Coronavirus or not, migrants push on toward Europe
NIAMEY: Many Africans are managing to evade coronavirus lockdown barriers in Niger, the Sahel’s migrant crossroads, as they press on with their perilous desert trek to the Mediterranean Sea and ultimately Europe. The migrant flow has slowed down but not dried up despite tight checks in the capital Niamey, and an increase of desert security patrols that have detained hundreds of people as desperate as ever to reach Europe, officials and former smugglers said. “Gambians, Senegalese, Malians, they are all determined to head there,” said Alassane Mamane, a retired civil servent who lives in Agadez, a desert crossroads and departure point for many migrants heading to Libya on the Mediterranean.
“One migrant said to me: ‘I would rather die from coronavirus than live in misery,” Mamane said. Slipping through the holes of the net is becoming increasingly difficult. Since the anti-migrant plan set up in 2015 to reinforce patrols, security forces “have intensified further their surveillance to enforce border closing measures aimed at fighting the coronavirus,” a local official said. Former people smuggler Idrissa Salifou confirmed it was now much harder for migrants.
“Before we could cross little by little but because of the anti-coronavirus measures (like border closures), the road is really blocked,” Salifou said. “Soldiers comb the entire length of the border day and night. And on the other side, the Libyans have become very vigilant,” he said. Niger, one of the world’s poorest countries, has officially only recorded 781 coronavirus infections, with 42 people who have died from the COVID-19 disease. Niger has already decreed a state of emergency, closed its borders with Libya and its other neighbours as well as cut off the capital Niamey from the rest of the country.
‘Skirt checkpoints’
Libya, where migrants have suffered from the violence and lawlessness that followed Moamer Kadhafi’s overthrow in 2011, is also affected by the coronavirus. Nonetheless, migrants are heading to the Niger border communities Dirkou and Madama in hopes of entering Libya but measures have been taken to block them, according to Bourkari Mamane, the mayor of Agadez, a large town in northern Niger. But the flow is far from drying up. Migrants “are trying in large numbers to enter Libya. They manage to skirt the checkpoints. The unlucky ones are picked up by military patrols,” Boubakar Jerome, the mayor of Dirkou, a city close to Libya, told AFP.
In less than two months, more than 300 migrants have been caught by Niger’s army along the border with Libya, the mayor said. In the past week, 33 migrants were detained in the same area, the mayor said. Bachir Amma, who heads an association of former people smugglers, said the migrants are as determined as ever. “They don’t care about the coronavirus. In Agadez, some ‘ghettos’ have reopened and the migrants look for any chance to bound into the desert,” Amma said. —AFP