From: Biniam Tekle (biniamt@dehai.org)
Date: Sun Nov 22 2009 - 11:41:17 EST
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article6922213.ece
November 22, 2009
African migrants and their desperate ploy for a better life Meet the
survivors, bereaved families from Gambia and Senegal, and a man who smuggles
the people — at a colossal price
(Robin Hammond for The Sunday Times Magazine)
Fatoumata Balajo with her son Nyima. Her husband, Alouma, and his three
brothers were aboard the overcrowded fishing boat the Nazar
Dan Macdougall
The dawn prayer had begun prematurely in the cold darkness some time after
3am. Clinging to the upturned hull of the Nazar, the fishing boat that had
carried the migrants out into the black waters off Tripoli, the survivors
had dreamt they were floating west and, by Allah’s divine grace, had come
upon the distant green lights of Malta.
For two days they had clung to the oily hull of the ship. Again and again
they had slipped backwards into the watery Mediterranean tomb that
surrounded them. Each time they had somehow made it back onto the rotten
wooden carcass of the boat, using the floating corpses of other would-be
migrants to help them climb back.
“Dear God, how many can there be?” whispered the captain of the Libyan
coastguard vessel to his deckhand, repeating the words in Berber and Arabic
as the high beam on the starboard of the Libyan navy rescue ship drew closer
and lit up the remains of the vessel.
Even for experienced mariners, the sight was unforgettable. Pregnant women
from Somalia, Nigerian schoolchildren and young Gambian men, dozens of them,
bloated and scattered across the sea. On the upturned hull were no more than
10 survivors, all hysterical and weeping, grasping one another for dear
life.
By daybreak it emerged that three boats had gone down. The survivors from
the Nazar would speak of a blood-red sandstorm at sea and of hundreds
slipping from the packed decks into the roaring depths around them. How many
were there on each ship, their interrogators enquired.
“Too many,” one survivor claimed. “The boats were so low in the water we had
to bail from the shore. At least a hundred crammed cheek to cheek on each
vessel, dozens of screaming infants among our number.” Where were they from?
“Everywhere. Lagos. Accra. Addis Ababa. Nairobi. Yaounde. Banjul. Dakar.”
Where were they heading? “Lampedusa and then Milan, Paris, London. Who
knows? To a better life.”
On dry land the individual stories of the living were even more devastating.
“A breastfeeding mother next to me dropped her screaming newborn into the
blackness as she was trampled on by the other migrants in the panic as the
storm set in,” said an Eritrean.
The only Gambian to survive related: “In desperation the boatmen threw the
weakest overboard as the water came up to our knees. The children were the
first to go, tossed into the water as the boat listed. A fight broke out and
it was everyone for themselves.” The same man told the Libyan authorities:
“I held onto my brother’s hand in the water, hours after he had died of
exposure. I couldn’t let him go.”
In London, Paris and Rome, the sinking of three illegal vessels in a storm
off Libya, and the deaths of perhaps 300 people — one of the worst maritime
disasters in modern Mediterranean history — barely made down-page headlines
in the broadsheet newspapers. In the past decade alone as many as 20,000
nameless “clandestini”, as the Italians call them, may have drowned en route
to the Italian island of Lampedusa, and the Canary Islands to the west. As
they have gone, so they have left behind thousands of destitute families.
Emigration, both legal and illegal, has become the defining factor in the
modern lives of sub-Saharan Africans, with an estimated 20m of them living
in European countries alone. Over one in nine of all people living in the UK
were born abroad, and increasingly the country has come to depend on a vast
secret army of illegal immigrants, many of them from sub-Saharan Africa, to
fill low-paid jobs. The Somalian minicab driver taking you to Manchester
Airport, the middle-aged Ghanaian woman cleaning the toilet in your
Edinburgh hotel room, the Malawian teenager smiling at you across the London
supermarket check-out may be among those who have come to Britain the hard
way.
The secretive nature of this type of immigration means that it is impossible
to accurately chart the number of African migrants arriving in Europe in
this way. The Migration Policy Institute believes there are between 7m and
8m irregular African immigrants in the EU. About two-thirds of Africans in
Europe are from North Africa, but an increasing number — as many as 50% —
are travelling from sub-Saharan Africa, particularly from west Africa —
Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal. They look out from Libya across 660 miles to
Sicily, and towards Italy’s 7,600-kilometre coastline, the European Union’s
most porous frontier, before heading out into the unknown in vessels painted
dark blue by smugglers to camouflage them in the glare of the authorities’
searchlights.
The sums sent home to Africa from around the world amount to an estimated
$40 billion a year. In the past, Africans have gone primarily to France,
where a forged carte de séjour still costs more than £5,000, or to the UK,
where asylum was traditionally believed to be easiest to secure, and to
Spain or, more recently, Italy. The routes they take are many and varied.
>From west Africa, migrants trek through the pitiless Sahara to Libya, from
there to brave the Mediterranean — or, more perilous yet, strike out for the
Canary Islands in fragile canoes known as “pirogues”. If they then cross to
the Spanish mainland they will probably do so in tiny, open Spanish fishing
boats.
An estimated one in every eight migrants who try to travel across the ocean
to Europe don’t make it, their bodies carried out into the cold Atlantic.
Those who perish are identified only by chance, their skeletons dredged from
the sea by Italian and Spanish trawlers, or their bodies washed on to
beaches used by holidaymakers. In the Gambia the impact of the drownings is
felt more than in most countries.
On a ragged bank of the Gambia River, bored children pummel holes in the red
earth with their bare fists. In front of drab mud-block homes their mothers
sell miserable packages of dirt-coloured groundnut, barely looking up from
their stalls. The fields of millet that once surrounded the villages have
been eroded by saltwater flooding and neglect, with the young men long gone.
Here, within a 10-kilometre radius, lived most of the young Gambian men who
perished aboard the Nazar, within hours of leaving Libya’s shore.
In the courtyard of his home in Bintang, a local civil servant, Doumbe
Jaiteh, tells me he lost his only two sons on board the Nazar. The old man
weeps as he clutches a copy of The Point, the main voice of opposition in
the Gambia. Inside are the names of a few of the 27 young Gambian men who
perished in the storm off Libya. Left behind by the deaths of Jaiteh’s sons
Bafoday, 30, and Forday, 27, are four wives, six children and a further 36
dependants — an entire extended family left destitute.
“What can I say to change this?” says Doumbe. “These boys went with our
hopes and our blessings. I encouraged them to go. To change our lives and
theirs. Not throw it away here on the rotten land like I did. We gave all of
our money to them, the little we had. We borrowed from our neighbours.
Bafoday and Forday were going to build us a home. My neighbour’s son went to
London five years ago. Their home is concrete.”
A former British colony, the Gambia is the smallest country in mainland
Africa, and one of the world’s poorest, a tiny sliver of land, a bleakly
flat nation of fewer than 1.5m people. Today it is a member of the
Commonwealth, and a tourist destination for nearly 60,000 Britons a year.
But to human-rights watchdogs it is also becoming a postage-stamp-sized scar
on the map. It is the personal domain of the president His Excellency Sheikh
Professor Al-Haji Dr Yahya AJJ Jammeh, the Gambia’s increasingly erratic
dictator, who is developing a personality cult based on fear and oppression.
Jammeh’s great hero is the Libyan leader, Colonel Gadaffi, and over the past
decade he has set about building up a “special relationship” with Tripoli.
This, and the regime at home, has encouraged an exodus of young Gambian men
such as the 27 who slipped helplessly from the deck of the sinking Nazar.
The final journey of Jaiteh’s sons, Bafoday and Forday, had begun 400
kilometres north of their home, in Dakar, Senegal. For $500 each, a
Mauritanian fixer had agreed to take 60 Gambians on the hard road across the
Senegalese border to the Mauritanian capital, Nouakchott, and across the
Sahara to Libya, where, for a further fee, they would get a boat to Europe.
The “fare”, funded by relatives and neighbours, was paid up front in full.
>From Saint Louis in northern Senegal, the Gambians had boarded a flatbed
Chinese truck and trundled north and then east across barren flatlands
during endless chilly nights and sweltering days. Their destination,
improbably, was Kufra, the oasis outpost in southern Libya over 1,700
kilometres away. Unable to absorb its own foreign population (in a country
of just 5.5m, there are 2m immigrants), and hoping to pressure the European
Union into lifting economic sanctions, Libya has continued to allow camps of
would-be immigrants to flourish around Kufra.
Three days into the trip the truck broke down and the Gambians were left
stranded in the desert. For Bafoday and Forday it would be their first
glimpse of death. According to their father the boys had told them simply:
“We will get a message to you within a month.”
“A month passed and I had no word,” Jaiteh told The Sunday Times. In fact,
the young men were marooned for weeks. Woefully ill-prepared for life in the
Sahara, where temperatures drop to near-freezing, four of their fellow
migrants died of hypothermia in their first few days as they lay helplessly
under the truck, while in the background the driver counted down the seconds
of his own life as he pieced together the engine parts of his truck.
After finally getting back on the road and crossing Mali, the brothers
somehow ended up in Dirkou in northern Niger, a town constantly on edge
because of its combustible mix of soldiers, smugglers, migrants, rebels from
neighbouring Chad and other shadowy desert dwellers. Here, in the past few
years, the number of mud-brick houses has doubled; more are under
construction. It has become the latest immigrant boomtown. Before making it
here, most migrants pass through Agadez, about 560 kilometres to the
southwest, a city that, like Timbuktu in neighbouring Mali, has served for
centuries as a gateway between black Africa to the south and Arab Africa to
the north.
At Dirkou, the Gambians’ driver and his Chinese truck disappeared in the
night as they waited to head further north. A further $100 bought them a
week’s lodging, lying low, in Dirkou; and, finally, a Jeep ride north to
Benghazi, Libya’s second-largest city, where they waited patiently for the
green light to head out to sea.
Follow the Gambia River 10 kilometres downstream from Doumbe Jaiteh’s
mud-block home and you reach Sanyaang village. In a family compound on the
outskirts of the community, cast out in mourning, are the widows of Ousman,
Ebrima, Ensa and Alouma Bojan Sayang, four brothers who perished aboard the
Nazar. “They slipped away in the night, like ghosts. We had so little
warning,” says Fatoumata Balajo, the wife of Alouma, breastfeeding her
eight-month-old son, Nyima. “My husband said to me before he left that, as
men, his brothers must pray as if they will die tomorrow and work as if
they’ll never die. He placed his fate and our future in God’s hands.”
All under 30, the Sayang brothers had taken the route east to Libya, through
the Senegalese city of Touba, a sprawling hovel that spans the arid
scrublands of central Senegal. Around Touba, north and south of the Senegal
river valley, village after village has emptied in a double exodus. Young
men and some women, braving desert and high seas to get to Europe and
beyond, are gone. In their wake their families have flowed steadily into
Touba, where Western Union exchanges are within reach.
Out of a population of 11m a staggering 1.6m Senegalese now live and work
outside the country, most concentrated communities in France, Italy and
Spain. The IMF estimates the money sent home by Senegalese migrants in 2008,
through the formal banking system and licensed money-transfer agencies, was
around £400m. On the wealthier backstreets of Touba the BMW or Mercedes of
the “golden boys” who made it big abroad are in evidence.
According to their surviving eldest brother, Demba Bojang Sayang, a
headmaster, the decision of Ousman, Ebrima, Ensa and Alouma to strike out
for Europe had been backed by all 74 members of his extended family. He
said: “In The Gambia young men and women no longer think of school. If you
take the traditional route through education, as I did, you go up the stairs
slowly, step by step. But if you leave for Europe through the desert or by
the sea it is the equivalent of travelling on an elevator. I walk into one
of my classrooms and ask the children, boys and girls, 12-year-olds, how
many have brothers or sisters in Europe. They will all put their hands up.
I then ask them how many want to follow and I get the same reply. All the
hands in the air. I am a headmaster yet I earn a monthly salary of 3,000
dalasi [about £67]. My neighbour’s brother supports his entire family, 47
people, selling handbags and watches in a London market. He sends home £350
a month. Here that can support everyone. It can build a brick home. My home
is mud-block — when the rains come there is nothing left of our floor.” He
added: “My four brothers sat here and looked at a map and they kept coming
back to Libya, they kept tracing the route across the desert with their
fingers. We all took part in the decision. When they left we knew the risks
were high, but for four of them to die in one boat is too much to take. Now
their widows float among us like the living dead, lost in their grief; their
children’s faces are a permanent reminder to us of what we have lost. Look
around you. Our family is now destitute.”
For the widows of the four men, life in the compound is no consolation for
the death of their husbands. Their fate will probably involve being
“adopted” by a member of their husband’s family, taken on as a fourth or
fifth wife. In the Gambia children of dead migrants have literally wasted
away from malnutrition.
“Finding food is the hardest thing,” says Fatou Cessay, the widow of Ebrima
Sayang, clutching her three children. “We’re reduced to beggars. We wait for
everyone else to eat before we get what is left. I had no say in my
husband’s decision.”
Two hours north from the Sayang compound the ominous sweep of the great
river floods the valley basin near the village of Kachung. Suleman Conteh,
36, grew up here in Kachung, the river a constant in his life. With it
flowed his dreams of escape. Five years ago he cheated death and somehow
made it to Europe — or, rather, to a detention centre in Tenerife. He was
eventually returned to the Gambia in disgrace, by Spanish military plane to
Senegal. “My route was the sea from Dakar, by pirogue,” says Suleman. “The
journey to the Canary Islands should take eight days with a good wind. If
you hit 10 days you are in trouble. There were 89 people on my boat. I
counted them all as we sat in the darkness.
“The drinking water ran out about 48 hours into the voyage. The fee was
supposed to include water and food. The traffickers ordered us to carry
nothing. No papers, no personal belongings, no supplies. It happened
quickly. Suddenly. It took everyone by surprise. Everything happened in slow
motion. The boat’s engine, wheezing and spluttering, cut out after three
days. By day four, floating helplessly in the open sun, the women were no
longer weeping; their tear ducts were cracked and withered. On day four I
started to think about drinking my own urine. Some tried around me but
vomited.
“I started having panic attacks. Others followed. I looked at the seawater
and thought, ‘If I drink this I will survive.’ So I started drinking. I
scooped the water into my hands and it tasted bitter but it seemed to work.
The others joined in and there was euphoria and relief across the boat.
Within hours the stomach cramps started and the dying began. We floated for
four more days, tipping the dead overboard; we counted 17 corpses in all.
For those of us who survived to the final day, when we were picked up by a
Spanish patrol boat, we might as well have been dead.”
When Suleman returned to the Gambia last year, a broken man, the
responsibility of getting to Europe fell to his brother, Jereh. Like the
Sayang brothers, his journey would take him through Touba and eventually to
the same safe house in Benghazi as the Jaiteh brothers. Unlike Suleman,
Jereh was unable to cheat death. Sitting in the family compound Jereh
Conteh’s twin girls take turns on the breast of his widow, Janka. Alasuna
and Awa Conteh were born five months ago as their father prepared to go to
Europe. “My husband inherited the debts of his brother so had to go. He was
terrified of the sea so went overland to Libya,” said Janka, her sad eyes
looking out towards the river. “His body was never found.”
All routes from the Gambia lead to Senegal. At the border we pass into
Francophile Africa and follow the only road north, the same route taken by
the 27 young men who died aboard the Nazar. On the approaches to Mbour the
ubiquitous Western Union signs illuminate the roads. “Gone are the adult men
but here for ever are the yellow signs,” our driver tells us in French.
The people along this stretch of coast south of Dakar traditionally enjoyed
warm waters, a mild climate and an abundance of fruit and fish. But then the
factory ships from Spain, Britain and latterly Japan came and emptied the
seas. In the wake of the western boats the residents of Mbour and other
towns along the coast found a new source of income: in the past decade an
entire industry has sprung up around emigration. Because the boats that
leave never come back, new ones have to be built. Then the boats need
outboard motors, global positioning systems, supplies of water and food, and
fuel. The migrants also need accommodation, safe houses, as they wait to go.
But in towns such as Mbour and the fishing villages south of the capital,
Dakar, it is the local men and not the foreigners who have passed through
and gone.
You can smell the sea from Yayi Bayam Diouf’s office in Thiaroye sur Mer,
just outside Dakar. Madame Diouf’s son, Alioune, had swum in the waters
here, close to the sewage outpipe, and looked back at the shore. By the time
he was a young man he was already looking the other way, towards Europe. In
March 2006, aged 26, he boarded a boat barely 500 yards from his family home
and set out on his final journey. Somewhere in the rough swell of the
Atlantic the vessel went down, taking 90 young men and women with it.
Rather than mourn, Madame Diouf decided to fight back. “Assez! Assez!
Enough! I’d had enough,” she said. “I was to blame for him going and I had
to take action — not weep and lose my life to misery.” Madame Diouf’s
response was to found the Women’s Collective for the Fight Against
Clandestine Immigration. It now has 375 members, all Senegalese women who
have lost their sons to the sea. “We have begun to investigate the
traffickers. We are exposing them for killing our sons. We go to the
schools, to tell the next generation they must not die in the sea, and to
the beaches where men make boats to go west. We confront the men building
the boats. This is how to stop the drownings. Direct action.”
Along the shoreline of Thiaroye sur Mer local madrasahs hum with the sounds
of children reciting the Koran as they rock back and forward to dodge the
long sticks of their teachers. Niang Boubacar smooths out his long tunic on
the washed marble steps of the local mosque. “If you give me $1,000 I will
get even you to Europe with no passport, no paperwork, nothing,” he says,
mocking us and adjusting his sunglasses. Signs of Boubacar’s wealth as a
trafficker are evident in his gold watch and expanding waistline. He has
made his fortune by sending his countrymen west, out across the sea. He
claims to have sent as many as 5,000 young men in the past decade. He makes
no mention of how many died on the way.
Niang Boubacar claims that he deals in salvation, not in death. “I do this
to save people from poverty, not to condemn them,” he says. “My job is
difficult. To get a boat up and ready I hire a fishing captain and a crew of
seven or eight to make each trip. I order the captain to travel to a
community where he is not well known, where I rent him a room. He puts out
word that he has a pirogue going. We need 80 to make it work. When the
wooden boat is booked full we build it here in Thiaroye sur Mer, behind the
beach out of sight of the authorities. When it is ready to go we will fill
it with drums of fuel, fresh water and food, everything you will need to
survive. It’s safe.
When the young men bring the money to me they all have gris-gris around
their necks, charms that their mothers get from their marabouts, their
Muslim leaders; they believe it helps to bring them a safe crossing. I take
between $400 and $500 from each. From Senegal, my boats motor up the coast
to near Nouakchott in Mauritania, and from there to Nouadhibou, on the
border of Mauritania. From that point, the boat cuts west to the Canary
Islands. When conditions are good, the trip takes eight days. If the boat
has to turn back, the passengers are reimbursed half the cost of the
tickets, but if they are arrested it is Allah’s will. If they make it they
head straight to payphones and tell their families. This is the best moment
for me. I have helped to save them and their families from a life of
poverty. This is why I do this.”
Each week of the summer on Spanish and Italian television, footage is shown
of men, women and children on rickety gangplanks in Tenerife or Lampedusa.
Walking almost blindly in surreal, dignified silence, they stumble ashore.
Laura Boldrini, a spokeswoman for the UN’s high commissioner for refugees,
says that in the past year the number of women and children arriving on the
boats has doubled. Last year, 678 minors reached Lampedusa alone, without
family. Those found at sea, within sight of Sicily’s arid coastline, with
its white sands, prickly pears and shoddy white concrete towns, lie
breathless and gasping on open boats.
Only a minority of Italians are uncomfortable about such scenes. The
president of the Vatican pontifical council commented upon the country’s
“unforgivable indifference” after a group of Eritreans were reported to have
died from hunger and thirst trying to reach Europe from Libya. Only five
migrants survived. A total of 73 of their companions perished during the
voyage. The emaciated few who lived through the hell said that their boat
had been ignored by passing vessels — it had been adrift for 20 days. “Our
so-called civilised societies have in reality developed an attitude of
rejection of foreigners,” Archbishop Antonio Maria Veglio told Radio
Vatican, “resulting not only from ignor-ance but selfishness and refusal to
share what one has with others.”
Like the countless other clandestini who are picked up in the sea off
Europe, those who survived the latest tragedy are sent to detention centres
before they are quietly and efficiently deported back to Africa. For the
fortunate few who do get asylum it is a stopping point before they find a
regular salary to rent more salubrious accommodation. For most, the centres
remain a prison, a symbol of their frustrated hopes — free but cut off from
life in mainland Europe.
In the Sidi Hamed cemetery in Tripoli’s residential Gargaresh neighbourhood,
the bodies recovered from the Nazar remain anonymous. Under tombstones
reading “identity unknown” or merely “African national”, they lie on top of
one another, three to a narrow grave. Their fresh graves have been dug by
other migrants whiling away their time in Libya. Each one waiting for their
own opportunity to go out into the abyss
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