Nigerian woman survives after being abandoned by smugglers
In West Africa, a desert graveyard has claimed countless lives
Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Max Bearak.
Two weeks ago, a 22-year-old Nigerian woman was found in the desert.
Aid workers rescued the woman — nicknamed Adoara — after she and about 50 others spent 10 days wandering the Tenere section of the vast desert. They had been abandoned by their smugglers in a barren expanse of land the size of Texas.
To live, Adoara resorted to drinking her own urine. She and the others buried the dead under the shifting sands until they were too exhausted to perform those last rites.
Only six survived, including Adoara.
A dangerous route for West African migrants
Hundreds of thousands of mostly West African migrants fleeing war, poverty and persecution have crossed this stretch of the Sahara over the past few years. They scrounge together life savings and bet them all on a treacherous journey — first across the Tenere; then farther into the Sahara, into Libya; then the choppy seas of the Mediterranean — in hopes of a better life in Europe.
The sandy graveyard of the Tenere has claimed hundreds, if not thousands, of lives.
The economy of a deadly obstacle course
The Tenere is located in Niger, which, per the United Nations’ development rankings, has long held the grim position of the world’s poorest country.
Smugglers in Agadez, a city on the edge of the desert that functions as a migrant transit hub, stuff the back of pickup trucks with people and then speed through the roadless expanse for days until they reach the Libyan border, where their human cargo is dealt away to new handlers. The collapse of the Libyan state in 2011, after Moammar Gaddafi was deposed, turned that country into the preferred point for embarking across the Mediterranean.
Until last year, Niger’s military would escort smugglers’ convoys to the Libyan border, raking in bribes along the way. An entire economy was born in the desert, with both smugglers and soldiers making money in a region where jobs had been scarce, or scarcely paid. More than 400,000 would-be asylum seekers traversed the Tenere in 2016, according to the International Organization for Migration. That was four times the number in the year prior. Most were young men.
Many made it only as far as Libya or Algeria, but 180,000 reached Italy last year. Some pushed north to even more prosperous countries such as Germany.
Europe’s involvement
European countries pledged major development assistance funds if Niger would crack down on smugglers.
Late last year, Niger began to enforce a new law criminalizing the smuggling business. Military and police officers were replaced at all desert checkpoints between Agadez and the Libyan border. Raids were conducted on migrant ghettos in Agadez, aiming to shutter the shadow smuggling economy. Migrants were given incentives to voluntarily return to their countries of origin.
Half-way through 2017, it appears the strategy has succeeded only in pushing smugglers and migrants like Adoara toward riskier routes where they are at lower risk of detection and detention by security forces. More than 60,000 people arrived in Italy by the end of May, putting this year on pace to pass last year’s total.
Though the United Nations and the IOM have registered far lower numbers of migrants passing through Agadez, that is probably because smugglers are simply avoiding the city.
“They say that very few people are coming through Agadez now, but that’s not true. People are just avoiding the checkpoints now because it is illegal,” said Ibrahim Manzo Diallo, a journalist based in Agadez. “So everyone has had to move their operations, but it’s really not too far from here.”
Why smugglers abandon migrants
- Crossing tougher terrain in fear of military arrest
- Vehicular malfunction
- low fuel
- migrants falling off the truck and being left behind
A group of 75 migrants was abandoned in the Tenere in late June, and the 23 who survived by walking 50 miles to the desert outpost of Seguedine said their drivers had gotten spooked after seeing a security vehicle, ordered them out of the truck and fled. Diallo said that story was one he was hearing with increasing frequency.
Overall, the total number of abandonments and deaths in Niger’s desert is impossible to know, given the desert’s vastness and the new proliferation of even more remote routes.
Migrant education programs
In conjunction with European governments, the International Organization for Migration has ramped up education programs for migrants that aim to dissuade them from crossing the Tenere.
“It’s impossible to forbid migrants from taking those routes or to close down the desert,” Monica Chiriac, an IOM spokeswoman for Niger, said. “A lot of migrants come back from the desert saying ‘I didn’t know what it was like. Had I known, I would have never left.’ Most of them don’t make an informed decision when they choose this route, and we are working on changing that.”
There are certainly enough horror stories for such a curriculum. The Tenere has its own perils, but once migrants are in Libya, many are bought and sold as indentured laborers, and housed in fetid, disease-ridden cells while they work toward earning passage on boats crossing the Mediterranean. And the dangers of the sea are now well known.
Yet tens of thousands still make it through this morbid obstacle course, and the $11.2 billion that Africans sent home in remittances from Europe last year only make the rewards clearer to prospective migrants, not to mention their home country’s governments, which also benefit from the inflow of cash.
“It is still easier to get to Europe through Niger and Libya than anywhere else,” said Diallo, the journalist in Agadez. “People want to get to Europe and get there fast.”
