African Migrants Push On Toward Europe Amid Pandemic
A police officer watches a group of illegal immigrants protesting on the roof of the Aluche Immigration Detention Center during a riot on March 17, 2020, in Madrid. GABRIEL BOUYS / AFP.Many Africans are managing to evade coronavirus lockdown barriers in Niger, the Sahel’s migrant crossroads, as they press on with their perilous desert trek to the Mediterranean Sea and ultimately Europe.
Since the anti-migrant plan set up in 2015 to reinforce patrols, security forces “have intensified further their surveillance to enforce border closing measures aimed at fighting the coronavirus,” a local official said.“Before we could cross little by little but because of the anti-coronavirus measures , the road is really blocked,” Salifou said.
Niger has already decreed a state of emergency, closed its borders with Libya and its other neighbours as well as cut off the capital Niamey from the rest of the country.Libya, where migrants have suffered from the violence and lawlessness that followed Moamer Kadhafi’s overthrow in 2011, is also affected by the coronavirus.
“They don’t care about the coronavirus. In Agadez, some ‘ghettos’ have reopened and the migrants look for any chance to bound into the desert,” Amma said.Idrissa Salifou, the former people smuggler, said: “Recently around 60 vehicles transporting migrants managed to enter Libya, but they were quickly picked up by Libyan border guards who drove them to a city in that country.”
It said it has rented extra facilities and reinforced prevention measures in six transit centres which are currently at the maximum capacity. During a visit to Niamey the same year, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte hailed an 80 percent reduction in 2018 of clandestine migrant arrivals on Italian shores.
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