Migrants forced to make deadly desert passage
ASSAMAKA, Niger — Algeria has abandoned more than 13,000 people in the Sahara Desert over the past 14 months, including pregnant women and children, expelling them without food or water and forcing them to walk, sometimes at gunpoint, under a blistering sun. Some never make it out alive.
The expelled migrants can be seen coming over the horizon by the hundreds, appearing at first as specks in the distance under temperatures of up to 118 degrees.
In Niger, where the majority head, the lucky ones limp across a desolate 9-mile no man’s land to the border village of Assamaka. Others wander for days before a U.N. rescue squad can find them. Untold numbers perish; nearly all of the more than two dozen survivors interviewed by the Associated Press told of people in their groups who simply vanished.
“Women were lying dead, men . ... Other people got missing in the desert because they didn’t know the way,” said Janet Kamara, who was pregnant at the time.
In a voice almost devoid of feeling, she recalled at least two nights in the open before her group was rescued.
“I lost my son, my child,” said Kamara, who is Liberian.
Algeria’s mass expulsions have picked up since October 2017, as the European Union renewed pressure on North African countries to head off migrants going north to Europe via the Mediterranean Sea.
A European Union spokesperson said the EU was aware of what Algeria was doing, but that “sovereign countries” can expel migrants as long as they comply with international law. Unlike Niger, Algeria takes none of the EU money intended to help with the migration crisis, although it did receive $111.3 million in aid from Europe between 2014 and 2017.
Algeria provides no figures for its involuntary expulsions. But the number of people crossing on foot to Niger has been increasing since the International Organization for Migration started counting in May 2017, when 135 people were dropped, to as high as 2,888 in April 2018. In all, according to the IOM, a total of 11,276 men, women and children survived the march.
At least another 2,500 were forced on a similar trek into neighboring Mali, with an unknown number succumbing along the way.
The migrants AP talked to described being rounded up hundreds at a time, crammed into trucks for hours to what is known as Point Zero, then dropped in the desert and pointed toward Niger. They walk, sometimes at gunpoint.
“There were people who couldn’t take it. They sat down and we left them. They were suffering too much,” said Aliou Kande, an 18-year-old from Senegal.
The migrants’ accounts are confirmed by videos collected by the AP over months, which show hundreds of people stumbling away from lines of trucks and buses. Two migrants told AP gendarmes fired on them.
Algerian authorities refused to comment. But Algeria has in the past denied criticism that it is committing rights abuses by abandoning migrants in the desert.