#décés

En Russie, la dure vie des habitants asphyxiés par le charbon
▻https://reporterre.net/En-Russie-la-dure-vie-des-habitants-asphyxies-par-le-charbon

À côté des mines de charbon à ciel ouvert, les habitants du Kouzbass, le grand bassin houiller de la Russie, endurent une situation sanitaire et écologique catastrophique.

https://reporterre.net/IMG/jpg/kouzbass_-_carte_-_reporterre-2.jpg

La corde du diable

https://www.cc-pays-stmeen.fr/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/3518-la-corde-du-diable-la-lucarne-arte.jpg

« La corde du diable » est le nom du barbelé, ce fil de fer inventé à la fin du XIXe siècle aux États-Unis qui emprisonne les hommes et les bêtes, de la prairie à la prison, de la base militaire à la frontière. C’est à travers ce prisme que Sophie Bruneau approche l’épineuse question de la #surveillance et du #contrôle. Un essai documentaire exigeant, à la force plastique stupéfiante qui présente une poignante réflexion sur la gestion politique de l’espace.

« La corde du diable », c’est le nom donné par ses détracteurs au barbelé, ce fil de fer inventé à la fin du XIXe siècle aux États-Unis. Le film s’ancre dans les grands espaces américains et leurs kilomètres de clôture, comme si la trame narrative se dévidait en miroir de ces millions d’épissures acérées derrière lesquelles lorgnent les têtes de bétail. Point de départ : Omaha, dans le Nebraska, entre foire aux bestiaux, bottes rutilantes et Stetson poussiéreux. Claquements de fouet et musique bluegrass en fond sonore. De la prairie à la prison, de la base militaire à la frontière, la corde du diable emprisonne les hommes et les bêtes. C’est à travers le prisme de cet objet universel que Sophie Bruneau – coréalisatrice du remarquable documentaire Ils ne mouraient pas tous mais tous étaient frappés, sur la souffrance au travail – aborde l’épineuse question de la surveillance et du contrôle.

▻https://www.arte.tv/fr/videos/057390-000-A/la-corde-du-diable

#film #film_documentaire
#barbelé #clôture #USA #Etats-Unis #fil_barbelé #élevage #prison #armée #objets #identification #frontières #Mexique #Tohono_O'odham #Baboquivari #migrations #mourir_dans_le_désert #morts #décès #morgue

‘A system of #global_apartheid’ : author #Harsha_Walia on why the border crisis is a myth

The Canadian organizer says the actual crises are capitalism, war and the climate emergency, which drive mass migration.

The rising number of migrant children and families seeking to cross the US border with Mexico is emerging as one of the most serious political challenges for Joe Biden’s new administration.

That’s exactly what Donald Trump wants: he and other Republicans believe that Americans’ concerns about a supposed “border crisis” will help Republicans win back political power.

But Harsha Walia, the author of two books about border politics, argues that there is no “border crisis,” in the United States or anywhere else. Instead, there are the “actual crises” that drive mass migration – such as capitalism, war and the climate emergency – and “imagined crises” at political borders, which are used to justify further border securitization and violence.

Walia, a Canadian organizer who helped found No One Is Illegal, which advocates for migrants, refugees and undocumented people, talked to the Guardian about Border and Rule, her new book on global migration, border politics and the rise of what she calls “racist nationalism.” The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Last month, a young white gunman was charged with murdering eight people, most of them Asian women, at several spas around Atlanta, Georgia. Around the same time, there was increasing political attention to the higher numbers of migrants and refugees showing up at the US-Mexico border. Do you see any connection between these different events?

I think they are deeply connected. The newest invocation of a “border surge” and a “border crisis” is again creating the spectre of immigrants and refugees “taking over.” This seemingly race neutral language – we are told there’s nothing inherently racist about saying “border surge”– is actually deeply racially coded. It invokes a flood of black and brown people taking over a so-called white man’s country. That is the basis of historic immigrant exclusion, both anti-Asian exclusion in the 19th century, which very explicitly excluded Chinese laborers and especially Chinese women presumed to be sex workers, and anti-Latinx exclusion. If we were to think about one situation as anti-Asian racism and one as anti-Latinx racism, they might seem disconnected. But both forms of racism are fundamentally anti-immigrant. Racial violence is connected to the idea of who belongs and who doesn’t. Whose humanity is questioned in a moment of crisis. Who is scapegoated in a moment of crisis.

How do you understand the rise of white supremacist violence, particularly anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim violence, that we are seeing around the world?

The rise in white supremacy is a feedback loop between individual rightwing vigilantes and state rhetoric and state policy. When it comes to the Georgia shootings, we can’t ignore the fact that the criminalization of sex work makes sex workers targets. It’s not sex work itself, it’s the social condition of criminalization that creates that vulnerability. It’s similar to the ways in which border vigilantes have targeted immigrants: the Minutemen who show up at the border and harass migrants, or the kidnapping of migrants by the United Constitutional Patriots at gunpoint. We can’t dissociate that kind of violence from state policies that vilify migrants and refugees, or newspapers that continue to use the word “illegal alien”.

National borders are often described as protecting citizens, or as protecting workers at home from lower-paid workers in other countries. You argue that borders actually serve a very different purpose.

Borders maintain a massive system of global apartheid. They are preventing, on a scale we’ve never seen before, the free movement of people who are trying to search for a better life.

There’s been a lot of emphasis on the ways in which Donald Trump was enacting very exclusionary immigration policies. But border securitization and border controls have been bipartisan practices in the United States. We saw the first policies of militarization at the border with Mexico under Bill Clinton in the late 90s.

In the European context, the death of [three-year-old Syrian toddler] Alan Kurdi, all of these images of migrants drowning in the Mediterranean, didn’t actually lead to an immigration policy that was more welcoming. Billions of euros are going to drones in the Mediterranean, war ships in the Mediterranean. We’re seeing the EU making trade and aid agreements it has with countries in the Sahel region of Africa and the Middle East contingent on migration control. They are relying on countries in the global south as the frontiers of border militarization. All of this is really a crisis of immobility. The whole world is increasingly becoming fortified.

What are the root causes of these ‘migration crises’? Why is this happening?

What we need to understand is that migration is a form of reparations. Migration is an accounting for global violence. It’s not a coincidence that the vast number of people who are migrants and refugees in the world today are black and brown people from poor countries that have been made poor because of centuries of imperialism, of empire, of exploitation and deliberate underdevelopment. It’s those same fault lines of plunder around the world that are the fault lines of migration. More and more people are being forced out of their land because of trade agreements, mining extraction, deforestation, climate change. Iraq and Afghanistan have been for decades on the top of the UN list for displaced people and that has been linked to the US and Nato’s occupations of those countries.

Why would governments have any interest in violence at borders? Why spend so much money on security and militarization?

The border does not only serve to exclude immigrants and refugees, but also to create conditions of hyper exploitation, where some immigrants and refugees do enter, but in a situation of extreme precarity. If you’re undocumented, you will work for less than minimum wage. If you attempt to unionize, you will face the threat of deportation. You will not feel you can access public services, or in some cases you will be denied public services. Borders maintain racial citizenship and create a pool of hyper-exploitable cheapened labor. People who are never a full part of the community, always living in fear, constantly on guard.

Why do you choose to put your focus on governments and their policies, rather than narratives of migrants themselves?

Border deaths are presented as passive occurrences, as if people just happen to die, as if there’s something inherently dangerous about being on the move, which we know is not the case. Many people move with immense privilege, even luxury. It’s more accurate to call what is happening to migrants and refugees around the world as border killings. People are being killed by policies that are intended to kill. Literally, governments are hoping people will die, are deliberating creating conditions of death, in order to create deterrence.

It is very important to hold the states accountable, instead of narratives where migrants are blamed for their own deaths: ‘They knew it was going to be dangerous, why did they move?’ Which to me mimics the very horrible tropes of survivors in rape culture.

You live in Canada. Especially in the United States, many people think of Canada as this inherently nice place. Less racist, less violent, more supportive of refugees and immigrants. Is that the reality?

It’s totally false. Part of the incentive of writing this second book was being on a book tour in the US and constantly hearing, ‘At least in Canada it can’t be as bad as in the US.’ ‘Your prime minister says refugees are welcome.’ That masks the violence of how unfree the conditions of migration are, with the temporary foreign worker program, which is a form of indentureship. Workers are forced to live in the home of their employer, if you’re a domestic worker, or forced to live in a labor camp, crammed with hundreds of people. When your labor is no longer needed, you’re deported, often with your wages unpaid. There is nothing nice about it. It just means Canada has perfected a model of exploitation. The US and other countries in Europe are increasingly looking to this model, because it works perfectly to serve both the state and capital interests. Capital wants cheapened labor and the state doesn’t want people with full citizenship rights.

You wrote recently that ‘Escalating white supremacy cannot be dealt with through anti-terror or hate crime laws.’ Why?

Terrorism is not a colorblind phenomena. The global war on terror for the past 20 years was predicated around deeply Islamophobic rhetoric that has had devastating impact on Black and Brown Muslims and Muslim-majority countries around the world. I think it is implausible and naive to assume that the national security infrastructure, or the criminal legal system, which is also built on racialized logics, especially anti-black racism – that we can somehow subvert these systems to protect racialized communities. It’s not going to work.

One of the things that happened when the Proud Boys were designated as a terrorist organization in Canada is that it provided cover to expand this terror list that communities have been fighting against for decades. On the day the Proud Boys were listed, a number of other organizations were added which were part of the Muslim community. That was the concern that many of us had: will this just become an excuse to expand the terrorist list rather than dismantle it? In the long run, what’s going to happen? Even if in some miraculous world the Proud Boys and its members are dismantled, what’s going to happen to all the other organizations on the list? They’re still being criminalized, they’re still being terrorized, they’re still being surveilled.

So if you don’t think the logics of national security or criminal justice will work, what do you think should be done about escalating white supremacist violence?

I think that’s the question: what do we need to be doing? It’s not about one arm of the state, it’s about all of us. What’s happening in our neighborhoods, in our school systems, in the media? There’s not one simple fix. We need to keep each other safe. We need to make sure we’re intervening whenever we see racial violence, everything from not letting racist jokes off the hook to fighting for systemic change. Anti-war work is racial justice work. Anti-capitalist work is racial justice work.

You advocate for ending border imperialism, and ending racial capitalism. Those are big goals. How do you break that down into things that one person can actually do?

I actually found it harder before, because I would try things that I thought were simple and would change the world, and they wouldn’t. For me, understanding how violences are connected, and really understanding the immensity of the problem, was less overwhelming. It motivated me to think in bigger ways, to organize with other people. To understand this is fundamentally about radical, massive collective action. It can’t rely on one person or even one place.

▻https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/07/us-border-immigration-harsha-walia
#apartheid #inégalités #monde #migrations #frontières #réfugiés #capitalisme #guerres #conflits #climat #changement_climatique #crises #crise #fermeture_des_frontières #crises_frontalières #violence #racisme #discriminations #exclusion #anti-migrants #violence_raciale #suprématisme_blanc #prostitution #criminalisation #vulnérabilité #minutemen #militarisation_des_frontières #USA #Mexique #Etats-Unis #politique_migratoire #politiques_migratoires #Kurdi #Aylan_Kurdi #Alan_Kurdi #impérialisme #colonialisme #colonisation #mourir_aux_frontières #décès #morts

ping @isskein @karine4

In the Sonoran Desert, #GIS Helps to Map Migrant Deaths

GIS technology lends insight into why some undocumented migrants perish while crossing international borders.

Last year geographer #Sam_Chambers published an unusual map of the Sonoran Desert. He wasn’t interested in marking roads, mountains, and cities. Instead, the University of Arizona researcher wanted to show the distance a young male can walk in various regions of the desert before the high temperature and physical exertion put him at risk of dying from heat exposure or hyperthermia.

On the resulting map, red and purple correspond with cooler, mountainous terrain. Yellow and white, which dominate the image, indicate a remote, hot valley. It’s here where migrants seeking to cross between Mexico and the United States are at greatest risk of dying from the desert’s relentless sun.

Chambers’ map relies on geographical information system (GIS) modeling, a digital technology that allows geographers to perform spatial, data-driven analysis of landscapes. Chambers’ chosen topic represents a burgeoning effort to use GIS to understand the risk undocumented migrants face while crossing international borders, according to Jonathan Cinnamon, a geographer at Ryerson University in Toronto. According to Chambers’ analysis, migrants began crossing through hotter, more rugged parts of the desert after the U.S. government increased the number of Border Patrol agents and installed new surveillance technologies, including underground motion sensors and radar-equipped watchtowers.

The Sonoran covers roughly 100,000 square miles in Arizona, California, and Mexico, and includes major cities such as Phoenix and Tucson, as well as vast swathes of empty public and private lands. The effort to funnel migrants into this desert began in 1994 under the Clinton administration. That’s when the wave of increased migration that had started in the 1980s prompted the U.S. government to embrace the policy of “prevention through deterrence.” The idea was that would-be migrants from Mexico and Central America would be deterred from illegally crossing the U.S. border if their routes were too treacherous. With this goal in mind, Border Patrol erected new infrastructure and stepped up enforcement in border cities like Tijuana and El Paso, leaving the harsh unpopulated borderlands as the only option.

In an email to Undark, John Mennell, a public affairs specialist with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) — the agency that oversees Border Patrol — in Arizona, said that people crossing the border illegally are at risk from the predations of smugglers and criminal organizations, who, he says, encourage migrants to ride on train tops or to shelter in packed houses with limited food and water. Mennell says the agency has installed rescue beacons in the desert, which migrants can use to call for help. According to CBP, Border Patrol rescued roughly 5,000 migrants on the Southwest border from October 2019 through September 2020.

Yet according to data compiled by the nonprofit group Humane Borders, the prevention through deterrence approach has failed to stop migrants from attempting the border crossing. “There continues to be a shift in migration into more remote and difficult areas,” said Geoff Boyce, a geographer at Earlham College in Indiana, and one of Chambers’ collaborators. Migrants have a much higher chance of dying in the desert today than they did 15 years ago, he said, and the numbers continue to rise, from 220 deaths per 100,000 apprehensions in 2016 to 318 deaths per 100,000 apprehensions in 2020. Last year, 227 migrants died in the Pima County Medical Examiner’s jurisdiction, in southern Arizona, although activists say that the number is likely much higher because of the way bodies disappear in the desert.

Chambers and Boyce source mortality data from the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office. They have gotten information on migrant activity from No More Deaths, one of many humanitarian groups in the Tucson area that maintains desert water and supply stations for migrants. No More Deaths, which supports the decriminalization of undocumented migration, has set up supplies in the mountains and other hard-to-reach areas. Humane Borders also maintains stations in areas accessible by car. These organizations maintain meticulous records — the raw data that launched Chambers’ and Boyce’s first desert mapping collaboration.

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On a cool November morning, Rebecca Fowler, administrative manager with Humane Borders, climbed into a truck armed with a list of 53 water stations. She was joined by two volunteers who chatted on the street next to a truck bed bearing yards of hoses and 55-gallon blue barrels that the organization purchases at a discount from soda companies.

Fowler was leading the Friday morning water run to seven stations off State Route 286, which runs south from Tucson to an isolated border town called Sasabe. Each week, Fowler and her volunteers check to be sure that the water is potable and plentiful. They change out dirty barrels and make notes of any vandalism. (In the past, some of the group’s barrels have been found with bullet holes or with the spigots ripped off.)

Among other data points, Fowler and her team gather data on water usage, footprints, and clothes found near their sites. Using the county’s medical examiner data, they have also created an interactive map of migrant deaths. A search of their website reveals a spread of red dots on the Southwestern United States, so many between Phoenix and Tucson that the map turns black. The organization has charted more than 3,000 deaths in the past two decades.

In her years in the desert, Fowler has noticed the same kind of changes pointed to in Boyce’s and Chambers’ research. “Migrants have been increasingly funneled into more desolate, unforgiving areas,” she said.

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GIS modeling, which is broadly defined as any technique that allows cartographers to spatially analyze data and landscapes, has evolved alongside computers. The U.S. military was an early developer and adopter of this technology, using it to understand terrain and plan operations. In those early days, few activists or academics possessed the skills or the access needed to use GIS, said Cinnamon. But in the last decade, more universities have embraced GIS as part of their curricula and the technology has become more readily available.

Now, the kind of GIS modeling employed by Chambers, who uses ArcGIS and QGIS software, is commonplace in archaeology and landscape design. It allows modelers to understand how factors like terrain, weather, and manmade features influence the way people move through a given physical environment.

An architect might employ GIS technology to decide where to put sidewalks on a college campus, for example. Chambers used these techniques to study elk migration during his doctoral studies at the University of Arizona. But after Boyce connected him to No More Deaths, he started using his skills to study human migration.

No More Deaths tracks data at their water stations, too — including acts of vandalism, which they asked Boyce and Chambers to assist in analyzing via GIS. That report, released in 2018, spatially examines the time of year and location of the vandalism and uses its results to postulate that Border Patrol agents are primarily responsible, while acknowledging that rogue actors, such as hunters and members of militia groups, may contribute as well. (CBP did not respond to Undark’s questions on water station vandalism.)

When Boyce and Chambers finished analyzing the information, they asked themselves: What else could this data reveal? Previous attempts to understand the desert’s hostility had relied on the prevalence of human remains or statistics on capture by Border Patrol agents, but both of those are imperfect measures.

“It’s very hard to get any type of reliable, robust information about undocumented migration, particularly in remote desert areas,” said Boyce. “The people who are involved, their behavior is not being methodically recorded by any state actor.”

Most of the water stations on Fowler’s route were set back from the highway, off bumpy roads where mesquite scraped the truck. By 11 a.m., heavy-bellied clouds had rolled in and the temperature was in the 80s and rising. The fingers of saguaro cacti pointed at the sky and at the Quinlan Mountains jutting over the horizon; on the other side lay the Tohono O’odham Nation. Fowler says Border Patrol’s policies increasingly shunt migrants into treacherous lands within the reservation.

Humane Borders’ water barrels are marked by long poles capped by tattered blue flags, fluttering above the brush. Each barrel features a combination lock, preventing vandals from opening the barrel and pouring anything inside. Each is also marked by a Virgin of Guadalupe sticker, a symbol for migrants passing through the desert.

At each stop, Fowler and that day’s volunteers, Lauren Kilpatrick and Isaiah Ortiz, pulled off the lock and checked the water for particulates and pH levels. They picked up nearby trash and kept an eye out for footprints. At the third station, the water harbored visible black dots — an early sign of algae — so the group dumped all 55 gallons and set up a new barrel. At a later station, Fowler found a spigot that had been wrenched off and flung among the mesquite. Later still, the group came upon a barrel full of decaying, abandoned backpacks.

This was the third water run for Kilpatrick and Ortiz, a couple from Nevada now living in Arizona. Kilpatrick had read books and listened to podcasts about the borderlands, and Ortiz had wanted to get involved because the crisis felt personal to him — some of his family are immigrants, some of his friends and their relatives undocumented.

“I just think about their journey — some of them are from Central America and Mexico,” he said. “Their lives were in real danger coming through areas like this.”

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GIS modeling simplifies this complex landscape into a grid. To analyze the grid, Chambers uses a standard modeling software; so far, he has published five papers with Boyce about the desert. For the first they worked on together, the team took No More Deaths’ data on visits to water sites from 2012 to 2015 and looked at changes in water usage at each site. Once they’d determined which routes had fallen out of favor and which had risen in popularity, they looked at whether those newer routes were more treacherous, using a ruggedness index that Chambers developed with his colleagues by looking at the slope and jaggedness of terrain, along with vegetation cover and temperature. They concluded that official United States policy is increasingly shunting migrants into more rugged areas.

From CBP’s perspective, “Walking through remote inhospitable terrain is only one of many dangers illegal immigrants face during their dangerous journey into the United States,” said Mennell. And installing new technology and increased patrol on popular migration routes is actually a good thing, he says, because it contributes to the goal of securing the border against smugglers shepherding in so-called “illegal immigrants.”

In another paper, Chambers studied whether migrants took new routes to avoid increased surveillance, and whether those new routes put them at higher risk of heat exposure and hyperthermia. To map out which areas were toughest to cross — as measured by caloric expenditure — Chambers factored in such variables as slope, terrain, and average human weight and walking speed, borrowing both military and archaeological formulas to measure the energy expenditures of different routes. He used viewshed analysis, which tells a mapmaker which areas are visible from a certain point — say, from a surveillance tower — and, using his slope calculations and the formulae, compared the energy costs of walking within sight of the towers versus staying out of sight.

Chambers tested his findings against the maps of recovered human remains in the area before and after increased surveillance. To map risk of heat exposure, Chambers used formulae from sports medicine professionals, military physicians, and physiologists, and charted them onto the desert. And he found, just as with the ruggedness index, that people are taking longer, more intense routes to avoid the towers. Now they need more calories to survive the desert, and they’re at higher risk of dying from heat.

Caloric expenditure studies had been done before in other contexts, said Chambers. But until this map, no one had ever created a detailed spatial representation of locations where the landscape and high temperatures are deadliest for the human body.

GIS mapping is also being used to track migration into Europe. Lorenzo Pezzani, a lecturer in forensic architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London, works with artists, scientists, NGOs, and politicians to map what they see as human rights violations in the Mediterranean Sea.

Compared with the group conducting research in Arizona, Pezzani and his team are at a distinct disadvantage. If a body drops into the sea, it’s unlikely to be recovered. There’s just not as much data to study, says Pezzani. So he and his team study discrete disasters, and then they extrapolate from there.

Pezzani disseminates his group’s work through a project called Forensic Oceanography, a collaborative research effort consisting of maps, visualizations, and reports, which has appeared in art museums. In 2018, information gathered through their visualizations was submitted to the European Court of Human Rights as evidence showing the Italian government’s role in migrant drowning deaths.

The goal is to make migrant deaths in the Mediterranean more visible and to challenge the governmental narrative that, like the deaths in the Sonoran, these deaths are unavoidable and faultless. Deaths from shipwrecks, for example, are generally blamed on the criminal networks of human traffickers, said Pezzani. He wants to show that the conditions that draw migrants into dangerous waters are the result of “specific political decisions that have been taken by southern European states and by the European Union.”

Pezzani, Chambers, and Boyce all intend for their work to foster discussion about government policy on immigration and borderlands. Boyce, for one, wants the U.S. government to rethink its policy of “prevention through deterrence” and to demilitarize the border. He believes the current policy is doomed to fail and is inhumane because it does not tackle the underlying issues that cause people to try to migrate in the first place. Ryan Burns, a visiting scholar at University of California, Berkeley, said he wants to see more research like this. “We need more scientists who are saying, ‘We can produce knowledge that is sound, that is actionable, that has a very well-established rigor to it, but is also politically motivated,’” Burns said.

Cinnamon said that GIS, by its nature, tends to involve approaching a project with a viewpoint already in mind. “If the U.S. government decided to do the same study, they might approach it from a very different perspective,” he said. As long as the authors are overt about their viewpoints, Cinnamon sees no issue.

Burns, however, did sound one cautionary note. By drawing attention to illegal crossings, he said, researchers “could be endangering people who are taking these paths.” In other words, making a crisis more visible can be politically powerful, but it can also have unintended consequences.

Before their last water station visit, the group from Humane Borders drove into Sasabe. A helicopter chopped overhead, probably surveilling for migrants, Fowler said. Border Patrol vehicles roamed the streets, as they do throughout this part of the country.

Once, Fowler said, a 12-foot wall spread for miles across the mountains here. In recent months, it’s been replaced by the U.S. government’s latest effort to stop migrants from venturing into the desert: a 30-footer, made of steel slats, undulating through the town and across the mountains in either direction. It’s yet another factor to consider when mapping the Sonoran and envisioning how its natural and manmade obstacles will shape its migration routes.

“There’s so much speculation” about what will happen to migrants because of this wall, said Fowler. She suspects they will cross through the Tohono O’odham Nation, where there’s no wall. But they won’t have access to water dropped by Humane Borders. “What I worry about, obviously, is more people dying,” said Fowler. She’s certain the migrants “will continue to come.”

Chambers and Boyce plan to keep making maps. They recently published a paper showing the stress that internal border checkpoints place on migrants crossing the desert, the latest step in their quest to create empirical evidence for the increasing treacherousness of the border.

“It’s an important thing for people to know,” said Boyce.

▻https://undark.org/2021/03/31/mapping-migrant-deaths-sonoran-desert
#SIG #désert_du_Sonora #asile #migrations #frontières #morts_aux_frontières #décès #morts #USA #Mexique #Etats-Unis #cartographie #visualisation #contre-cartographie

ping @reka

A City in Brazil’s Amazon Rain Forest Is a Stark Warning about COVID to the Rest of the World - Scientific American
▻https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-city-in-brazils-amazon-rain-forest-is-a-stark-warning-about-co

the dire scenes in the Amazon—hospital systems collapsing, grave diggers carving out trenches for mass graves shared by multiple bodies, and families desperately queuing for oxygen supplies—will send a clear message: “Herd immunity through infection, instead of a vaccine, only comes with an enormous amount of illness and death,” Hanage says.

Le cas hors normes du lycée de Drancy, où le Covid-19 a tué 20 parents d’élèves, la fermeture demandée - ladepeche.fr
►https://www.ladepeche.fr/2021/03/28/le-cas-hors-normes-du-lycee-de-drancy-ou-le-covid-19-a-tue-20-parents-dele

C’est une véritable catastrophe qui frappe actuellement le lycée Eugène-Delacroix de Drancy (Seine-Saint-Denis). Alors que les établissements scolaires de la région Île-de-France sont actuellement frappés par une vague de Covid-19 d’ampleur, ce lycée fait face à une vague de contaminations sans précédent : depuis le 1er mars dernier, 60 élèves ont été contaminés par le virus. Pire encore, 20 parents d’élèves sont morts en l’espace d’un an.

#désastre_sanitaire

The Hard Work of Remembering. A short story about about names and remembering | by Jer Thorp
▻https://blprnt.medium.com/the-hard-work-of-remembering-e34b8161d519

https://miro.medium.com/max/994/0*nA4RjaOclHUqTg9q#.jpg

ça parle d’histoire, de morts, de mémoire, de Stolpersteine et de covid

@supergeante

When a migrant drowns, a whole community feels the loss. The hidden costs of Mediterranean shipwrecks on a remote Senegalese village

On an unknown day in 2015, a shipwreck off the coast of Libya in the Mediterranean Sea took the life of Binta Balde’s second son.

It was days before the news travelled the more than 3,400 kilometres back to the village of Anambe Counda in the remote south of Senegal where Binta lives and where her son, Demba, had been born.

No one in the village knows the exact timeline of events. Lives here are ruled by the weather, and the passage of time is marked by the progress of two seasons: the rainy and the dry.

All anyone can say with certainty is that news of the shipwreck arrived on a Friday, the communal day of prayer for the Muslim majority in the village.

On that afternoon, grief-stricken cries pierced the normal, low din of neighbours chatting and children playing games. Binta froze. The shrieks came from the mud hut compound next to her own. Something terrible had happened.

Binta rushed out to see if she could offer help, but before she reached anyone else, Mamadou, her eldest son, blocked her path.

“There has been an accident,” he said. The neighbours’ son had drowned at sea while trying to reach Italy. But Mamadou hadn’t finished. “Demba was with him,” he said. “They were in the same boat. He died too.”

Binta dropped to the ground as if she had been shot.

Invisible victims

Since 2014, when the UN’s migration agency, IOM, began keeping track, more than 21,500 people have died or disappeared attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea to Europe. Already this year, almost 300 have perished. The true tally is undoubtedly higher, as some deaths are never officially recorded.

Thousands more asylum seekers and migrants have died in the Sahara Desert and in Libya. There’s no official count, but IOM estimates the number could be twice as high as the fatalities in the Mediterranean.

Behind every person who dies while trying to reach the EU are a family and friends – an entire community left to grapple with the impact of the loss. IOM refers to these people as the invisible victims of the humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean.

The impacts of the deaths on them are often material as well as emotional, and in places like Anambe Counda – far from the media and public gaze – they normally go entirely unseen.
Demba

Anambe Counda is part of the municipality of Pakour. Named after the largest village in the area, the municipality is a collection of 32 hamlets scattered across a vast plain near Senegal’s southern border with Guinea-Bissau. People in the area live on the knife-edge of poverty and are among the most likely in Senegal to migrate.

Like other young men from Pakour, Binta’s son Demba left to help provide for his family. Demba’s father died when he was young. Polygamy is still relatively common in Senegal, and he left behind Binta, a second wife, and eight children.

Growing up, Demba helped work the family’s small plot of land. But the family often had to ration food, especially between May and August when the stockpile from the previous year’s harvest ran low. During those months, having three meals a day was a luxury, and buying grain and rice on credit at an interest rate of around three percent was a major financial strain.

Kolda, the administrative district where Pakour is located, is lush and replete with arable land and abundant water, unlike other arid and semi-arid parts of Senegal. Paradoxically, it is one of the poorest regions of the country. In rural areas, up to 65 percent of people at times lack the food to meet their basic nutritional needs.

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When he was 16, Demba moved to Dakar. Mamadou was already married, so it fell on Demba to leave in search of economic opportunity. Nobody in the family knows what work Demba found, but he was able to send home around $345 per month, split evenly between his mother and his father’s second wife – an impressive sum when the family’s income from the harvest was somewhere between $600 and $800 per year and Senegal’s monthly minimum wage is $94.

Binta doesn’t know why Demba decided to leave for Europe. Dakar made sense. “After the harvest, there is nothing to do [in Pakour]. This is why he went [to Dakar],” Binta said.

But Demba’s friends told TNH he wanted more than what his earnings in Dakar could bring. He had seen others who made it to Europe and were able to send more money back to their families. He wanted to build a concrete house for his mother and buy a car. But he didn’t tell Binta his plans because he was afraid she would worry and try to dissuade him. “If I had known it, I would have never allowed it,” Binta said, on the verge of tears. “I heard about the shipwrecks.”

Demba did confide in Mamadou, who tried to persuade him not to go. But cautionary tales about danger in the Mediterranean were not enough to change Demba’s mind.

When tragedy struck, news of Demba’s death eventually reached Anambe Counda by phone. A friend from a nearby village was on the same boat as Demba and the neighbour’s son. “He could save himself, but the others drowned,” Mamadou said of the neighbour.

Demba was 22 years old.
Frustrations

Undocumented migration from Senegal to Europe peaked between 2014 and 2017. Over 28,000 Senegalese crossed the Mediterranean during those years, before the movement was curtailed by European policies aimed at restricting migration routes to Libya and reducing departures from the North African coast. Because of the absence of concrete data, it’s impossible to say for certain how many Senegalese died during that period.

Despite the increased difficulty, the factors pushing people to migrate – especially lack of economic opportunity and disillusionment with seemingly corrupt and ineffective political leadership – haven’t gone away. In fact, over the past year, they have only been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

As a result, last year saw the revival of the Atlantic maritime route from the West African coast, including Senegal, to the Spanish Canary Islands – considered to be the most dangerous sea crossing for Africans trying to reach Europe. More than 400 people are believed to have died attempting the passage in the last week of October 2020 alone.

At the beginning of March, the same set of frustrations pushing this upswing in migration also caused protesters to spill onto streets across Senegal, following the arrest of an opposition leader.

Authorities responded by cracking down, with at least eight protesters killed in the clashes, including a teenager in a village 45 minutes from Pakour in Kolda, where frustrations over years of economic marginalisation and stagnant development are particularly acute.
La recherche

The Gambia, shaped like a gnarled finger, cuts through Senegal to the north of Pakour, dividing the Kolda region from the rest of the country and rendering transportation and commerce complicated and costly.

The municipality – officially home to around 12,500 people, although many births go unrecorded – is on the eastern edge of Casamance, a territory stretching across southern Senegal where a low-intensity conflict between the Senegalese government and a separatist movement has been simmering since 1982. The fighting has not touched Pakour directly, but it has stunted economic development across the area.

A two-day drive from Senegal’s capital, Dakar, the main village of Pakour has only limited access to off-grid electricity, and most of the surrounding villages have no access at all. There are no hospitals, and people travel from place to place on foot, by donkey, or, less often, on motorbikes.

Despite the remoteness and economic struggles, walking on the red, dusty roads of the villages, almost everyone has a story to tell about attempting to migrate, or about family members and friends who left for Spain, Italy, or France. Since the 1980s, thousands of young men from the area, like Demba, have left to try to make a living in other parts of Senegal, Africa, and further away, in Europe.

It is easy to spot which families have members overseas. Most inhabitants live in mud and straw huts with thatched roofs. The amount of millet, grain, and corn stockpiled on the roofs is a sign of comparative affluence: The larger the stockpile, the more likely it is that the family has a relative, or relatives, living abroad. Similarly, the few concrete homes mixed in with the huts are telltale signs of migration success stories.

These benefits of what people in the villages call la recherche – the search, in French – are readily apparent, and make a tremendous difference when nearly 80 percent of people live in poverty and many families are forced to sometimes make do with one meal per day, mostly consisting of millet.

The costs of la recherche are less easy to see.

“We do not know how many people from our municipality died on their way to Europe, in the Mediterranean, in the Sahara, or in Libya,” a local official in Pakour, who asked to remain anonymous as he didn’t have permission to speak to the media, told The New Humanitarian.

The deaths of people en route to Europe are often shrouded in ambiguity: A family doesn’t hear from a relative who has left for weeks, months, or years, and is left simply to presume the worst. Less frequently, as happened with Demba, a survivor or witness calls someone in the village to relay concrete news of a tragedy.

The bodies of those who perish are never returned. They disappear below the waves, disintegrate into the sand, or end up interred in distant cemeteries beneath a plaque bearing no name. Without a body, without definitive answers, there is nothing to make the deaths concrete.

As a result, the tangible benefits of migration continue to outweigh the abstract risks for those who want to leave, according to Seydina Mohamed L. Kane, a senior programme assistant with IOM. “They don’t see the losses,” Kane told TNH. “They don’t see the bodies.”
Families

“I cannot count the number of funerals I have officiated of young men who drowned,” Alassane Hane, Pakour’s chief imam, told TNH.

For 25 years, Hane has been a reluctant witness to the exodus of youth from the municipality. Before they leave, young men often visit his mosque – a low, square building with blue paint peeling off its walls – asking for prayers of protection ahead of their journey. When they die, the imam shepherds their families through the mourning process.

The fact the bodies are missing doesn’t prevent the community from organising funerals to symbolically acknowledge the loss. The men gather for prayers at the mosque, and the women sit together in the common area outside their huts, shedding tears.

The time for catharsis and open expression of pain is brief. Families soon have to return to the task of scraping together a living. “It was God’s will,” people repeat stoically when asked about their loved ones who died migrating.

Still, the pain endures. In private moments, family members sigh heavily, tears streak their cheeks, their body postures break, lives stagnate. It’s hard to move on without closure, and closure is difficult to find without material evidence of loss.

Death also means there will be no financial lifeline from abroad, and it comes with additional costs. Many families sell belongings and borrow money to finance a relative’s travel to Europe. If the person dies, there’s no return on that investment. It’s also tradition for families to sacrifice animals, if they have them, and to offer the meat to fellow villagers during a funeral.

Sathio Camara, from one of Pakour’s villages, died in the Mediterranean in 2018. He was 25 years old. He, like Demba, had hoped to reach Italy and send money back to his family. His mother sold one of the family’s two cows to help finance the trip and sacrificed the second for Sathio’s funeral.

The cows had been a lifeline during difficult times. On top of their grief, Sathio’s loss has made the family even more economically insecure. “I could count on the milk [from the cows], and if we did not have anything to eat, we could sell it,” said Sathio’s mother, Salimatei Camara.
Widows

At 19, Ami has been a widow for nearly three years. Child marriage is common in Kolda – twice as common as in wealthier regions of Senegal. Like so many things in the area, the practice is connected to calculations around poverty and survival: Marrying a daughter into another family means one less person to support.

Ami’s family arranged for her to wed Sathio when he was 21 and she was only 12. She moved into Sathio’s family’s compound, and a year later, when she was 13, she gave birth to a daughter, Mariam.

For Sathio, finding work in Europe meant the opportunity to provide a better life to his parents, and to his wife and daughter. Ami only attended first grade, but dreamt of giving Mariam a full education – a goal that would require significant investment. As much as he wanted their financial circumstances to improve, Ami did not want Sathio to leave. “I wanted him to go back to school, to stay here with me,” she said.

Their final conversation was about their daughter. “The last thing he told me was not to sell the groundnuts I had harvested,” Ami remembered. “He told me to keep them and save them for Mariam so that she could eat.”

After news of Sathio’s death reached the village, Ami returned to her father’s home, but her parents are struggling to provide for her and Mariam. They are thinking of remarrying her to Sathio’s younger brother, Famora.

If a widow with small children does not have parents to help her, or they cannot afford to support her, remarrying within the deceased husband’s family is seen as the best option. It gives the children some security and ensures they remain in their father’s family. Although the widow has to agree to it, between financial strains and familial pressure, most of the time they feel they have no choice.

When asked about potentially marrying Famora, Ami shrugs. It doesn’t seem like a realistic possibility. Famora is in Italy. He migrated in 2017 and is undocumented and struggling to find consistent work to send money back home. But if things change and the marriage can take place, what option will Ami have?

Moussou Sane became a widow at 23. Her husband, Souleymane Sane, was shot and killed on the street in Libya, where violence against sub-Saharan asylum seekers and migrants is rife. “He was handsome,” Moussou said of Souleymane. “He was generous.”

Their marriage was also arranged when Moussou was 15 and Souleymane was a couple of years older. They had two children, and when Souleymane was killed, Moussou’s family couldn’t afford to take her back in with her kids so she married Souleymane’s older brother, Samba. The two always got along, but the circumstances of the marriage are strained. “You’re forced to do it, so that the children can remain in the family,” Samba said.

Samba was already married with two children. He worries about being able to provide for them all. “If you don’t have enough resources, you don’t know how to feed them,” he said.

Publicly, the constant struggle to overcome food insecurity dominates conversation. In private, when interviewed separately, both Moussou and Samba broke down in tears when talking about Souleymane, each wrapped in their own intimate grief.
Survivors

Ousmane Diallo watched his friend Alpha Balde drown. “I saw his body,” Ousmane said.

Alpha (unrelated to Binta Balde) and Ousmane grew up in nearby villages and had known each other their entire lives. The two left Pakour at different times but reunited in Libya. In the spring of 2018, they boarded a rubber dinghy with dozens of other asylum seekers and migrants and set out to sea.

About 12 miles from the coast, the dinghy started to shake, causing panic among the passengers. “There was an Italian ship nearby,” Ousmane said. “We asked for their help, but they said they could not intervene.”

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Instead, a patrol boat from the Libyan Coast Guard – funded and backed by Italy and the EU – arrived. The Libyans threw ropes into the water. In their panic, people started jumping off the unstable dinghy, trying to grab the ropes. Most didn’t know how to swim – including Alpha, who screamed and sank. He was 21 years old.

Ousmane wanted to jump too, but a wall of people separated him from the edge of the boat. “I could not move. This is why I survived,” he said.

It was Ousmane’s third attempt to reach Europe. He had left Pakour in 2015. When he reached Libya, he found work in a bakery and was able to send some money back to his family. But Libya was unstable and unsafe. Each time he tried to leave on a dinghy, he was caught by the Libyan Coast Guard and taken to a detention centre.

In the first centre, detainees were frequently threatened, beaten, and denied food and water. “We had to drink the same water that was used for the toilet. If you were there, you automatically got sick,” he said.

After watching Alpha drown, Ousmane was taken to another detention centre where he was haunted by thoughts of the water, screams, and the sight of his friend’s corpse. “I kept thinking about it. I was exhausted. I had to go home,” he explained. “After Libya, your heart changes.”

Ousmane decided to return to Senegal through an assisted voluntary return programme run by IOM.

Back in Pakour, he wears a pressed shirt, newer and cleaner than those worn by most men here. It speaks to the money he earned when he left the village. But he also has nightmares he can’t shake off, and has struggled to find his place in the village after returning.

He is not alone.
Returnees

Between January 2017 and July 2020, more than 6,000 people returned to Senegal through IOM’s assisted voluntary return programme.

In Pakour, there are more than 150 returnees like Ousman. Many got stuck in Libya and were victims of violence and exploitation. Some were kidnapped for ransom. Others were victims of random acts of violence. Almost all are still haunted by their experiences.

Some of the returnees have started an organisation – Pakour’s Association of the Returnees – that is supposed to help the young men who end up back in the municipality find economic opportunities. The organisation gives small loans at low interest rates to its members to help them buy farming tools and seeds.

In recent years, the EU has also poured hundreds of millions of dollars into aid projects meant to address the “root causes of migration” through its Trust Fund for Africa. Senegal has received more than €170 million ($206 million) from the fund for projects, including the creation of a controversial national biometric identity database that critics suspect will be used to facilitate deportations from Europe.

Kolda, together with other regions, has received over €60 million ($73 million) in funding for projects aimed at providing technical support and vocational training to farmers, and at giving them access to credit and small loans for entrepreneurial projects.

But in Pakour, all this development funding has done little to change the material circumstances that push young men to migrate.

One project financed by the EU Trust Fund that made it to the area around Pakour in 2018 was a travelling caravan offering information about local entrepreneurship and vocational training that was also intended to inform youth about the risks of irregular migration.

In October 2018, a mobile cinema project funded by the Italian Development Agency and IOM brought a vivid documentary about the dangers migrants face en route to Europe to Pakour. The documentary was screened in 200 villages in six African countries, costing two million euros ($2.4 million). Its effect, however, was mostly to terrify the mothers of people who had already undertaken the journey, according to people in Pakour.

Pakour’s Association of the Returnees also received funding from Caritas and IOM to start a poultry farm to stimulate the local economy. But the project is struggling and has so far failed to provide anyone with an income. Around 30 men take turns working at the farm on a voluntary basis. Many association members feel discouraged and worry about the future.

“We need resources and real investment,” a representative of Pakour’s local authority told TNH. “Problems here are complex. You cannot solve them with a bunch of chickens.”

Cycle

Ibrahima Balde (no relation to Binta Balde or Alpha Balde) is in his thirties and returned from Libya four years ago. He came back to Pakour after witnessing his friend get shot and killed as retribution for other migrants escaping from a construction site in the southern Libyan city of Qatrun when they realised they wouldn’t be paid for their work.

Ibrahima’s son will soon become a teenager. “I don’t want my child to go through what I had to go through, to see what I have seen,” he said.

But if things don’t improve in Pakour, Ibrahima fears his son will have little choice but to take the same risks he took and hope for a better result.

In recent years, relatively successful peacekeeping efforts in Casamance have led to better safety and stability in the area around Pakour – important ingredients for increased economic activity. A government offensive in January appears to have weakened the separatist group, but where things are heading remains to be seen. Development rates continue to lag behind other regions, and the pandemic has only made things worse for the entire country. Senegal’s growth dropped from an already low 5.3 percent in 2019 to an estimated 1.3 percent last year.

Even Mamadou, Binta’s eldest son and Demba’s brother, is tempted to try to make his way to Europe. He started the journey once, before Demba, but returned home when their father died. If it wasn’t for Demba’s death, he would already have left again.

Now, without Demba’s contribution to the family economy, Mamadou is struggling. He has a wife and two children to provide for, and he also needs to help support his siblings and his mother. They are all depending on him and he doesn’t see a future in Pakour. “It’s difficult,” he said. “We cannot earn any money here.”

▻https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/news-feature/2021/3/23/When-a-migrant-drowns-a-whole-community-feels-the-loss

#celleux_qui_restent #migrations #asile #réfugiés #morts #décès #mourir_en_Méditerranée #mourir_aux_frontières #Sénégal #Pakour #returnees #retour #renvois #expulsions #familles #communauté #celles_qui_restent #ceux_qui_restent

Synthèses pluriannuelles − Nombre de #décès quotidiens | #Insee
▻https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/4931039?sommaire=4487854

Exceptionnellement, pendant la pandémie de la #Covid-19, l’Insee diffuse régulièrement le nombre de décès (toutes causes confondues) par jour et par région et département. Les décès sont enregistrés dans la commune où ils ont eu lieu (et non au lieu de résidence). Les #statistiques diffusées sont provisoires

Migranti u šumi kod Saborskog stradali su od mine

MIGRANTI koji su jučer stradali na šumskom predjelu općine Saborsko naišli su na mine postavljene u Domovinskom ratu na negdašnjoj crti razgraničenja, potvrdio je načelnik Saborskog Marko Bičanić. Policija je potvrdila da je jedan mrtav, a u bolnici u Ogulinu doznaje se da se u njoj liječe još dvojica ranjenih.

Policijska uprava karlovačka potvrdila je jučer i danas ponovila da je jedan muškarac mrtav, ne i koliko je ranjenih. Glasnogovornica karlovačke Policijske uprave Andreja Lenard rekla je da će o ostalim okolnostima jučerašnjeg stradavanja izvijestiti javnost kada prikupe sve informacije.

Ravnatelj ogulinske bolnice Davor Vukelja rekao je za Hinu da se kod njih liječe dvojica ranjenih Pakistanaca. Jedan je teže ranjen u trbuh, operiran je i odstranjeno mu je strano tijelo. Još je na odjelu intenzivnog liječenja, ali je stabilno. Drugi je ranjen u koljeno, operiran je i dobro se oporavlja.

Načelnik Marko Bičanić rekao je za Hinu da policija danas iz zraka pretražuje šire područje Saborskog, tzv. migrantsku rutu. Dodao je da je područje općine razminirano svuda gdje se znalo da ima mina, ali sa šumama je mnogo teže jer se uglavnom radi o minski sumnjivom području.

Ploče s oznakama mina postavljene su uz putove, a budući da ih migranti izbjegavaju kako ih se ne bi primijetilo, moguće je da oznake nisu ni vidjeli.

“Žao mi je tih ljudi, nadam se da će se migrantski problemi uskoro riješiti jer, koliko god se mi žalili da nam nije lako s migrantima, njima je puno teže”, rekao je Bičanić.

▻https://www.index.hr/vijesti/clanak/migranti-u-sumi-kod-saborskog-stradali-su-od-mine/2258991.aspx

#mines_anti-personnel #mort #décès #Balkans #Croatie #asile #migrations #réfugiés #route_des_Balkans #morts #mines #forêt #Saborsko

Localisation:

https://i.imgur.com/T3PS0Sx.png

#Biden and the Border Security-Industrial Complex

Successive administrations have poured money into the business of militarizing immigration control—and lobbyists have returned the favors. Will this president stop the juggernaut?

There are many ways I wish I’d spent my last days of freedom before the coronavirus’s inexorable and deadly advance through the US began last year, but attending the 2020 Border Security Expo was not one of them. On March 9, 2020, President Trump told us the flu was more deadly than coronavirus and that nothing would be shut down. “Think about that!” he tweeted. On March 13, he declared the pandemic a national emergency. In the days between, I flew to San Antonio, Texas, to attend the Expo in an attempt to better understand the border security industry and its links to government. I soon found myself squeezing through dozens of suited men with buzz cuts clapping each other on the back and scarfing bagels at the catering table, with scant mention of the coming catastrophe.

Instead, the focus was on how best to spend the ever-increasing budgets of the Customs and Border Protection agency (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which had discretionary spending allocations that totaled $27 billion. Together, that was up 20 percent on the previous year’s budgets; and for decades now, under Democrats and Republicans alike, the border security industry has generally received more and more money each year. For the first time in years, the agencies’ latest combined budget records a modest reduction, of $1.5 billion (though the expenditure on ICE continues to grow unchecked).

President Biden is working to undo some of the most violent anti-immigrant policies of his predecessor, including lifting the travel ban on thirteen nations, almost all in the Middle East or Africa, and working to end the Migrant Protection Protocols, which forced some 25,000 asylum seekers to stay in Mexico as they awaited their day in court. He has also created a task force to reunite families separated at the US–Mexico border and has already sent a comprehensive immigration reform bill to lawmakers. And he has halted construction of Donald Trump’s notorious border wall.

Does this all signify that he is ready to consider taming the vast militarized machine that is the border security industry? Or will he, like Democratic presidents before him, quietly continue to expand it?

(#paywall)

▻https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2021/03/02/biden-and-the-border-security-industrial-complex

#USA #complexe_militaro-industriel #Etats-Unis #migrations #frontières #contrôles_frontaliers #business #réfugiés #migrations #militarisation_des_frontières #Joe_Biden #Customs_and_Border_Protection_agency (#CBP) #Immigration_and_Customs_Enforcement (#ICE)

Data and displacement, Missing migrants

The authors in our Data and displacement feature discuss recent advances in gathering and using data, the challenges that remain, and new approaches, including in the face of pandemic-imposed restrictions.

Unknown numbers of migrants die or disappear during their perilous journeys, and their families are often left in limbo. In our Missing migrants feature, authors explore initiatives to improve data gathering and sharing, identification of remains, and assistance for families left behind.

►https://www.fmreview.org/issue66
#données #statistiques #migrations #décès #disparitions #morts #pandémie #covid-19 #coronavirus #limbe #Missing_migrants #identification #ceux_qui_restent #celleux_qui_restent

Le prix du foot : 6500 travailleurs migrants morts sur les chantiers liés au Mondial 2022 au Qatar
▻https://www.bastamag.net/Mondial-2022-Qatar-FIFA-au-moins-6500-travailleurs-migrants-tues-sur-les-c

Au Qatar, les chantiers liés à la future Coupe du monde tuent, beaucoup. Les alertes ...

6-year-old refugee boy dies in blaze in #Thiva accommodation camp

A 6-year-old boy died on Tuesday night when a fire broke out in a refugee camp on the town on Thiva, some 60 km north of Athens.

The boy was reportedly leaving with his parents and 4 siblings in a container. Local media reported that the mother reportedly managed to bring another boy and three girls outside but not the boy. The father was not there at the time of the blaze. The family are asylum-seekers from Iran.

https://i2.wp.com/www.keeptalkinggreece.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/thivaboy.jpg?resize=768%2C433&ssl=1#.jpg

The fire broke out around 9 o’ clock under unknown circumstances. Footage taken at the time of the fire shows a lot of residents to have gathered outside the building on fire.

▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mD28yBy7k8Q&feature=emb_logo

According to local media radiothiva, and the Fire Service, it was the camp residents who pulled the dead body of the boy from the spot.

The Fire Service said firefighters had to be accompanied by police to get into the camp after residents initially prevented them from entering.

The refugees claimed that firefighters arrived with delay, reportedly threw stones and other items at the trucks, smashing the front window in one of them.

Eight firemen with four fire engines were finally able to extinguish the blaze in a building in the camp.

The Fire Service was reportedly not able to conduct inspection due to the angry crowd, a small police unit remains in the area.

▻https://www.keeptalkinggreece.com/2021/02/24/refugee-boy-dies-fire-camp-thiva

#incendie #feu #réfugiés #camps_de_réfugiés #décès #mort #Grèce

–-

ajouté à la métaliste des incendies dans les camps de réfugiés, notamment en Grèce :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/851143

Mort de Cédric Chouviat : les policiers auraient menti avec la bénédiction de leur hiérarchie - Le Parisien
▻https://www.leparisien.fr/faits-divers/mort-de-cedric-chouviat-les-policiers-auraient-menti-avec-la-benediction-

https://cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/leparisien/2ZD7ZQ2S2NNQJXSE6XMJXBKCKQ.jpg

Les policiers mis en examen auraient tenté de cacher leur responsabilité dans la mort du chauffeur-livreur de 42 ans. Leur hiérarchie les aurait couverts.

Ils n’ont pas entendu Cédric Chouviat crier « j’étouffe » à sept reprises. C’est ce qu’ont affirmé les policiers qui ont plaqué au sol, sur le ventre, le chauffeur-livreur de 42 ans lors d’un contrôle routier près la tour Eiffel à Paris le 3 janvier. Transporté dans un état critique à l’hôpital Georges-Pompidou, le père de famille était mort deux jours plus tard.

Des mensonges que mettent en lumière mardi Mediapart et Libération grâce à des documents qu’ils ont consultés. Après une enquête menée par l’Inspection générale de la police nationale (IGPN), trois des quatre fonctionnaires impliqués dans l’interpellation fatale à Cédric Chouviat ont été mis en examen pour homicide involontaire, avec interdiction d’entrer en contact avec tout ou partie de l’équipage. Une policière a été, elle, placée sous le statut de témoin assisté.

Au cours de leurs auditions, les policiers n’en ont pas démordu : ils n’ont pas entendu les cris de détresse du chauffeur-livreur. Pourtant, Cédric Chouviat continuait d’enregistrer la conversation lorsqu’il a été attrapé par le cou, plaqué au sol sur le ventre, encore casqué, avant d’être menotté. Non seulement on l’entend se plaindre d’étouffer, mais on entend aussi distinctement l’un des fonctionnaires dire à son collègue, le chef de bord Michaël P. : « C’est bon, c’est bon, lâche », « sur un ton paraissant empreint d’inquiétude ».

Mais face aux enquêteurs de la police des polices, ce gardien de la paix ne « sait plus » pourquoi il a prononcé ces mots, rapporte Mediapart. La « clé d’étranglement » ? Un simple « maintien de tête », affirme Michaël P. « Il n’y a pas eu de geste volontaire », dit-il encore. D’autres vidéos tournées par l’une des policières impliquées ont pourtant été versées au dossier.

Insee sur Twitter : « [1/2 Mise à jour du nombre de #décès] Entre le 1ᵉʳ septembre 2020 et le 25 janvier 2021, 289 544 décès, toutes causes confondues, sont enregistrés en France à la date du 5 février 2021, soit 16 % de plus qu’entre le 01/09/2019 et le 25/01/2020 » / Twitter
▻https://twitter.com/InseeFr/status/1357694296384749570

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#surmortalité #covid-19 #France

Un nombre choquant de morts, mais aussi des luttes grandissantes sur place
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2020 a été une année difficile pour des populations du monde entier. Les voyageur.euses des routes de #Méditerranée_occidentale et de l’Atlantique n’y ont pas fait exception. Iels ont fait face à de nombreux nouveaux défis cette année, et nous avons été témoins de faits sans précédents. Au Maroc et en #Espagne, non seulement la crise du coronavirus a servi d’énième prétexte au harcèlement, à l’intimidation et à la maltraitance de migrant.es, mais les itinéraires de voyage ont aussi beaucoup changé. Un grand nombre de personnes partent à présent d’Algérie pour atteindre l’Espagne continentale (ou même la #Sardaigne). C’est pourquoi nous avons commencé à inclure une section Algérie (voir 2.6) dans ces rapports. Deuxièmement, le nombre de traversées vers les #Canaries a explosé, particulièrement ces trois derniers mois. Tout comme en 2006 – lors de la dénommée « #crise_des_cayucos », lorsque plus de 30 000 personnes sont arrivées aux Canaries – des bateaux partent du Sahara occidental, mais aussi du Sénégal et de Mauritanie. Pour cette raison, nous avons renommé notre section sur les îles Canaries « route de l’Atlantique » (voir 2.1).

Le nombre d’arrivées sur les #îles_Canaries est presqu’aussi élevé qu’en 2006. Avec plus de 40 000 arrivées en 2020, le trajet en bateau vers l’Espagne est devenu l’itinéraire le plus fréquenté des voyages vers l’Europe. Il inclut, en même temps, l’itinéraire le plus mortel : la route de l’Atlantique, en direction des îles Canaries.

Ces faits sont terrifiants. A lui seul, le nombre de personnes mortes et de personnes disparues nous laisse sans voix. Nous dressons, tous les trois mois, une liste des mort.es et des disparu.es (voir section 4). Pour ce rapport, cette liste est devenue terriblement longue. Nous sommes solidaires des proches des défunt.es ainsi que des survivant.es de ce calvaire. A travers ce rapport, nous souhaitons mettre en avant leurs luttes. Nous éprouvons un profond respect et une profonde gratitude à l’égard de celles et ceux qui continuent de se battre, sur place, pour la dignité humaine et la liberté de circulation pour tous.tes.

Beaucoup d’exemples de ces luttes sont inspirants : à terre, aux frontières, en mer et dans les centres de rétention.

En Espagne, le gouvernement fait tout son possible pour freiner la migration (voir section 3). Ne pouvant empêcher la mobilité des personnes, la seule chose que ce gouvernement ait accompli c’est son échec spectaculaire à fournir des logements décents aux personnes nouvellement arrivées. Néanmoins, beaucoup d’Espagnol.es luttent pour les droits et la dignité des migrant.es. Nous avons été très inspiré.es par la #CommemorAction organisée par des habitant.es d’Órzola, après la mort de 8 voyageur.euses sur les plages rocheuses du nord de #Lanzarote. Ce ne sont pas les seul.es. : les citoyen.nes de Lanzarote ont publié un manifeste réclamant un traitement décent pour quiconque arriverait sur l’île, qu’il s’agisse de touristes ou de voyageur.euses en bateaux. Nous relayons leur affirmation : il est important de ne pas se laisser contaminer par le « virus de la haine ».

Nous saluons également les réseaux de #solidarité qui soutiennent les personnes arrivées sur les autres îles : par exemple le réseau à l’initiative de la marche du 18 décembre en #Grande_Canarie, « #Papeles_para_todas » (papiers pour tous.tes).

Des #résistances apparaissent également dans les centres de rétention (#CIE : centros de internamiento de extranjeros, centres de détention pour étrangers, équivalents des CRA, centres de rétention administrative en France). En octobre, une #manifestation a eu lieu sur le toit du bâtiment du CIE d’#Aluche (Madrid), ainsi qu’une #grève_de_la_faim organisée par les personnes qui y étaient détenues, après que le centre de #rétention a rouvert ses portes en septembre.

Enfin, nous souhaitons mettre en lumière la lutte courageuse de la CGT, le syndicat des travailleur.euses de la #Salvamento_Maritimo, dont les membres se battent depuis longtemps pour plus d’effectif et de meilleures conditions de travail pour les gardes-côtes, à travers leur campagne « #MásManosMásVidas » (« Plus de mains, plus de vies »). La CGT a fait la critique répétée de ce gouvernement qui injecte des fonds dans le contrôle migratoire sans pour autant subvenir aux besoins financiers des gardes-côtes, ce qui éviterait l’épuisement de leurs équipes et leur permettrait de faire leur travail comme il se doit.

Au Maroc, plusieurs militant.es ont dénoncé les violations de droits humains du gouvernement marocain, critiquant des pratiques discriminatoires d’#expulsions et de #déportations, mais dénonçant aussi la #stigmatisation que de nombreuses personnes noires doivent endurer au sein du Royaume. Lors du sit-in organisé par l’AMDH Nador le 10 décembre dernier, des militant.es rassemblé.es sur la place « Tahrir » de Nador ont exigé plus de liberté d’expression, la libération des prisonnier.es politiques et le respect des droits humains. Ils y ont également exprimé le harcèlement infligé actuellement à des personnes migrant.es.

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De la même manière, dans un communiqué conjoint, doublé d’une lettre au Ministère de l’Intérieur, plusieurs associations (Euromed Droits, l’AMDH, Caminando Fronteras, Alarm Phone, le Conseil des Migrants) se sont prononcées contre la négligence des autorités marocaines en matière de #sauvetage_maritime.

Les voyageur.euses marocain.es ont également élevé la voix contre l’état déplorable des droits humains dans leur pays (voir le témoignage section 2.1) mais aussi contre les conditions désastreuses auxquelles iels font face à leur arrivée en Espagne, dont le manque de services de première nécessité dans le #camp portuaire d’#Arguineguín est un bon exemple.

Au #Sénégal, les gens se sont organisées après les #naufrages horrifiants qui ont eu lieu en très grand nombre dans la seconde moitié du mois d’octobre. Le gouvernement sénégalais a refusé de reconnaître le nombre élevé de morts (#Alarm_Phone estime jusqu’à 400 le nombre de personnes mortes ou disparues entre le 24 et le 31 octobre, voir section 4). Lorsque des militant.es et des jeunes ont cherché à organiser une manifestation, les autorités ont interdit une telle action. Pourtant, trois semaines plus tard, un #rassemblement placé sous le slogan « #Dafa_doy » (Y en a assez !) a été organisé à Dakar. Des militant.es et des proches se sont réuni.es en #mémoire des mort.es. Durant cette période, au Sénégal, de nombreuses personnes ont été actives sur Twitter, ont tenté d’organiser des #hommages et se sont exprimées sur la mauvaise gestion du gouvernement sénégalais ainsi que sur les morts inqualifiables et inutiles.

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▻https://alarmphone.org/fr/2021/01/29/un-nombre-choquant-de-morts-mais-aussi-des-luttes-grandissantes-sur-plac
#décès #morts #mourir_aux_frontières #asile #migrations #réfugiés #Méditerranée #mourir_en_mer #route_Atlantique #Atlantique #Ceuta #Melilla #Gibraltar #détroit_de_Gibraltar #Nador #Oujda #Algérie #Maroc #marche_silencieuse

ping @karine4 @_kg_
#résistance #luttes #Sénégal

Death on the Central Mediterranean : 2013-2020

Since 2013, more than 17,000 asylum seekers and migrants are known to have disappeared or died.

▻https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/news-feature/2021/01/12/migration-central-mediterranean-timeline-rescue

#chronologie #timeline #time-line #Méditerranée #asile #migrations #réfugiés #mourir_en_mer #mer_Méditerranée #histoire #morts #décès

ping @isskein @karine4 @_kg_ @reka

La seconde [deuxième, comme le dit d’ailleurs explicitement l’article qui suit...] vague de #Covid-19 en France est plus meurtrière que la première, Delphine Roucaute
▻https://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2020/12/29/une-deuxieme-vague-plus-meurtriere-que-la-premiere_6064736_3244.html

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Si le taux de mortalité dans les hôpitaux a été divisé par deux depuis avril, près de 32 500 personnes sont mortes des suites de la maladie lors des cinq derniers mois, contre un peu moins de 30 300 entre février et juillet.

Alors que la pandémie de Covid-19 s’est déclenchée il y a près d’un an, le monde compte ses morts et se rapproche dangereusement des deux millions au rythme de quelque 15 000 décès par jour. En France, depuis février, l’épidémie a d’ores et déjà causé la mort de 62 746 personnes, dont 43 551 à l’hôpital, selon Santé publique France. Ces données agrègent les chiffres issus des hôpitaux et des Ehpad et ne comptent donc pas les quelques milliers de personnes mortes chez elles.

La #deuxième_vague, qui a débuté dès août alors que celle du printemps finissait à peine, se révèle plus longue et plus meurtrière : 32 481 personnes sont mortes des suites de la maladie lors des cinq derniers mois, quand elles étaient 30 265 entre février et juillet. Le déséquilibre va encore s’intensifier dans les semaines voire les mois à venir, puisque la cinétique de cette deuxième flambée épidémique marque actuellement un #plateau élevé : la deuxième vague n’est pas finie. La saison hivernale et les retrouvailles de fin d’année font par ailleurs craindre une augmentation de la circulation du virus, d’autant plus qu’un nouveau variant plus contagieux a été identifié au très proche Royaume-Uni.

Moins de malades en services de réanimation

Ce tableau noir est toutefois à nuancer : une vague plus meurtrière ne signifie pas nécessairement un virus plus létal. « Si la deuxième vague s’était déroulée avec les mêmes paramètres de transmission que la première, c’est-à-dire avec un taux de reproduction de l’ordre de 3 au mois de mars, alors qu’il était inférieur à 1,5 au mois d’octobre, sa violence aurait été incomparablement plus grande », souligne l’épidémiologiste Antoine Flahault. Par ailleurs, « le taux de #mortalité dans les hôpitaux a été divisé quasiment par deux par rapport au début de la première vague, et cela sans grande innovation thérapeutique, seulement par une meilleure gestion des soins des formes sévères de la maladie », explique le directeur de l’Institut de santé globale à Genève. A nombre d’hospitalisations comparables, beaucoup moins de malades ont été admis en services de réanimation.

Cependant, l’automne a été marqué par un confinement moins strict qu’au printemps, qui n’a pas réussi à faire chuter l’incidence aux niveaux espérés par le gouvernement pour maîtriser l’épidémie – l’objectif de 5 000 nouveaux cas par jour établi par le président Emmanuel Macron s’éloigne, avec une moyenne de 15 000 tests positifs ces derniers jours. Par ailleurs, la saison hivernale est [avec les gouvernants, les charlatans, les complotistes et d’autres catégories de bipèdes pas toujours très définies] la meilleure alliée du virus. Une étude française publiée dans Plos One en novembre établit une corrélation entre la température ambiante et la sévérité de l’épidémie à partir de données hospitalières de la région parisienne. « Lorsque la température baisse, on observe alors une augmentation significative des admissions en réanimation huit jours après et des décès hospitaliers quinze jours après », écrivent les auteurs.

Certaines régions paient toutefois de plus lourds tributs à l’épidémie, comme c’est le cas du Grand-Est, d’Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes et de la Bourgogne-Franche-Comté. Selon la plate-forme de visualisation de données CovidTracker, 47 départements étaient, au 28 décembre, dans une situation pire que le pic de la première vague au niveau des hospitalisations.

#décès_à_domicile

Il était temps que ce soit dit, même si c’est pas à la télé, même si il n’y a pas les données qui font mal.

Un océano de tumbas anónimas

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Casi 600 jóvenes africanos, a veces menores, incluso niños, han perdido la vida este año intentando llegar a Canarias en patera; solo en 164 casos se han recuperado cadáveres

Cuesta creer que la bebé Sahe Sephora, ahogada el 16 de mayo de 2019, fuera la primera víctima del drama de las pateras en Canarias a la que se entierra con su nombre después de 21 años de tragedias, pero es así y los cementerios de las islas han seguido recibiendo difuntos anónimos en 2020, cuyas familias se ven arrastradas a un duelo imposible.

Casi 600 jóvenes africanos, a veces menores, incluso niños, han perdido la vida este año intentando llegar a Canarias en patera, de los que solo en 164 casos se recuperó su cadáver. Son las víctimas documentadas por el programa Missing Migrants de Naciones Unidas, que reconoce que se trata de una «estimación mínima», porque sus responsables son conscientes de que a varias embarcaciones se las ha tragado el Atlántico con todos sus ocupantes sin dejar rastro.

De hecho, la Cruz Roja sostiene que la Ruta Canaria mata ,entre el 5 y el 8% de quienes se aventuran a ella, lo que se traduce en una horquilla de 1.000 a 1.700 vidas perdidas, si se tiene en cuenta que este año han llegado al Archipiélago 21.500 personas en patera.

En toda Canarias, hay decenas de inmigrantes enterrados sin identificación de las tres grandes etapas que ha vivido este fenómeno: las llegadas de finales de los años noventa y primeros años del siglo XXI, centradas en Fuerteventura, donde se produjo el primer naufragio mortal (el 26 de julio de 1999); la crisis de los cayucos de 2006-2007, que abarcó todas las islas, con epicentro en Tenerife; y la oleada actual, focalizada en Gran Canaria.

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Son la punta del iceberg, detrás hay muchos más muertos en el mar de los que se sabe poco o nada, pues este es un movimiento clandestino de seres humanos, en el que no existen manifiestos de embarque. Como mucho, hay listas de llegadas, las que recopilan la Policía y la Cruz Roja, no siempre accesibles a los familiares que vuelven estos meses a peregrinar de ventanilla en ventanilla por Gran Canaria preguntando por un hijo o un hermano desaparecido.
Sin informar a las familias

«Si eres padre o madre y sabes que tu hijo ha salido, pero no has vuelto a tener noticias de él, aceptar que vas a dejar de buscarlo es un trámite doloroso, que requiere hacer el máximo esfuerzo por decirte a ti mismo que no ha llegado y que has hecho todo lo posible por encontrarlo. Vienen a España confiando en que somos un país moderno que les dirá si existe alguna noticia de esa persona, pero no se la dan», asegura el abogado #Daniel_Arencibia.

Este letrado colabora con el Secretariado de Migraciones de la Diócesis de Canarias y sabe bien de lo que habla: aunque la mayoría de las familias son musulmanas, muchos de los que viajan en busca de un pariente del que no saben más que cogió un cayuco hace semanas o meses acaban llamando a la puerta de una iglesia.

Arencibia atendió hace días a una mujer que había venido desde Italia empeñándose para pagarse el vuelo, la pensión y la PCR tras la pista de su cuñado, porque la madre, de Marruecos, no puede desplazarse a España. «Lloraba en la parroquia porque nadie la atendía. Lo único que quiero, decía, es que me digan que no ha llegado, sé que seguramente está muerto», relata el letrado. Pero la mujer no quería contar eso a su suegra sin una mínima confirmación.

No es fácil averiguar quién ha perecido en el Atlántico, pero las autoridades sí conocen quién ha llegado, subraya este abogado, que cree que muchas familias les bastaría con que les dijeran que su pariente no está entre los rescatados. Defiende, además, que este es un caso claro en el que debería activarse el protocolo de accidentes con víctimas múltiples, uno de cuyos puntos principales es la instauración de una oficina de información a las familias.

La juez Pilar Barrado, que hasta principios de año estuvo al cargo de uno de los juzgados de San Bartolomé de Tirajana, los de la costa de las pateras, comparte su opinión. «¿Si nos llegara un barco con 30 suecos que han visto morir a tres de sus compañeros tras quedarse a la deriva, los trataríamos así?», se pregunta. «Claro que no», se contesta, «identificaríamos a los fallecidos y a los supervivientes les ofreceríamos la ayuda de psicólogos».
Los primos Sokhona

Pero no siempre es posible, ni siquiera preguntando a los supervivientes, porque a veces los ocupantes de la patera se vieron por primera vez la noche del embarque. Y, con frecuencia, los traficantes de personas que fletan las pateras juegan a la desinformación con las familias. Los muertos no convienen al negocio y menos aún las pateras que desaparecen en el océano.

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Puede que sea el caso que está viviendo Omar Sokhona, un mauritano que llegó en patera a Fuerteventura en 2006. Desde hace años reside en Francia y ahora busca a su hermano Saliya y a su primo Fodie, dos veinteañeros de los que solo sabe que se subieron a un cayuco en Nuadibú con 52 personas más el siete de septiembre. Lleva semanas telefoneando al pasador que los embarcó y siempre obtiene la misma respuesta: un cayuco con 54 personas llegó a Gran Canaria el 10 de septiembre, será el de su hermano.

A Omar le consta que un cayuco no tarda tres días desde Nuadibú a Gran Canaria, sino bastantes más. «Son otros motores», se excusó el traficante. «¿Y por qué no ha llamado nadie?», insistió. «Estarán detenidos, con la COVID ahora pasan muchos días en los campamentos», se defendió. Ahora, ya ni responde a sus mensajes.

No ignora Omar que nadie está tres meses detenido en España sin llamar a casa. Ni tampoco que es poco probable que ni una sola de 54 personas contacte con su familia. Se barrunta lo que le ha pasado a su hermano, pero le duele asumirlo e, incluso, tiene engañada a su madre en Mauritania. «Sufre por dentro», reconoce. Y, de momento, alienta sus esperanzas con el cuento de la cuarentena sin fin.

Como decía el abogado Arencibia, no se atreve a dar por muerto a su hermano sin que al menos alguien le confirme en España que no está entre los 21.500 que han llegado a Canarias. Su familia en Valencia sí ha optado por denunciar la desaparición ante la Policía.

En esa ciudad vive otro de los primos Sokhoma, Alí. «Yo pienso que están muertos, que se han perdido o que su barca se hundió», admite Alí, que hizo la travesía en cayuco a Canarias dos veces (2006 y 2007). «Mi familia está fatal, si no ven los cuerpos, no van a descansar».

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Los Sokhoma se enteraron de que Saliya y Fodie habían intentado «el viaje» a posteriori, porque ninguno contó nada. Es común, aclara Teodoro Bondjale, secretario de la Federación de Asociaciones Africanas de Canarias (FAAC): la mayoría de los jóvenes que ahora se suben al cayuco no comparten sus planes con su familia, porque saben que se lo impedirían o intentarían disuadirlos.

Bondjale está asustado con las dimensiones que está cobrando el problema. Lo nota por el volumen de llamadas que reciben en la FAAC preguntando por chicos desaparecidos, la mayoría hechas por familiares en África, pero también por parientes en Europa o Estados Unidos. En una de las últimas que atendió, no se atrevió a decir a una mujer senegalesa residente en Massachussets que buscaba a su hermano lo evidente, «que muchas pateras se hunden, desaparecen en el Atlántico». «No quise desesperarla más», se excusa.
15 saquitos de huesos

En el cementerio de Agüimes, una pequeña oración enmarcada, un rosario y unas flores que los parroquianos van renovando de cuando en cuando ofrecen algo de dignidad a los nichos 3.325 a 3.339, tapiados solo con ladrillos y cal, sin ningún signo ni sigla que identifique a sus ocupantes, de los que poco se sabe.

Solo que allí yacen quince jóvenes subsaharianos a los que encontraron en un cayuco a la deriva a 160 kilómetros de las islas el 19 de agosto, cuando llevaban más de una semana muertos y estaban reducidos a poco más que piel y huesos. Posiblemente, eran los últimos de una lista de ocupantes aún mayor, nunca se aclarará.

Los enterraron casi en solitario el 26 de septiembre, solo estaban con ellos Teodoro Bondjale, el diputado Luc André Diouf (expresidente de la FAAC), el sepulturero y el párroco del pueblo, Miguel Lantigua, que rezó por sus almas, consciente de que lo más seguro era que no compartieran su fe y en unos momentos muy dolorosos para él, porque no se le iban de la cabeza las familias.

«Tiene que ser muy duro. Han puesto todas sus esperanzas en esa persona que vino por el futuro económico de la familia y ni siquiera tienen noticia de lo que ha pasado. Es muy duro pensar en las familias, en ellos y en cómo murieron», reconoce el cura.

La directora del Instituto de Medicina Legal de Las Palmas, la forense María José Meilán, sí sabe cómo fallecieron: de hambre y sed tras muchos días perdidos en el océano. Estuvo en las autopsias y no se le olvidan. «Fue terrible. Eran un manojo de huesos».

«Impresionaba ver cadáveres que pesaban 30 o 40 kilos. Eso da una idea del tiempo que pasaron sin comer ni beber, a la deriva, y de los días que llevaban fallecidos. Hablamos de chicos fuertes, que por su estatura y complexión pesarían 70-80 kilos, mínimo», apunta.
Cápsulas de ADN

El Instituto de Medicina Legal de Las Palmas conserva muestras de ADN de un centenar de inmigrantes muertos en esta zona de Canarias desde 2008 que están pendientes de identificar, 34 solo de este año.

Desde enero, lo hace siguiendo un protocolo que comparte con Cruz Roja Internacional: cada muestra de ADN tiene asociadas además datos físicos del difunto, el lugar donde fue hallado, los detalles de su patera, fotos de su rostro y de cualquier detalle del cuerpo que pueda ser identificativo (como un tatuaje) y hasta una ficha dental.

La idea, explica Meilán, es que Cruz Roja recoja peticiones en África de familias que tengan la sospecha de que un pariente suyo puede estar enterrado en Canarias, para hacer una comparación genética. El sistema solo está empezando y necesita rodaje, dice la forense, pero ya hay dos expedientes abiertos con familias que creen que el último rastro de sus hijos o hermanos están ese banco de ADN.

La Universidad John Moore de Liverpool trabaja en un proyecto complementario: la reconstrucción forense de los rostros de los inmigrantes a partir de fotos de sus cadáveres o incluso del escaneo de su cráneo. Lo impulsa una investigadora de Fuerteventura, María Castañeyra, integrante del equipo de Caroline Wilkinson, que consiguió ponerle cara a personajes como Ramses II o Ricardo III.

Quizás esa técnica podría devolver un atisbo de identidad a los 39 inmigrantes que Valentín Afonso enterró en Mogán entre 2006 y 2009 sin más identificación que un número. Hoy descansan en cajitas individuales numeradas en la fosa común, con la esperanza aún abierta de que alguien algún día los reclame, aunque hasta la fecha solo haya pasado por allí una mujer con ese afán, en 2007.

«Era una señora de Senegal, sabía que su hijo había muerto, pero no sabía más. Vino aquí a rezar en la tumba de los inmigrantes», recuerda este sepulturero, ya jubilado, que acabó tan implicado en aquella experiencia que acogió como a un hijo a un chico maliense con una experiencia terrible en el cayuco, Mamadú. Hoy Valentín tiene dos nietas de piel morena que alborotan su jubilación.

▻https://www.eldiario.es/canariasahora/sociedad/oceano-tumbas-anonimas_1_6561824.html
#mourir_en_mer #asile #migrations #réfugiés #Canaries #îles_Canaries #Espagne #frontières #décès #morts #2020 #statistiques #chiffres #cimetière #Agüimes #mourir_aux_frontières #María_José_Meilán #Valentín_Afonso #route_Atlantique #Océan_atlantique #Teodoro_Bondjale

Plus de 3 000 personnes meurent au cours de leurs voyages migratoires en 2020 malgré la pandémie de COVID-19 | Organisation internationale pour les migrations
▻https://www.iom.int/fr/news/plus-de-3-000-personnes-meurent-au-cours-de-leurs-voyages-migratoires-en-2020-m
▻https://www.iom.int/sites/default/files/styles/highlights/public/press_release/media/mmp_med_global_map_17_dec_2020_0.png?itok=ihCxyQq4

Le projet sur les migrants disparus de l’Organisation internationale pour les migrations (OIM) a enregistré à ce jour plus de 3 000 décès le long de itinéraires migratoires du monde entier en 2020.Malgré la COVID-19 et les restrictions et mesures de grande envergure mises en place aux frontières du monde entier pour tenter de contrôler la propagation du virus, des dizaines de milliers de personnes ont continué à quitter leur foyer et à entreprendre de dangereux périples à travers les déserts et les mers.
Bien que le nombre total de personnes qui ont perdu la vie en 2020 soit inférieur à celui des années précédentes, certains itinéraires ont connu une augmentation du nombre de décès. En particulier, à ce jour en 2020, au moins 593 personnes sont mortes en route vers les îles Canaries en Espagne, contre 210 en 2019 et 45 en 2018.Une augmentation des décès de migrants a également été enregistrée en Amérique du Sud en 2020 par rapport aux années précédentes, avec au moins 104 personnes qui ont perdu la vie - pour la plupart des migrants vénézuéliens - contre moins de 40 au cours de toutes les années précédentes.Au moins 1 773 personnes sont mortes en Europe et en route vers l’Europe cette année, ce qui représente la majorité des décès enregistrés dans le monde entier ; une tendance qui se poursuit depuis 2014, date à laquelle le projet de l’OIM sur les migrants disparus a commencé à recueillir ces données.Quelque 381 hommes, femmes et enfants ont perdu la vie à la frontière entre les États-Unis et le Mexique, 245 autres ont péri en Asie du Sud-Est - la plupart étaient des réfugiés rohingyas voyageant par bateau du Myanmar et du Bangladesh vers la Malaisie, la Thaïlande et l’Indonésie - tandis que 143 et 112 autres personnes sont mortes dans les Caraïbes et au Moyen-Orient respectivement.
« Les gens continuent de perdre la vie lors de leurs périples de migration irrégulière malgré les importantes restrictions de voyage en 2020, ce qui montre la nécessité de disposer de possibilités de migration plus sûres et légales », a déclaré Frank Laczko, directeur du Centre mondial d’analyse des données sur la migration de l’OIM, qui gère le projet sur les migrants disparus.La diminution du nombre de décès de migrants enregistrés n’indique pas nécessairement que le nombre de pertes humaines a réellement diminué en 2020, car la COVID-19 a également entraîné des changements importants dans la disponibilité des données sur les décès pendant la migration et la capacité à surveiller des itinéraires spécifiques.
Même avant la pandémie, les décès de migrants avaient tendance à être peu signalés, parfois même non recensés. Pendant la COVID-19, les contraintes liées à la collecte de ces données se sont multipliées. Les informations recueillies à partir de sondages auprès des migrants qui ont pu être témoins d’un décès n’étaient par exemple pas disponibles en 2020. Ces données de sondages sont souvent la seule source d’information sur les décès de migrants dans des régions isolées comme le désert du Sahara.

#Covid-19#migrant#migration#mortalite#routemigratoire#donnee#pandemie#donne#sante#deces#enregistrement

Rapporti di monitoraggio

Sin dal 2016 il progetto ha pubblicato report di approfondimento giuridico sulle situazioni di violazione riscontrate presso le diverse frontiere oggetto delle attività di monitoraggio. Ciascun report affronta questioni ed aspetti contingenti e particolarmente interessanti al fine di sviluppare azioni di contenzioso strategico.

Elenco dei rapporti pubblicati in ordine cronologico:

“Le riammissioni di cittadini stranieri a Ventimiglia (giugno 2015): profili di illegittimità“

Il report è stato redatto nel giugno del 2015 è costituisce una prima analisi delle principali criticità riscontrabili alla frontiera italo-francese verosimilmente sulla base dell’Accordo bilaterale fra il Governo della Repubblica italiana e il Governo della Repubblica francese sulla cooperazione transfrontaliera in materia di polizia e dogana (Accordo di Chambery)
#Vintimille #Ventimiglia #frontière_sud-alpine #Alpes #Menton #accord_bilatéral #Accord_de_Chambéry #réadmissions

Ajouté à la #métaliste de liens autour d’#accords_de_réadmission entre pays européens...
►https://seenthis.net/messages/736091
Et plus précisément ici:
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/736091#message887941

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“Le riammissioni di cittadini stranieri alla frontiera di Chiasso: profili di illegittimità”

Il report è stato redatto nell’estate del 2016 per evidenziare la situazione critica che si era venuta a creare in seguito al massiccio afflusso di cittadini stranieri in Italia attraverso la rotta balcanica scatenata dalla crisi siriana. La frontiera italo-svizzera è stata particolarmente interessata da numerosi tentativi di attraversamento del confine nei pressi di Como e il presente documento fornisce una analisi giuridica delle criticità riscontrate.

Ajouté à la #métaliste de liens autour d’#accords_de_réadmission entre pays européens...
►https://seenthis.net/messages/736091
Et plus précisément ici:
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/736091#message887940

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“Lungo la rotta del Brennero”

Il report, redatto con la collaborazione della associazione Antenne Migranti e il contributo della fondazione Alex Langer nel 2017, analizza le dinamiche della frontiera altoatesina e sviluppa una parte di approfondimento sulle violazioni relative al diritto all’accoglienza per richiedenti asilo e minori, alle violazioni all’accesso alla procedura di asilo e ad una analisi delle modalità di attuazione delle riammissioni alla frontiera.

#Brenner #Autriche

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“Attività di monitoraggio ai confini interni italiani – Periodo giugno 2018 – giugno 2019”

Report analitico che riporta i dati raccolti e le prassi di interesse alle frontiere italo-francesi, italo-svizzere, italo-austriache e italo slovene. Contiene inoltre un approfondimento sui trasferimenti di cittadini di paesi terzi dalle zone di frontiera indicate all’#hotspot di #Taranto e centri di accoglienza del sud Italia.

#Italie_du_Sud

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“Report interno sopralluogo Bosnia 27-31 ottobre 2019”

Report descrittivo a seguito del sopralluogo effettuato da soci coinvolti nel progetto Medea dal 27 al 31 ottobre sulla condizione delle persone in transito in Bosnia. Il rapporto si concentra sulla descrizione delle strutture di accoglienza presenti nel paese, sull’accesso alla procedura di protezione internazionale e sulle strategie di intervento future.

#Bosnie #Bosnie-Herzégovine

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“Report attività frontiere interne terrestri, porti adriatici e Bosnia”

Rapporto di analisi dettagliata sulle progettualità sviluppate nel corso del periodo luglio 2019 – luglio 2020 sulle diverse frontiere coinvolte (in particolare la frontiera italo-francese, italo-slovena, la frontiera adriatica e le frontiere coinvolte nella rotta balcanica). Le novità progettuali più interessanti riguardano proprio l’espansione delle progettualità rivolte ai paesi della rotta balcanica e alla Grecia coinvolta nelle riammissioni dall’Italia. Nel periodo ad oggetto del rapporto il lavoro ha avuto un focus principale legato ad iniziative di monitoraggio, costituzione della rete ed azioni di advocacy.

#Slovénie #mer_Adriatique #Adriatique

▻https://medea.asgi.it/rapporti

#rapport #monitoring #medea #ASGI
#asile #migrations #réfugiés #frontières
#frontières_internes #frontières_intérieures #Balkans #route_des_balkans

ping @isskein @karine4

En 2020, 27 #décès suite à une intervention des #forces_de_l’ordre, dont 12 pendant le #confinement - #Basta !
▻https://www.bastamag.net/recensement-interventions-policieres-letales-27-deces-2020-causes-circonst

Revealed: shocking death toll of asylum seekers in Home Office accommodation

FoI response shows 29 people died – five times as many as lost their lives in perilous Channel crossings.

Twenty-nine asylum seekers have died in #Home_Office accommodation so far this year – five times as many as those who have lost their lives on perilous Channel small boat crossings over the same period.

The Guardian obtained the figure in a freedom of information response from the Home Office, which does not publish deaths data. The identities of the majority of those who died have not been made public and the circumstances of their deaths are unclear.

Many asylum seekers are in the 20-40 age group and are fit and healthy when they embark on what are often physically and emotionally gruelling journeys to the UK.

One of the most recent deaths was that of Mohamed Camera, 27, from Ivory Coast. He was found dead in his room in Home Office accommodation in a north London hotel on 9 November.

Camera had been complaining of back pain shortly before he died and had travelled through Libya en route to the UK. He had recently arrived from Calais on a small boat.

One of his friends who travelled from Calais with him told the Guardian: “He was a nice, sociable person. He was smiling when we reached the UK because he believed that now he was going to have another life.”

A Home Office spokesperson confirmed the death and officials said they were “saddened” by it.

Another man, 41-year-old Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah Alhabib, who fled war-torn Yemen, was found dead in a Manchester hotel room on 6 August.

Alhabib travelled on a small boat with 15 other people from Yemen, Syria and Iran. After they were picked up by Border Force, Home Office officials detained a group at Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre in Bedfordshire for three days before moving them to the hotel in Manchester.

One of the asylum seekers who was in the boat with Alhabib told the Guardian at the time: “All of us on these journeys, we have lost our country, lost our family, lost our future. When we got into the boat in Calais we felt the sea was the only place left for us to go.”

An inquest jury found on 30 November that the death of Oscar Okwurime, a Nigerian man, as a result of a subarachnoid haemorrhage was considered “unnatural” and that neglect contributed to his death.

The Scottish Refugee Council has called for all 29 deaths to be fully and independently investigated. In September, a group of Glasgow MPs also called for a fatal accident inquiry into three deaths that occurred in the city.

The people who died were Mercy Baguma, from Uganda, who was found dead with her toddler by her side, Adnan Olbeh, from Syria, and Badreddin Abadlla Adam, who was shot dead by police, after he stabbed six people including a police officer.

Meanwhile, those who lost their lives in the Channel included Abdulfatah Hamdallah, a young Sudanese refugee, as well as a family of five – Rasul Iran Nezhad, Shiva Mohammad Panahi and their children Anita, nine, Armin, six, and 15-month-old Artin, who drowned trying to cross to the UK in October 2020.

Clare Moseley, the founder of the Care4Calais charity, said: “It’s shameful that more refugees die here in the UK, in Home Office accommodation, than do so in Calais or trying to cross the Channel. Refugees are the world’s most resilient people. Many have crossed the Sahara desert and made it through the hell of Libya, facing unimaginable hardship to get this far. But the way we treat them in this country is cruel.

“Our government doesn’t give them the basics of life like adequate food and clothing. It locks them up in military barracks and keeps them isolated and depressed in hotels. It keeps them under constant threat of deportation, instead of processing their asylum applications promptly.”

Graham O’Neill, the policy manager for the Scottish Refugee Council, said: “After the recent tragedies in Glasgow we are not shocked many have died in the UK asylum support system.”

He added that there was no Home Office public policy on deaths or support for funeral costs or repatriation of the body, nor any discernible learning process to prevent sudden or unexplained deaths. “The Home Office must rectify this and home affairs select committee and the chief inspector ensure they do,” he said.

A Home Office spokesperson said: “We are always saddened to hear of the death of any individual in asylum accommodation. This can be for a number of reasons, including natural causes or as the result of a terminal illness.

“The health and wellbeing of asylum seekers has and always will be our priority. We will continue to work closely with a range of organisations to provide support to those that need it and where necessary we will always cooperate fully in any investigation into the cause of an individual death.”

The revelation comes as a high court judge ruled on Monday that the Home Office was in breach of its duties to protect the human rights of asylum seekers against homelessness.

Judge Robin Knowles also found the Home Office was responsible for wholesale failure to monitor and implement a £4bn contract awarded to several private companies over a 10-year period leading to unlawful delays in provision of accommodation.

Freedom of information responses from the Home Office obtained by the Scottish Refugee Council found that, between January and March 2020, 83% of Home Office properties to accommodate asylum seekers had defects and 40% of the defects were so serious that they made the properties uninhabitable.

The defects were identified by the Home Office’s own inspectors.

▻https://amp.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/dec/15/revealed-shocking-death-toll-of-asylum-seekers-in-home-office-accom
#décès #morts #UK #logement #hébergement #Angleterre #asile #migrations #réfugiés #2020 #statistiques #chiffres

Une vie tronquée

#Abdoul_Mariga, 30 ans, est mort le 17 octobre dernier à #Conakry, un peu de l’#hépatite_B, beaucoup de la politique suisse en matière de migration. Ce jeune homme vivait depuis dix ans en #Suisse, où il exerçait le métier de cuisinier, lorsque les autorités fédérales l’ont expulsé, le 6 novembre 2019, probablement déjà malade, vers la Guinée, pays dans lequel il n’avait pas d’attaches. Ses proches le disaient intégré, le canton de #Vaud le jugeait intégré, le Tribunal fédéral l’admettait intégré, mais pas suffisamment, pas assez pour qu’il puisse poursuivre le cours de son existence.

Seul à Conakry, sans documents d’identité que lui refusent les autorités guinéennes, Abdoul Mariga est livré au harcèlement policier et, dans l’incapacité de travailler, voit son pécule s’envoler. Sa santé décline également.

A Berne, le Secrétariat d’Etat aux migrations (SEM) est prévenu de sa situation en mars. L’administration fédérale sait que la Guinée, Etat vers lequel elle l’a expédié de force, refuse de le régulariser, le maintenant dans une situation dramatique. Les documents en notre possession sont formels. Mais Berne refuse de prendre ses responsabilités.

« Ma santé ne va pas bien. Mes bras et mes jambes s’endorment. […] J’ai des vertiges et parfois je perds l’équilibre et je tombe. […] J’ai pris un traitement quelque temps, mais maintenant c’est fini, je n’ai plus de médicaments et plus de soins. Même me loger devient très difficile. […] Je suis complètement bouleversé, des fois, je ne mange pas. Je paie seulement l’hôtel. C’est trop difficile pour moi », témoignait-il1 encore en septembre, avant que ses amis suisses ne perdent le contact.

Après onze mois de descente aux enfers, M. Mariga s’est éteint le 17 octobre 2020, seul, dans un hôpital de Conakry. « Sans ce renvoi décidé par le SEM, Abdoul Mariga serait certainement encore en vie, et travaillerait aujourd’hui encore au CHUV », résume le collectif Droit de rester qui, durant des mois, a vainement tenté de s’opposer au Moloch bureaucratique. Comment ne pas partager leur colère. Et l’exigence que Berne rende aujourd’hui des comptes sur les manquements qui ont conduit à ce drame.

▻https://lecourrier.ch/2020/12/14/une-vie-tronquee

#Guinée_Conakry #réintégration #intégration #asile #migrations #réfugiés #morts #décès #SEM #Guinée

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Ajouté à la métaliste sur les exilés décédés en Suisse
►https://seenthis.net/messages/687445

ping @isskein @karine4