Meet the survivors, bereaved families from Gambia and Senegal, and a man who smuggles the people — at a colossal price
Fatoumata Balajo with her son Nyima. Her husband, Alouma, and his three brothers were aboard the overcrowded fishing boat the Nazar
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.”
Jereh Conteh’s widow, Janka, with their five-month-old twins
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.
Niang Boubacar has built his wealth on people-smuggling
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.
Immigrants sell their ‘designer’ wares on the streets of Pisa, Italy
