By Laraba MUREY with Agency
A new report has shed light how the European Union, EU, supports, finances and is directly involved in clandestine operations in North African countries to dump tens of thousands of Black people especially Nigerians, Ghanaians and others in the desert or remote areas each year to prevent them from coming to the EU.
One consultant, who worked on projects funded by the EU Trust Fund, under which the EU has given Tunisia, Mauritania and Morocco more than €400m for migration management in recent years, said of the aims of the fund: “You have to make migrants’ lives difficult. Complicate their lives. If you leave a migrant from Guinea in the Sahara [in Morocco] twice, the third time he will ask you to voluntarily bring him back home.”
Funds for these desert dumps have been paid under the guise of “migration management” with the EU claiming that the money doesn’t support human rights abuses against sub-Saharan African communities in North Africa. Brussels claims publicly that it closely monitors how this money is spent. But the reality is different.
In a year-long investigation by the Washington Post, Enass, Der Spiegel, El Pais, IrpiMedia, ARD, Inkyfada and Le Monde, it was revealed that Europe knowingly funds, and in some instances is directly involved in systematic racial profiling detention and expulsion of Black communities across at least three North African countries.
The findings show that in Morocco, Mauritania and Tunisia, refugees and migrant workers, some of whom were on their way towards Europe, as well as people who had legal status and established livelihoods in these countries, are apprehended based on the colour of their skin, loaded onto buses and driven to the middle of nowhere, often arid desert areas.
The report indicts that they are left without any assistance, water or food, leaving them at risk of kidnapping, extortion, torture, sexual violence, and, in the worst instances, death. Others are taken to border areas where they are reportedly sold by the authorities to human traffickers and gangs who torture them for ransom.
This investigation amounts to the most comprehensive attempt yet to document European knowledge and involvement with anti-migrant, racially motivated operations in North Africa. It exposes how not only has this system of mass displacement and abuse been known about in Brussels for years, but that it is run thanks to money, vehicles, equipment, intelligence and security forces provided by the EU and European countries.
METHODS
The team interviewed more than 50 survivors of these expulsions across Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia – all of whom were from Sub-Saharan or West African countries – which helped them to recognise the systematic and racially-motivated nature of the practices.
Some survivors supplied visual material and/or location data from their journey, which we were able to geolocate to support their accounts and map out what happened.
In Tunisia, 13 incidents that occurred between July 2023 and May 2024 were verified in which groups of black people were rounded up in cities or at ports and driven many miles away, usually close to the Libyan or Algerian borders, and dumped, as well as one incident of a group being handed over to Libyan security forces and then incarcerated in a detention centre.
In Morocco the team followed the paramilitaries of the Auxiliary Forces and filmed them picking up black people from the streets three times over three days in the capital, Rabat.
The team also filmed people being detained in local government buildings before being loaded onto unmarked buses and taken to remote areas.
In Mauritania, in the capital Nouakchott, refugees and migrants were filmed being brought to the centre in a large truck and Spanish police officers entering the detention centre on a regular basis. We filmed a white bus with migrants in it leaving the detention centre towards the border with Mali, an active warzone.
By speaking with current and former EU staff members, as well as sources within national police forces and international organisations with a presence in the countries where the dumps are taking place, it was established that the EU is well aware of the dump operations and sometimes directly involved.
European officials have expressed concern over escalating operations in the region against sub-Saharan African migrants, and consistently denied that funds are being used to violate basic rights. But two senior EU sources said it was “impossible” to fully account for the way in which European funding was ultimately used.
