Their situation seemed desperate; their demeanour, portrayed in several videos published by news outlets, was sour.
On a recent weekday in March, men, women, and even children – all with their belongings heaped on their heads or strapped to their bodies – disembarked from the ferry they say they were forcibly hauled onto from the vast northwest African nation of Mauritania to the Senegalese town of Rosso, on the banks of the Senegal River.
Their offence? Being migrants from the region, they told reporters, regardless of whether they had legal residency papers.
“We suffered there,” one woman told France’s TV5 Monde, a baby perched on her hip. “It was really bad.”
The deportees are among hundreds of West Africans who have been rounded up by Mauritanian security forces, detained, and sent over the border to Senegal and Mali in recent months, human rights groups say.
According to one estimate from the Mauritanian Association for Human Rights (AMDH),1,200 people were pushed back in March alone, even though about 700 of them had residence permits.
Those pushed back told reporters about being randomly approached for questioning before being arrested, detained for days in tight prison cells with insufficient food and water, and tortured. Many people remained in prison in Mauritania, they said.
The largely desert country – which has signed expensive deals with the European Union to keep migrants from taking the risky boat journey across the Atlantic Ocean to Western shores – has called the pushbacks necessary to crack down on human smuggling networks.
However, its statements have done little to calm rare anger from its neighbours, Mali and Senegal, whose citizens make up a huge number of those sent back.
Mali’s government, in a statement in March, expressed “indignation” at the treatment of its nationals, adding that “the conditions of arrest are in flagrant violation of human rights and the rights of migrants in particular.”
In Senegal, a member of parliament called the pushbacks “xenophobic” and urged the government to launch an investigation.
“We’ve seen these kinds of pushbacks in the past but it is at an intensity we’ve never seen before in terms of the number of people deported and the violence used,” Hassan Ould Moctar, a migration researcher at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, told Al Jazeera.
The blame, the researcher said, was largely to be put on the EU. On one hand, Mauritania was likely under pressure from Brussels, and on the other hand, it was also likely reacting to controversial rumours that migrants deported from Europe would be resettled in the country despite Nouakchott’s denial of such an agreement.
Is Mauritania the EU’s external border?
Mauritania, on the edge of the Atlantic, is one of the closest points from the continent to Spain’s Canary Islands. That makes it a popular departure point for migrants who crowd the coastal capital, Nouakchott, and the commercial northern city of Nouadhibou. Most are trying to reach the Canaries, a Spanish enclave closer to the African continent than to Europe, from where they can seek asylum.
Due to its role as a transit hub, the EU has befriended Nouakchott – as well as the major transit points of Morocco and Senegal – since the 2000s, pumping funds to enable security officials there to prevent irregular migrants from embarking on the crossing.
However, the EU honed in on Mauritania with renewed vigour last year after the number of people travelling from the country shot up to unusual levels, making it the number one departure point.
About 83 percent of the 7,270 people who arrived in the Canaries in January 2024 travelled from Mauritania, migrant advocacy group Caminando Fronteras (CF) noted in a report last year. That number represented a 1,184 percent increase compared with January 2023, when most people were leaving Senegal. Some 3,600 died on the Mauritania-Atlantic route between January and April 2024, CF noted.
Read more: Xenophobic’: Neighbours outraged over Mauritania’s mass migrant pushback
Source: Al Jazeera
