves as a route to hoped- for prosperity in Europe. Refugees tell a different story. On Monday, the Moroccan government led a group of journalists on a tour of two desert holding centres at Touizgue and Berden, allowing them to speak with the Africans there. Many say police picked them up on the streets, in their homes, at their workplaces. Others spoke of Moroccan forces leaving them within 50 kilometres of the borders of Algeria or Mauritania, handing them meagre food and water and telling them to “ go” but giving them no directions. Some described the horror of seeing spouses, siblings or children die, and of having to drink urine to survive.
Yet most of those interviewed at the holding centres were different from the illegal refugees who have been trying in vain to sneak into the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla on Morocco’s northern coasts. These sub- Saharan Africans — like Tijani Abdellahi, who went to the grocery store and wound up in the desert — are in Morocco legitimately, many with homes and jobs. They have United Nations’ asylum- seeker status and paperwork to prove it, meaning that Morocco, under the Geneva Conventions, cannot deport them.
Authorities apparently picked them up in their sweep to return illegal refugees to countries such as Algeria, which Moroccan officials blame for allowing migrants to cross into Morocco. Such repatriations continued yesterday.
Their plight came to light last week when Médecins Sans Frontières, or Doctors Without Borders, reported that Morocco had dropped about 1,000 people in the desert and left them there to walk for nearly a week. As a result, the government established the two holding centres for those people to find refuge.
People interviewed Monday recalled how they managed to survive and make it to the centres, one a military encampment, the other a police outpost of mud huts, both about 200 kilometres away from where they claim they were dumped. The heat, thirst and fatigue set in quickly, recalled Joseph Edoboro, a Nigerian. His threemonthbaby, Frank, died first, followed a few hours later by his wife, Stella, 22, despite his efforts to save her.
“ I pissed in a can for my wife to drink,” said Edoboro, 28, recounting his arduous journey until Moroccan authorities picked him up and brought him to Touizgue.
Abdellahi said police arrested him near his home in Casablanca on Oct. 2 as he returned from the store. He thought his U. N. papers would help him out, he said, but at the police station officers beat him and told him to go home to his country. The next day, Moroccan police drove him and 47 other Africans from various countries to Oujda, 320 kilometres to the east.
At 9 a. m. the next day, he and many others were put into nine buses and driven about 700 kilometres. In his group was Edoboro, his wife and baby son. Around 8 p. m., they were transferred into three trucks and driven deeper into the desert. When they stopped, soldiers gave each African six cans of sardines, three jugs of water and three loaves of bread. The police officers then issued a simple command. “ Go!”