Remote African hub reopens for migrants heading to Europe
The bus station in Agadez, a remote town of low mud buildings in Niger, West Africa, is bustling again.
Every week, thousands of migrants from West and Central Africa depart from the station at this gateway to the Sahara aboard a caravan of pick-up trucks, traveling for days towards North Africa, where many will then attempt to cross the Mediterranean Sea in a search for Europe.
For years this portal was closed, at least officially. The country's government, friendly to Europe, banned migration from Agadez, and in return the European Union poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Niger's coffers and the local economy.
But last summer, after generals seized power in Niger in a military coup, the European Union suspended financial support to the government – and in response the generals broke the migration arrangement with the European Union in November. The gate is open again and a new herd of hopeful migrants is coming through, to the relief of many locals.
“Migration is the way we make ends meet,” said Aicha Maman, a single mother who runs a company that helps migrants and was jailed in Agadez last year for illegal trafficking.
However, Niger's decision has caused alarm among European officials, who fear the end of the partnership with Niger will lead to many more people risking the treacherous journey north.
The land route through Niger's Agadez Port is considered by many migrants to be cheaper and less dangerous than the ocean route in the Atlantic Ocean – on rickety boats from the west coast of Africa via the Canary Islands. Even with the Niger Route officially closed, migration to Europe in 2022 reached its highest point since 2016.
Migration is once again at the top of the agenda of several European governments, and far-right parties seeking to deport migrants are on the rise months ahead of crucial elections for the European Parliament, one of the European Union's three main institutions.
Emmanuela Del Re, the European Union's top diplomat for the African region of which Niger is a part, said in a recent interview that Niger's military junta is hitting back at the European Union for refusing to recognize the junta: “They are using migration as blackmail against the European Union.”
In Agadez, a desert outpost that has been at the crossroads of trade and migration routes for centuries, thousands of households depended on transporting, housing and selling goods to migrants.
Now that migration is legal again, there are opportunities again: young men are buying new pickups to drive people north. Entrepreneurs who arranged housing and transportation for migrants have been released from prison.
In her mud house, Ms. Maman recently said she planned to resume her activities by housing migrants in homes known locally as “ghettos” and connecting them with drivers — a venture she has relied on for years to to support her children. and her parents.
“We have always considered migration as an economic activity,” said Mohamed Anacko, the top civilian official in the Agadez region. “It's not human trafficking, it's transportation.”
Two men in their 20s rested one recent morning in a shelter on the outskirts of Agadez. The men, identified only by their first names to avoid detection by authorities, had arrived days earlier from neighboring Nigeria and bought the water containers, sunglasses and headscarves needed for the three-day trip to Libya.
Their journey would have been illegal under Niger's anti-migration law weeks earlier, but now they were free to head north: one of the men, Abubakar, said he would look for a construction job in Libya , but as a fan of Real Madrid football team, aiming to eventually reach Spain. The other, Adamou, said he had Paris in his sights, but first any job in Libya would do.
Every week, about a hundred pickup trucks, each carrying thirty passengers, leave Agadez under military escort to protect them from bandits. Before Niger's government repealed the law last year, several dozen trucks left illegally, local authorities and researchers say.
Few people have any incentive to keep the size of these caravans down: when Niger began implementing its anti-migration law in 2016, thousands of locals lost their only source of income. Agadez essentially turned into a border post for the European Union, thousands of miles from European shores.
Countless people traveling through Niger never try to reach Europe; Many work in North African countries for a few years before returning home.
Yet the European Union, scarred by the 2015 migration crisis, when more than a million people reached Europe, mainly from the Middle East and Africa, has made efforts to keep migrants at bay by providing financial support to some key transit countries in return for stricter border controls. checks.
For Niger it was an attractive trade-off.
Until last summer's coup, the European Union had provided almost $1 billion in bilateral aid to Niger's government since 2014, according to official figures from the bloc, on top of hundreds of millions spent by individual European countries.
The European Union also pledged to help those who make their living from the migration sector in the Agadez region find new jobs. But local officials in Agadez say the promised funds only benefited about 900 of the 6,500 people involved in the migration sector.
“Those who made millions through migration were offered much less,” said Dr. Rhoumour Ahmet Tchilouta, a migration researcher from Agadez, about the millions in local currency, the equivalent of thousands of dollars, that some could earn in a month.
Yet, according to the UN migration agency, more than four million migrants have passed through Agadez since 2016.
Those who tried to leave hid in the “ghetto houses,” hidden behind tall metal fences in residential areas. Or they bypassed the city and escaped police surveillance by walking unknown paths, resulting in thousands of deaths or disappearances, according to humanitarian organizations.
“The Sahara is swallowing countless migrants, just like the Mediterranean Sea,” said Azizou Chehou, head of Alarm Phone Sahara, a nonprofit that rescues stranded migrants in the desert.
Tens of thousands of others have passed through Agadez in the opposite direction: on their way back from North Africa after militias in Libya or security forces in Algeria drove them out. From Agadez, the UN migration agency repatriates them to their country of origin with financial assistance from the European Union.
Agadez has become the choke point where those wanting to reach North Africa intersect with those returning home to West or Central African countries, and where stories of hope and suffering collide.
One morning last month, some Sierra Leonean men awaiting repatriation chatted in one of those dilapidated houses with fellow migrants from their country heading north.
Among them was Mabinty Conteh, 23, with her 9-month-old niece. Ms Conteh said her sister, the baby's mother, had died last year, and her own parents had died of Ebola years ago. She wanted to reach Italy via Libya, but she ran out of money.
“I don't have any family anymore,” said Ms. Conteh, who had sold clothes in Sierra Leone. “I do not have anything.”
Her compatriots tried to discourage her by sharing stories of sexual violence and abuse by border guards in Algeria, and sexual slavery in Libya. In interviews, more than a dozen migrants described being held in appalling conditions in Algerian prisons and then forced to walk for hours through the desert before being taken to Agadez.
Alfred Conteh, a 29-year-old truck driver from Sierra Leone (no relation to Mabinty Conteh) described how prisoners in an Algerian prison were so thirsty that they stole each other's bottles of urine. Mr Conteh said he had been waiting for his repatriation for months.
“I'm tired of this stuff and just want to go home,” he said.
But neither laws nor testimonies of atrocities discourage the migrants.
“People want to leave, no matter how much someone stops them,” said Demba Mballo, a Senegalese migrant who has settled in Agadez and now matches migrants with drivers. “We don't encourage, we don't discourage. We only facilitate.”
Omar Hama Saley reporting contributed.