> AGADEZ, NIGER
Since the 15th century, Agadez has been one of Africa’s most important trading hubs. It still is, but now the most lucrative trade is human life
“There’s so much money at stake that this has become almost impossible to stop.”
MOHAMMED ANACKO
THE TOP OFFICIAL IN AGADEZ
AGADEZ, NIGER— The smuggler walked past the diaper aisle, through the back door of the convenience store and into the metal shed where the migrants were hiding.
It was Monday in one of the world’s human smuggling capitals, the day when trucks crammed with Africans roar off in a weekly convoy bound for Libya, the threshold to Europe. For Musa, an expert in sneaking people across the Sahara, it was time to get ready.
He walked around the white Toyota pickup parked next to the shed, loaded with jugs of water. Then he glanced at the cluster of 30 people waiting to climb atop the load.
One of them was an 11-year-old girl from Burkina Faso, sucking a lollipop. Another was a mother who held her wailing 6-month-old baby. Next to them, 27 men, from five countries, shifted their eyes nervously between Musa and the truck. If they weren’t caught or stranded or killed, it would take them three days to get from the stash house to Libya.
“We need to leave soon,” Musa said, examining the truck, its windows tinted, its licence plate missing, prayer beads hanging from the rear-view mirror.
Since the 15th century, Agadez has been one of the continent’s most important trading hubs, the gateway between West and North Africa. Now, it is a city run by human smugglers.
Across the developing world, migrants and refugees are leaving home in historic numbers. Increasingly, they are turning to smugglers, who load them onto flimsy ships or overcrowded trucks for treacherous journeys that kill thousands each year. Authorities in Europe and Asia have vowed to crack down on the multibillion-dollar industry. But the human cargo business is thriving.
Musa, 38, knew the risks. He knew that if his truck broke down in the 49 C heat, he and the migrants might survive no more than two days. He knew that his pistol was little help against the bandits who roamed the Sahara. But he also knew how to bribe the police and military to let him pass. And he knew the desert as well as anyone. Or he claimed to.
“Before we had migrants, but not like now,” Musa said. “Now, there are so many that I can’t remember them all. Every week, the trucks are full.”
Outside of his mud-walled compound were dozens of other stash houses, which locals call ghettos. They were hidden behind homes, next to mosques and market stalls, part of the city’s secret geography, the architecture of a booming illicit economy.
It is a boom driven by the collapse of the Libyan government, which has left a vast stretch of North African coast virtually unguarded. But just as important has been Africa’s explosion of cellphones and social networks, which have linked smugglers to potential migrants.
“Now, in sub-Saharan Africa, you’re never more than two conversations away from someone who can get you to Europe,” said Tuesday Reitano, of the think-tank the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. Hundreds of men and women from across West and Central Africa pour into this desert outpost every week. The majority are fleeing abject poverty. Others are escaping violence in Mali, northeastern Nigeria or the Central African Republic.
Many have only one thing in common: They arrived in Agadez with Musa’s phone number.
Konissa had stepped off the bus in Agadez the previous night, just after11. He had been travelling for three days from Ivory Coast and his legs felt stiff and heavy. When he walked through the parking lot, men started approaching him, his small black backpack giving him away as a migrant.
“You going to Libya?” they asked in French and Hausa. “You need some help?” But Konissa, 25, already had a contact in Agadez. His uncle had travelled to Libya last year.
“This man can help you,” the uncle wrote in a text in May, and pasted Musa’s number.
A few minutes after getting off the bus, Konissa dialled the number.
Konissa held the phone to his ear. He had spent two years saving for the trip to Europe, eking out a living as a tailor. If he made it to France or Italy, the money he sent back would change the lives of his parents and siblings and their children.
“Je suis arrivé,” he said to Musa. “I’m here.”
Fifteen minutes later, Konissa was driven to the large shed where Musa and his brothers kept the migrants.
Western officials portray smugglers as hardened criminals who have driven the surge in migrants to European shores — where more than 100,000 have arrived this year. The smugglers are “21st-century slave traders,” as Italy’s Foreign Minister, Paolo Gentiloni, put it. And indeed, there are alarming accounts of brutality, including a recent Amnesty International report detailing how migrants crossing Libya faced rape, torture and abductions.
But in Agadez, smugglers see themselves as businessmen, providing a service that Niger’s desert tribes have mastered.
Musa’s father shuttled goods for years between Agadez and Libya, where U.S. and UN sanctions made legal trade difficult. By the time Musa was 20, he was crossing the Sahara too. He learned to navigate by ruts in the sand during the day and by the stars at night. In 2011, Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi was overthrown, and suddenly no one was stopping boats from leaving the country’s ports for Italy, just 320 kilometres away. Throngs of migrants began to arrive in Agadez. Musa was ready to profit.
He and his brothers bought a fleet of Toyota pickups stolen from Libya. They started taking between 25 and 100 migrants across the Sahara every week, charging about $300 each. “My phone number became famous across West Africa,” he said.
In about three years, Musa was a millionaire. He bought homes in Niger and Libya. He bought cars and camels and smartphones, his selfies reflecting his swagger, a man lying next to a pistol. He married one woman in Niger and another in Libya. He tried to hide his enterprise from his four children, telling them that he was a trader. It was a rare glimmer of shame.
Countries around the world have vowed to fight the smugglers. The European Union recently announced a major operation to detain smuggling ships coming from Libya. But breaking up the networks is a colossal task.
“There’s so much money at stake that this has become almost impossible to stop,” said Mohammed Anacko, the president of the Agadez regional government council and the top official in the city.
Last month, a delegation from the EU travelled to Agadez seeking to strengthen Niger’s law-enforcement agencies. Police and soldiers, however, are deeply involved in the trade. Many of them earn exponentially more in bribes from smugglers and migrants than they do from their salaries.
Perhaps the most glaring sign of the complicity comes each Monday, when the smugglers and their migrant cargoes leave Agadez in a loose convoy led by a military escort.
While the images of boats capsized in the Mediterranean have come to symbolize the dangers of illegal migration to Europe, the trip through the Sahara is no less risky. Last month, the bodies of 48 migrants were found in two locations a few hundred kilometres outside Agadez, according to International Office for Migration. Musa shrugs off the risks of the journeys. “If God writes that you will die in the desert, then that is how you will die.”
He regularly stumbles upon the remains of those who didn’t make it, sometimes taking a shovel from his truck to dig graves.
“We bury the bodies because that’s what our religion tells us,” Musa said. “We do not say anything to the authorities.” On Monday night, the men climbed aboard the truck. Musa and his brothers had stuck tree limbs between the bags and supplies so that the men sitting on the edge of the vehicle could hold on, their legs hanging just above the ground. It was the only way they could fit so many people.
Konissa’s uncle was living somewhere in Italy. The plan was to call him once the truck arrived in the Libyan city of Sabha, the next staging ground for migrants. Konissa already had the phone number of a smuggler there.
Musa decided he would drive a separate truck this night, behind his brother, who would transport the migrants. Musa wanted to see his family in Libya and bring some supplies back.
When the first truck was full, two of Musa’s employees opened the metal gates that separated the stash house from a main road. The truck shot onto the street and past a mosque where women were praying. “Libya!” one woman cheered. The vehicle flew by the last mud-baked houses of Agadez and within minutes it was in the desert, in darkness. The only lights came from other trucks, also overcrowded with migrants. Dozens of vehicles would depart for Libya in a single night.
The next morning, the police in Agadez announced at a news conference that they had arrested about a dozen smugglers and 40 migrants.
Back at Musa’s store, his employees scanned photos of the detained. Neither Musa nor his brother was among them. Behind the counter, one of his brothers, Abdul Salam, laughed. “Even when he was young, we called Musa ‘The Warrior,’ ” he said. “He wasn’t scared of anyone.”
Then Abdul Salam went back to work. The next migrants were due to arrive soon.