Un migrant est mort dans la nuit à #Calais
G.O avait 27 ans. Il était nigérian. Il est mort d’une #intoxication au monoxyde de carbone, confirme la préfecture du Pas-de-Calais à « l’Obs ». Il avait posé sa tente depuis quelques semaines seulement aux abords de l’ancienne jungle.
▻https://www.nouvelobs.com/migrants/20191101.OBS20594/un-migrant-est-mort-dans-la-nuit-a-calais.html
#décès #morts #France #migrations #asile #réfugiés #mourir_dans_la_forteresse_Europe
Mort de neuf migrants après un #naufrage au large de l’île espagnole de #Lanzarote
Neuf migrants ont été retrouvés morts au large de Lanzarote après le naufrage de leur embarcation prise dans une forte houle alors qu’ils tentaient de rejoindre cette île des Canaries. Deux autres personnes sont toujours portées disparues.
Neuf migrants sont morts après le naufrage au large de l’île espagnole de Lanzarote, aux Canaries, de leur embarcation renversée par de fortes vagues, ont indiqué jeudi 7 novembre les autorités de l’archipel. Deux autres migrants sont toujours portés disparus.
Ce bilan s’est alourdi jeudi après la découverte de quatre nouveaux corps, ont indiqué les autorités locales. Mercredi, cinq corps avaient été retrouvés « en dépit des difficultés dues à la forte houle, responsable du renversement de l’embarcation", avait expliqué l’administration locale de Lanzarote, dans un communiqué.
"Il y a neuf personnes décédées, en plus des quatre secourues en vie", a indiqué à l’AFP un porte-parole du gouvernement local de Lanzarote, île située au large des côtes marocaines, dans l’océan Atlantique. "Selon certains survivants, quinze personnes étaient à bord de l’embarcation et les services d’urgence continuent de fouiller la zone", a ajouté le porte-parole.
Les recherches se poursuivaient jeudi avec deux hélicoptères et plusieurs bateaux, en dépit des conditions météorologiques très difficiles "avec des vagues de quatre ou cinq mètres", avait plutôt affirmé Isidoro Blanco, porte-parole des services d’urgence de Lanzarote.
Selon le récit des rescapés, la quinzaine de personnes aurait pris la mer vendredi. Aucune information n’a été donnée sur leur pays d’origine ni leur identité.
Selon les chiffres publiés par l’Organisation internationale pour les migrations (OIM) de l’ONU, au moins 80 personnes sont mortes ou portées disparues, après avoir tenté de parvenir aux Canaries depuis le nord-ouest de l’Afrique en 2019.
▻https://www.infomigrants.net/fr/post/20690/mort-de-neuf-migrants-apres-un-naufrage-au-large-de-l-ile-espagnole-de
#décès #migrations #réfugiés #Lanzarote #Atlantique #océan_atlantique #mourir_en_mer #Canaries #routes_migratoires #itinéraires_migratoires #route_atlantique
Il corpo senza vita di #Ousmane_Keita, un #bracciante 22enne originario della Costa d’Avorio, è stato ritrova con un paio di cesoie conficcate in gola nelle campagne di Rosarno. Condoglianze e vicinanza ai familiari. Chiediamo piena luce su questa vicenda.
▻https://twitter.com/aboubakar_soum/status/1192190798063951873
#mourir_dans_la_forteresse_europe #exploitation #décès #mort #asile #migrations #réfugiés #travail #Rosarno #Italie #Calabre
#Suicide au centre de requérants
Un jeune homme s’est suicidé au centre pour demandeurs d’asile de #Boudry. Des organisations dénoncent un manque d’accompagnement et d’accès aux soins médicaux.
#Calais : huit migrants, dont des enfants, trouvés en hypothermie dans un camion frigorifique
Tôt ce dimanche 27 octobre, la Border Force britannique a trouvé huit migrants en état d’#hypothermie dans un #camion_frigorifique, au terminal ferry du port de Calais. Parmi eux, deux enfants en bas âge.
#asile #migrations #frontières #France #Angleterre #UK #camion #décès #morts #mourir_aux_frontières #mourir_dans_la_forteresse_européenne
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Mise à jour du 29.10.2019...
Je pense que les 8 personnes qui ont été retrouvées dans le camion ne sont pas mortes (ouf !) :
Huit migrants afghans, dont quatre mineurs ont été hospitalisés à Calais après avoir été retrouvés dimanche 27 octobre en état de « légère hypothermie » dans un camion frigorifique dans le port de cette ville du Pas-de-Calais.
►https://www.infomigrants.net/fr/post/20418/une-trentaine-de-migrants-decouverts-dans-des-camions-en-belgique-et-a
Quelques jours après le #camion_de_la_honte (22 octobre 2019 : 39 cadavres découverts dans un camion en Angleterre)...
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/807727
Une trentaine de migrants découverts dans des camions en Belgique et à Calais
Quelque 28 migrants, dont des mineurs, ont été retrouvés depuis samedi dans plusieurs camions en partance de Calais et du nord de la Belgique vers le Royaume-Uni. La plupart sont Afghans, Irakiens et Érythréens. L’un des transporteurs avait caché les migrants sous un trappe verrouillée, derrière des poulets surgelés.
Huit migrants afghans, dont quatre mineurs ont été hospitalisés à Calais après avoir été retrouvés dimanche 27 octobre en état de « légère hypothermie » dans un camion frigorifique dans le port de cette ville du Pas-de-Calais.
Ils étaient cachés derrière des poulets surgelés, dans le double fond de la cellule frigorifique qui se trouvait sous une trappe.
Ils ne pouvaient pas s’échapper en cas de problème
La trappe était verrouillée de l’extérieur, un dispositif extrêmement dangereux puisque les personnes transportées ne pouvaient pas s’échapper seules en cas de problème.
La semaine dernière, trente-neuf migrants vietnamiens sont morts piégés dans des conditions similaires, dans un camion frigorifique dont le conteneur était arrivé de Zeebruges jusqu’à Londres.
Dimanche, le petit camion de 3,5 tonnes qui transportait les migrants afghans, a été contrôlé au moment d’embarquer sur un ferry à destination du Royaume-Uni. « Tout le contenant n’était pas rempli, ce qui prouve bien que ce n’était pas un véritable transport de marchandises », a indiqué une source judiciaire.
Vingt migrants découverts à bord de deux camions en Belgique
La veille, vingt migrants ont été découverts dans deux camions en route pour le Royaume-Uni depuis la Belgique. Ils ont tous été retrouvés en bonne santé.
Le premier véhicule transportait onze personnes, dont des femmes et des enfants d’origine africaine, a priori érythréenne, a précisé le parquet du Limbourg. Le chauffeur a découvert ces passagers clandestins lors d’un arrêt technique dans un garage de Saint-Trond, situé à proximité de la frontière avec l’Allemagne (environ 65 km à l’est de Bruxelles).
Par ailleurs, la police a trouvé samedi matin neuf hommes se disant de nationalité irakienne. Ils étaient cachés dans un camion qui circulait sur une voie rapide à Bruges en direction du port de #Zeebruges, a indiqué le parquet de Flandre occidentale. Les policiers sont intervenus après avoir été avertis de la présence de migrants dans ce camion.
►https://www.infomigrants.net/fr/post/20418/une-trentaine-de-migrants-decouverts-dans-des-camions-en-belgique-et-a
Après la mort de deux migrants dans la Manche, les associations alertent sur cette nouvelle route migratoire
Pour la première fois, les corps de deux migrants ont été retrouvés lundi sur une plage du #Touquet, dans le #Pas-de-Calais. Un drame qui souligne l’augmentation préoccupante du nombre d’exilés qui tentent de rejoindre les côtes britanniques par la #voie_maritime.
Les dépouilles de deux Irakiens ont été retrouvées lundi sur une plage du Touquet, dans le Pas-de-Calais. Ils avaient 17 et 22 ans. Ces jeunes hommes auraient tenté de traverser la Manche pour rejoindre le Royaume-Uni, selon les premiers éléments recueillis par la préfecture. Une petite embarcation semi-rigide a en effet été retrouvée à proximité. Ce drame porterait donc à quatre le nombre de migrants morts en tentant de rejoindre les côtes anglaises par la voie maritime.
Le 9 août, une Iranienne de 30 ans avait perdu la vie après être tombée d’un bateau surchargé. Le 23 août, le corps d’un Irakien avait été retrouvé au large de Zeebruges, en Belgique. Il pourrait s’agir d’un homme repéré par les secours français en train de tenter la traversée à la nage. Des morts prévisibles, selon les associations d’aide aux migrants. Depuis 2018, elles alertent régulièrement sur l’augmentation des traversées clandestines de la Manche.
Les traversées ont plus que doublé entre 2018 et 2019
Depuis le début de l’année 2019, la préfecture maritime de la Manche et de la mer du Nord, contactée par le JDD, a dénombré 206 cas de tentatives ou de traversées. Soit environ 2.000 migrants. Lundi matin encore, huit migrants ont été secourus sur une plage près de Calais, selon le parquet de Boulogne-sur-Mer.
Rien à voir avec les chiffres en Méditerranée où 69.962 personnes ont gagné l’Europe en bateau cette année, d’après les données de l’UNHCR au 14 octobre 2019. Et 1.071 y ont laissé leur vie ou sont portés disparus.
Il n’empêche. Si la plupart des candidats à l’immigration continuent de tenter de se faufiler dans un camion (souvent en risquant leur vie, 4 personnes étant décédées en 2018 selon la Cimade), de plus en plus d’entre eux choisissent la voie maritime. Le phénomène a été repéré pour la première fois par les autorités en 2016 et connaît, depuis, une croissance exponentielle. Cette année-là, 23 tentatives ou traversées sont comptabilisées par la préfecture maritime. Puis 12 cas en 2017 et… 78 en 2018, impliquant 586 migrants. En 2019, ce chiffre a donc plus que doublé, et l’année n’est pas finie.
Une bouée avec des bouteilles en plastique
Une nouvelle route migratoire d’autant plus préoccupante qu’elle est extrêmement dangereuse. Car la Manche est « une autoroute de la mer », rappelle la préfecture maritime, « 25% du trafic maritime international passe par le détroit du Pas-de-Calais ». Et de comparer cette traversée au fait de franchir une voie express de nuit et à pied.
Les exilés doivent naviguer de nuit entre ferrys et cargos, avec bien souvent des embarcations de fortune et un matériel de sauvetage insuffisant. L’Irakien repêché fin août près de Zeebruges portait une ceinture de flottaison bricolée avec des bouteilles en plastique.
A ces difficultés, il faut ajouter les courants forts et les températures glaciales. A bord, les passagers se retrouvent vite trempés, risquant l’hypothermie. Et s’ils tombent, leurs chances de s’en sortir se réduisent drastiquement. Les conditions météorologiques ne semblent pas dissuader les départs : la préfecture a enregistré un pic à l’hiver 2018, la pire période pour naviguer.
1.200 migrants auraient réussi la traversée, selon les médias britanniques
Alors, pourquoi prendre ce risque, au péril de sa vie ? "Parce que certains réussissent, avance Antoine Nehr, coordinateur de l’antenne d’Utopia 56 à Calais, « c’est un mélange de désespoir et d’espoir ». La préfecture maritime ne communique aucun chiffre sur le nombre de migrants ayant réussi à atteindre les cotes anglaises mais, côté britannique, la BBC, citant le ministère de l’Intérieur estime que plus de 1.200 personnes ont réussi la traversée cette année, dont 336 en août.
Autre facteur explicatif, selon ces associatifs : les conditions de vie toujours plus dures sur place. Depuis le démantèlement en 2016 de la « jungle » de Calais, « la politique est d’empêcher toute fixation, explique Antoine Nehr d’Utopia 56. Il y a des démantèlements des campements de fortune tous les deux jours, les forêts sont coupées pour empêcher de créer des lieux de vie, les tentes ou matériels sont jetés ». Ce qui pousserait les exilés à vouloir à tout prix parvenir au Royaume-Uni.
Plus de contrôles et plus de risques
« Ça ne va pas s’arrêter ! », prévient Claire Millot, secrétaire générale de l’association Salam, à l’AFP. « Parce que les conditions à Calais et Grande-Synthe sont épouvantables, avec des démantèlements réguliers, ils sont prêts à tout pour passer. » Pour elle, « ils ne sont pas prêts à entendre ce qu’on pourrait leur dire car ils sont déterminés. »
En fait, les migrants prennent de plus en plus de risques, en camions ou par bateaux. C’est en tout cas ce qu’observent les associations interrogées. « Les contrôles se sont renforcés sur le littoral nord entre Calais et Grande-Synthe, raconte Antoine Nehr au JDD. Il y a de plus en plus de murs, de barrières. » Il ajoute que ces personnes sont souvent « des déboutés du droit d’asile, en fin de parcours, qui n’ont plus d’autre choix et tentent le tout pour le tout ». En 2019, les contrôles ont également été accrus en mer et sur les côtes. Conséquence : « On observe qu’ils partent de plus loin et sur des canots surchargés », déclare Antoine Nehr.
Même constat pour Eva Ottavy, responsable des questions internationales à la Cimade. « Les camions n’ont plus le droit de s’arrêter dans les parkings entre Arras et Calais, indique-t-elle au JDD, pour éviter que les migrants n’y grimpent. Alors ils partent plus en amont sur la route ou prennent la mer. » Pour elle, « le renforcement des contrôles ne fait que déplacer les routes migratoires ». Tous craignent que d’autres drames soient passés sous les radars.
▻https://www.lejdd.fr/Societe/apres-la-mort-de-deux-migrants-dans-la-manche-les-associations-alertent-sur-ce
#route_migratoire #asile #migrations #réfugiés #France #Angleterre #UK #Calais #parcours_migratoire #décès #mort #mourir_dans_la_forteresse_Europe #frontières
#Camion_de_la_honte : les 39 victimes sont chinoises
L’enquête semble se diriger vers un nouveau drame d’esclavage moderne, avec la révélation de la nationalité chinoise des 39 victimes, 8 femmes et 31 hommes.
Ils n’ont pas encore de noms, d’âge et encore moins de sépultures. Mais on sait déjà que leur voyage cauchemardesque a commencé loin, très loin, à l’autre bout du monde. Les 39 personnes retrouvées sans vie dans la nuit de mardi à mercredi dans le conteneur d’un camion réfrigéré sur une zone industrielle de l’Essex, à l’est de l’Angleterre, venaient de Chine. Il y avait 8 femmes, dont une très jeune adulte, et 31 hommes, a confirmé jeudi la police d’Essex.
L’ambassade de Chine au Royaume-Uni a immédiatement réagi. « C’est avec un cœur lourd que nous lisons ces informations », a tweeté un porte-parole en indiquant « travailler avec la police pour éclaircir et confirmer la situation ». Ce n’est pas la première fois, sans doute pas la dernière, que des Chinois sont les victimes d’un drame de l’esclavage moderne au Royaume-Uni, les otages de gangs ultra-organisés, aux ramifications mondiales, des triades chinoises aux réseaux criminels d’Europe centrale et à ceux d’Europe occidentale. Ces criminels vendent, très cher et sans scrupule, la promesse d’un eldorado qui n’existe pas.
L’enquête le confirmera, mais la National Crime Agency (NCA), qui travaille en coordination avec la police de l’Essex et celle d’Irlande du Nord d’où est originaire le chauffeur du camion, a indiqué chercher à identifier « des groupes de crime organisé qui pourraient avoir joué un rôle » dans cette tragédie. La garde à vue du chauffeur, un homme de 25 ans, a été prolongée de vingt-quatre heures et des perquisitions étaient en cours dans trois résidences en Irlande du Nord, dans le comté d’Armagh. Selon le Daily Mail, qui cite un proche, le jeune homme aurait lui-même prévenu les secours après avoir ouvert l’arrière du camion pour y récupérer des papiers. La police n’a pas confirmé ces informations.
En 2000, 58 Chinois retrouvés morts dans un camion
Le 18 juin 2000 déjà, 58 Chinois avaient été retrouvés morts asphyxiés à l’arrière d’un camion, dans le port de Douvres. Seules 2 personnes avaient survécu. Grâce à elles, le périple infernal des victimes avait été retracé. Partis de la province chinoise de Fujian, sur le littoral du sud-est de la Chine, en face de l’île de Taiwan, ils avaient pris un avion depuis Pékin, avec leurs passeports légaux, jusqu’à Belgrade en Yougoslavie.
Des passeports volés, coréens pour la plupart, leur avaient alors été fournis. De Belgrade, ils avaient été acheminés par petits groupes dans des camionnettes vers la Hongrie, puis l’Autriche et la France. De là, ils avaient pris un train vers les Pays-Bas où ils avaient été « cueillis » par la branche européenne du gang de trafiquants, à Rotterdam. Enfermés à 60 dans un camion, dont le sas de ventilation avait été fermé, avec seulement quatre seaux d’eau, ils étaient morts étouffés lors de la traversée de Zeebruges en Belgique à Douvres. Le chauffeur, un Néerlandais, et une interprète chinoise, le contact des immigrés au Royaume-Uni, avaient été condamnés respectivement à seize et six ans de prison.
« On coule »
C’est aussi de la province de Fujian que venaient la plupart des 23 immigrés illégaux chinois, retrouvés noyés quatre ans plus tard, le 5 février 2004, dans la baie de Morecambe, dans le Lincolnshire (nord-ouest de l’Angleterre). Ils avaient été embauchés pour pêcher à marée basse des coques. Payés la misérable somme de 5 pounds (6 euros) pour 25 kg de coquillages. Cette baie est immense, sujette à de grands mouvements de marée. Les Chinois ne parlaient pas ou très peu anglais, ne connaissaient pas le coin, le danger de l’eau montante.
C’était l’hiver, ils étaient à pied d’œuvre dans la soirée, dans l’obscurité. Un pêcheur chinois avait donné l’alerte en appelant les secours sur son téléphone portable et en criant, dans un anglais approximatif : « On coule, on coule dans l’eau, beaucoup, beaucoup, on coule dans l’eau. » 23 personnes s’étaient noyées. Le crâne d’une femme avait été rejeté sur la plage six ans plus tard. Le corps d’une des victimes n’a jamais été retrouvé.
Un seul homme, Li Hua, a survécu. Dix ans plus tard, en 2014, il se confiait à la BBC. « Il faisait un noir d’encre et j’étais terrifié. Je me suis dit que je n’avais plus qu’à me laisser mourir et puis, je ne sais pas, une vague m’a retourné… J’étais seul et soudain, un hélicoptère m’a repéré. » Son témoignage avait permis la condamnation d’un trafiquant, Lin Liang Ren, à quatorze ans de prison. Pour éviter toutes représailles, Li Hua avait été placé sous la protection spéciale du gouvernement britannique. « Nous sommes tous venus ici pour la même raison. Nous avons laissé derrière nous nos familles pour construire une vie meilleure. Et tous ont disparu d’un coup, juste comme ça. J’ai juste eu de la chance. »
L’identification de chacun « pourrait prendre du temps »
Jeudi en milieu de journée, le camion et ses 39 victimes étaient dissimulés dans un hangar du port de Tilbury Docks, à quelques centaines de mètres de là où le conteneur a été débarqué mardi dans la nuit en provenance de Zeebruges. Les autorités belges ont précisé que le conteneur était arrivé dans le port ce même mardi, à 14h29, avant d’être embarqué sur un ferry dans la soirée. Pour le moment, les enquêteurs ne savent pas à quel moment, ni où exactement les victimes ont été enfermées dans le conteneur.
A l’abri des regards, les médecins légistes ont entrepris la lourde tâche d’examiner les corps un à un pour déterminer les causes du décès. Ensuite, les autorités tenteront « d’établir l’identité de chacun, une opération qui pourrait prendre du temps », a précisé la police. Alors, ces âmes auront peut-être enfin un nom, un visage et quelqu’un pour les pleurer, loin très loin de ce triste hangar.
▻https://www.liberation.fr/planete/2019/10/24/camion-de-la-honte-les-39-victimes-sont-chinoises_1759507
–-> On sait depuis que probablement les victimes ne sont pas chinoises, mais vietnamiennes...
#UK #Angleterre #Essex #asile #migrations #réfugiés #frontières #Manche #La_Manche #22_octobre_2019 #camion #décès #morts #mourir_dans_la_forteresse_Europe
“Mi dispiace mamma. Il mio viaggio all’estero non è riuscito. Mamma ti voglio tanto bene!
Sto morendo perché non riesco a respirare …
Vengo da Nghen, Can Loc, Ha Tinh, Vietnam …
Mi dispiace, mamma.”
Questo è l’ultimo, straziante, SMS che una ragazza ventiseienne vietnamita, di nome Pham Thi Trà My ha inviato, presumibilmente dall’interno del TIR dell’orrore, martedì scorso, 22 Ottobre 2019.
Un messaggio carico di disperazione, un ultimo pensiero per la persona a lei più cara, la mamma.
La sua mamma.
E’ drammatico questo messaggio, perché ci fa comprendere che quei 39 migranti asiatici hanno sentito giungere la loro morte; ne hanno sofferto; hanno pensato; hanno avuto tutto il tempo per comprendere che la loro fine si andava, inesorabilmente, avvicinando.
E tutto questo è terribile. Terribile. Terribile.
Non sopporto più questa disumanità, non sopporto chi continua a dire aiutiamoli a casa loro, non sopporto chi continua a gioire (ma come cazzo si fa a gioire?) di questi tragici eventi.
Io, lo dico francamente, sto imparando ad odiare!
Ad odiare voi indifferenti, voi complici, voi misera gente che vi girate dall’altra parte.
Ci state riuscendo.
State riuscendo a trasformarmi, piano piano.
State riuscendo a trasmettermi il vostro odio ma, sappiate, lo utilizzerò solo contro voi.
Contro voi che pensate di essere gli unici ad avere diritto alla vita e spero, per questo, un giorno siate puniti!
Perdonaci, se puoi, Pham Thi Trà My…
Essex lorry deaths: Vietnamese families fear relatives among dead
At least six of the 39 people found dead in a lorry trailer in Essex may have been from Vietnam.
The BBC knows of six Vietnamese families who fear their relatives are among the victims.
They include Pham Thi Tra My, 26, who has not been heard from since she sent text messages on Tuesday saying she could not breathe.
A man was earlier arrested at Stansted Airport on suspicion of manslaughter and conspiracy to traffic people.
The 48-year-old from Northern Ireland is the fourth person to be arrested in connection with the investigation.
Two people from Warrington are being held on suspicion of manslaughter and conspiracy to traffic people and the lorry driver is in custody on suspicion of murder.
Ms Tra My’s brother, Pham Ngoc Tuan, said some of the £30,000 charge for getting his sister to the UK had been paid to people smugglers and her last-known location had been Belgium.
The smugglers are understood to have returned money to some families.
Meanwhile, relatives of Nguyen Dinh Luong, 20, have also said they fear he is among the 39 victims.
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/660/cpsprodpb/065B/production/_109372610_phamtramy.jpg 
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/2799/production/_109373101_mediaitem109373099.jpg 
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/128F1/production/_109371067_mediaitem109348858.jpg Ms Tra My’s brother told the BBC: "My sister went missing on 23 October on the way from Vietnam to the UK and we couldn’t contact her. We are concerned she may be in that trailer.
“We are asking the British police to help investigate so that my sister can be returned to the family.”
The last message received from Ms Tra My was at 22:30 BST on Tuesday - two hours before the trailer arrived at the Purfleet terminal from Zeebrugge in Belgium.
Her family have shared texts she sent to her parents which translated read: "I am really, really sorry, Mum and Dad, my trip to a foreign land has failed.
“I am dying, I can’t breathe. I love you very much Mum and Dad. I am sorry, Mother.”
Ms Tra My’s brother told the BBC her journey to the UK had begun on 3 October. She had told the family not to contact her because “the organisers” did not allow her to receive calls.
“She flew to China and stayed there for a couple days, then left for France,” he said.
“She called us when she reached each destination. The first attempt she made to cross the border to the UK was 19 October, but she got caught and turned back. I don’t know for sure from which port.”
The BBC has passed details of Ms Tra My, who is from Nghen town in Can Loc district of Ha Tinh province area of Vietnam, to Essex Police, along with details of other people claiming to have information.
The BBC also knows of two other Vietnamese nationals who are missing - a 26-year-old man and a 19-year-old woman.
The brother of the 19-year-old said his sister called him at 07:20 Belgian local time (06:20 BST) on Tuesday, saying she was getting into a container and was turning off her phone to avoid detection.
He has not heard from her since.
He said a people smuggler returned money to the family overnight, and the family of the 26-year-old who she was travelling with also received money back.
A spokesman from the Vietnamese Embassy in London confirmed they had been in contact with Essex police since Thursday.
They said Vietnamese families had appealed to them for help finding out if their relatives were among the victims but added they had not yet received any official confirmation.
The victims of the trailer were 31 men and eight women and Essex Police initially said they were all believed to be Chinese.
They were found at an industrial estate in Grays at 01:40 BST on Wednesday.
At a press conference on Friday evening Deputy Chief Constable Pippa Mills said the force was working with the National Crime Agency, the Home Office, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Border Force and Immigration Enforcement.
She said she would not be drawn on any further detail about the nationalities of the victims until formal identification processes had taken place.
“We gave an initial steer on Thursday on nationality, however, this is now a developing picture,” she said.
Police have confirmed the scene at Waterglade Industrial Estate in Eastern Avenue was closed on Friday.
Essex Police also urged anyone fearing their loved ones may have been in the lorry to get in touch.
“I can’t begin to comprehend what some of you must be going through right now. You have my assurance that Essex Police will be working tirelessly to understand the whole picture to this absolute tragedy,” said Det Ch Con Mills.
She also urged anyone living illegally in the UK who may have information to come forward, without fear of criminal action being taken against them.
GPS data shows the refrigerated container trailer crossed back and forth between the UK and Europe in the days before it was found.
It was leased from the company Global Trailer Rentals on 15 October. The company said it was “entirely unaware that the trailer was to be used in the manner in which it appears to have been”.
Essex Police said the tractor unit (the front part of the lorry) had entered the UK via Holyhead - an Irish Sea port in Wales - on Sunday 20 October, having travelled over from Dublin.
Police believe the tractor unit collected the trailer in Purfleet on the River Thames and left the port shortly after 01:05 on Thursday. Police were called to the industrial park where the bodies were discovered about half an hour later.
Temperatures in refrigerated units can be as low as -25C (-13F). The lorry now is at a secure site in Essex.
A spokesman for the UN International Organization for Migration said the discovery of bodies in Essex did not necessarily indicate a major shift in migration patterns.
“These are the kind of random crimes that occur every day in the world somewhere,” he said. “They get huge attention when they do but they don’t necessarily indicate a big shift in migration or patterns in any place in particular. It’s just the condition of what happens when this many people are engaging this many criminal groups to reach a destination, which of course we deplore.”
Detectives are still questioning the lorry driver, Mo Robinson, of County Armagh in Northern Ireland, on suspicion of murder. He was arrested on Wednesday.
Two other people were also earlier arrested on suspicion of manslaughter.
The man and woman, both 38, from Warrington, Cheshire, are also being held on suspicion of conspiracy to traffic people.
Police officers were seen at the couple’s home address in Warrington, with a police van and two squad cars parked outside.
Sources say the GPS data shows it left Monaghan in the Republic of Ireland on 15 October before crossing over to Northern Ireland and then returning south to Dublin
From Dublin, it crossed over to Holyhead in Wales overnight on 16 October
That evening, it travelled to continental Europe from Dover to Calais in France
Between 17 and 22 October, it moved between various cities in Belgium and France, including Dunkirk, Bruges and Lille
On 22 October, it made its final crossing from #Zeebrugge to #Purfleet
*Essex lorry deaths: The Vietnamese risking it all to get to the
UK*
An hour’s drive inland from the French coast, a dozen Vietnamese men nurse tea over a smoking campfire, as they wait for a phone call from the man they call “the boss”. An Afghan man, they say, who opens trailers in the lorry-park nearby and shuts them inside.
Duc paid €30,000 ($33,200; £25,000) for a prepaid journey from Vietnam to London - via Russia, Poland, Germany and France. It was organised, he says, by a Vietnamese contact back home.
“I have some Vietnamese friends in UK, who will help me find jobs when I get there,” he told me. “These friends help me get on lorries or container trucks to go across the border.”
Security is much less tight in the nearby lorry park than around the ports further north. But few people here have managed to get past the border controls.
We were told there is a two-tier system in operation here; that those who pay more for their passage to Britain don’t have to chance their luck in the lorries outside, but use this base as a transit camp before being escorted on the final leg of their journey.
A Vietnamese smuggler, interviewed by a French paper several years ago, reportedly described three levels of package. The top level allowed migrants to ride in the lorry cab and sleep in hotels. The lowest level was nicknamed “air”, or more cynically “CO2” - a reference to the lack of air in some trailers.
A local volunteer in the camp told us that they’d seen Vietnamese and British men visiting migrants here in a Mercedes. And that once migrants arrived in the UK, some went to work in cannabis farms, after which all communication stopped.
Duc tells me he needs a job in the UK to pay back the loan for his journey.
“We can do anything,” he says, “construction work, nail bars, restaurants or other jobs.”
A report by one of France’s biggest charities described smugglers telling Vietnamese migrants that refrigerated lorries gave them more chance of avoiding detection, and giving each of them an aluminium bag to put over their heads while passing through scanners at the border.
No one here had heard about the 39 people found dead this week.
This journey is about freedom, one said.
More Vietnamese families fear relatives are among the 39 UK truck victims
Two Vietnamese families have said they are scared relatives may be among the dead. Both of the suspected victims come from Ha Tinh, an impoverished province where many of the country’s illegal migrants come from.
More Vietnamese families came forward Saturday saying their relatives may be among the 39 people found dead in a container truck east of London.
Police initially believed all victims were Chinese but later announced this may not be accurate and that investigations were still a “developing picture.”
At least two Vietnamese families have now said they are worried their relatives, who may have been carrying falsified Chinese passports, are among the dead.
The Vietnamese Embassy in London said Friday it contacted police about a missing woman believed to be one of the dead after a family in Vietnam informed them about their daughter who had been missing since the lorry was found.
The Embassy said it was working with British authorities over the case, Vietnamese media reported.
Up to 10 of the victims may have originally come from Vietnam, according to unconfirmed reports. The BBC reported it had been in contact with six Vietnamese families, all who believe their relatives are among the 39 victims found in Grays, Essex on Wednesday.
Read more: Opinion: It’s time to end human trafficking
’Something unexpected happened’
The father of a 20-year-old Vietnamese man said he is scared his son is among the dead. He told the Associated Press that he had not been able to reach his son Nguyen Dinh Luong since last week.
“He often called home but I haven’t been able to reach him since the last time we talked last week,” Nguyen Dinh Gia said. “I told him that he could go to anywhere he wants as long as it’s safe. He shouldn’t be worry about money, I’ll take care of it.”
Gia said his son left home in Ha Tinh province, central Vietnam, to work in Russia in 2017 then on to Ukraine. He arrived in Germany in April 2019 before making his way to France. He had been living in France illegally since 2018.
The 20-year-old told his family he wanted to go to the United Kingdom (UK), and that he would pay £11,000 (€12,700). Last week, he told his father he wanted to join a group in Paris that was trying to enter England.
Several days ago, his father received a call from a Vietnamese man saying, “Please have some some sympathy, something unexpected happened,” Gia told AFP.
“I fell to the ground when I heard that,” Gia said. “It seemed that he was in the truck with the accident, all of them dead.”
The family said they shared the information with Vietnamese authorities.
Read more: Opinion: EU’s immigration policy is stuck in a rut
’I’m dying because I can’t breathe’
Hoa Nghiem, a human rights activist from Vietnamese civic network, Human Rights Space, said on Friday one of the victims may have been 26-year-old Pham Thi Tra My.
Tra My had sent a text message to her mother saying she was struggling to breathe at around the same time as the truck was en route from Belgium to the UK.
“I’m so sorry mom and dad....My journey abroad doesn’t succeed,” she wrote. “Mom, I love you and dad very much. I’m dying because I can’t breathe .... Mom, I’m so sorry,” she said in a message confirmed by her brother Pham Manh Cuong.
Cuong had received a message from his sister on Wednesday saying, “Please try to work hard to pay the debt for mummy, my dear.”
No confirmation
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told a press briefing Friday in Beijing that Britain has not officially confirmed the identities or nationalities of the victims. She added that China is also working with Belgium police since the shipping container in which the bodies were found was sent from England to the Belgian port of Zeebrugge.
“The police said that they were urgently carrying out the verification work and the identities of the victims cannot be confirmed at present,” said Tong Xuejun, a Chinese consular official in London.
Both suspected victims come from the impoverished province of Ha Tinh where many of the country’s illegal migrants come from. Many who try to reach the UK end up working in nail salons or cannabis farms.
▻https://www.dw.com/en/more-vietnamese-families-fear-relatives-are-among-the-39-uk-truck-victims/a-50997473
Vietnamese woman suspected killed in UK truck disaster
A father has reported to Vietnamese authorities that his 26-year-old daughter may have been one of the 39 found dead in a container truck in England.
#Pham_Van_Thin, of Can Loc District in the central Ha Tinh Province, sent a letter Friday to the People’s Committee of Nghen Town, saying his daughter was likely one of the 39 people found dead in a container truck in the Waterglade Industrial Park, Grays Town.
“My daughter, Pham Thi Tra My, left Vietnam on October 3, 2019, then travelled to China, France and England,” Thin wrote in the letter, which had My’s photo attached. She was described as 1.5 meters tall and weighing around 46 kilograms.
Thin asked the Nghen People’s Committee to verify that he is My’s father, in order to initiate legal procedures to identify and bring his daughter’s body back to Vietnam.
At his home in Nghen Town, Thin’s family members confirmed that he had indeed submitted an application to the authorities to verify that My was missing, but refused to provide further information on her overseas travel.
The Nghen Town People’s Committee has passed on Thin’s letter to the Can Loc District’s Department of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs, which, in turn, will report to authorities with jurisdiction over the matter, said Bui Viet Hung, Vice Chairman of the committee.
“Thin’s family has three children, of which My is the youngest. My had worked overseas in Japan for three years, and only last month completed procedures to go to China,” Hung said.
A senior official of the Ha Tinh Provincial Department of Foreign Affairs, who did not wish to be named, said Friday afternoon that he had received a phone call from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Consular Department asking to verify the case of a Vietnamese worker from Ha Tinh Province suspected missing in the UK.
The Ha Tinh Provincial Department of Foreign Affairs has contacted authorities of Can Loc District, where a person has allegedly been reported missing, to verify the information.
According to an authorized source, My had used an emigration ring led by a resident of Nghe An Province to go to China. After getting there, she obtained forged Chinese citizenship documents and left for Europe.
One of My’s relatives has reportedly contacted the Vietnamese Association in the U.K., a non-profit organization, to request their assistance in bringing her body home.
In the early hours of Wednesday morning, U.K. emergency services discovered the bodies of 38 adults and one teenager, suspected immigrants, after being alerted that there were people in a refrigerated container truck at the Waterglade Industrial Park in Grays, Essex County, east of London.
Staff of the Chinese Embassy in London have arrived at the scene to help police verify whether the victims were Chinese citizens.
Three people, including truck driver, were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to traffic people and manslaughter, the British police said on Friday, the first indication from officials that the deaths were linked to human smuggling.
In 2000, 58 Chinese migrants were found dead in a refrigerated truck in Dover, Britain’s busiest port. The authorities said they had asphyxiated in the container, in which cooling and ventilation were switched off.
▻https://e.vnexpress.net/news/news/vietnamese-woman-suspected-killed-in-uk-truck-disaster-4002594.html
Traduction et commentaire d’une étudiante de mon master, vietnamienne :
He said: "It is possible that all 39 “Chinese-like-people” who were suffocated in the car in the UK were Vietnamese. Even the majority of them are probably Nghe An-Ha Tinh by participating in a smuggling transfer service. If they send a message to their family, the family will pay about 1 billion VND (35.000£) for the Vietnamese smugglers. If they NEVER text again, it looks like family members get a refund for the deposit. A terrible contract."
The photos are captured in a Facebook group for recruiting and supporting Vietnamese in a foreign country (maybe England, I’m not sure). People are posting information of their relatives who left at the same time with the lorry and didn’t contact anymore. All of them were born in 1999, 2000 and from Ha Tinh, Nghe Anh (2 poor cities in the center of Vietnam). The last photo is a message of a woman saying that she has people in contact with the invesgators and there are already 20 people identified as Vietnamese.
Majority of 39 UK truck victims likely from Vietnam - priest
YEN THANH, Vietnam (Reuters) - The majority of the 39 people found dead in the back of a truck near London were likely from Vietnam, a community leader from the rural, rice-growing community where many of the victims are believed to have come from told Reuters on Saturday.
The discovery of the bodies - 38 adults and one teenager - was made on Wednesday after emergency services were alerted to people in a truck container on an industrial site in Grays, about 32km (20 miles) east of central London.
Police have said they believe the dead were Chinese but Beijing said the nationalities had not yet been confirmed. Chinese and Vietnamese officials are now both working closely with British police, their respective embassies have said.
Father Anthony Dang Huu Nam, a catholic priest in the remote town of Yen Thanh in northern-central Vietnam’s Nghe An province, 300km (180 miles) south of Hanoi, said he was liaising with family members of the victims.
“The whole district is covered in sorrow,” Nam said, as prayers for the dead rang out over loudspeakers throughout the misty, rain-soaked town on Saturday.
“I’m still collecting contact details for all the victim’s families, and will hold a ceremony to pray for them tonight.”
“This is a catastrophe for our community.”
Nam said families told him they knew relatives were travelling to the UK at the time and had been unable to contact their loved ones.
Vietnam’s foreign ministry said in a statement on Saturday that it had instructed its London embassy to assist British police with the identification of victims.
The ministry did not respond to a request for further comment regarding the nationalities of the dead.
Essex Police declined to elaborate as to how they first identified the dead as Chinese.
‘BEAUTIFUL DAY’
In Yen Thanh, Nghe An province, dozens of worried relatives of 19-year-old Bui Thi Nhung gathered in the family’s small courtyard home where her worried mother has been unable to rise from her bed.
“She said she was in France and on the way to the UK, where she has friends and relatives,” said Nhung’s cousin, Hoang Thi Linh.
“We are waiting and hoping it’s not her among the victims, but it’s very likely. We pray for her everyday. There were two people from my village travelling in that group”.
In comments under a photo uploaded to Nhung’s Facebook account on Monday, two days before the doomed truck was discovered, one friend asked how her journey was going.
“Not good,” Nhung replied. “Almost spring,” she said, using a term in Vietnamese meaning she had almost reached her destination.
Other photos on her account show her sightseeing in Brussels on Oct. 18.
“Such a beautiful day,” Nhung posted.
Nghe An is one of Vietnam’s poorest provinces, and home to many victims of human trafficking who end up in Europe, according to a March report by the Pacific Links Foundation, a U.S.-based anti-trafficking organisation.
Other victims are believed to come from the neighbouring province of Ha Tinh, Nam said, where in the first eight months of this year, 41,790 people left looking for work elsewhere, including overseas, according to state media.
The province was ravaged by one of Vietnam’s worst environmental disasters in 2016 when a steel mill owned by Taiwan’s Formosa Plastics contaminated coastal waters, devastating local fishing and tourism industries and sparking widespread protests.
Another suspected victim from Ha Tinh, 26-year-old Pham Thi Tra My, had sent a text message to her mother saying she could not breathe at about the time the truck container was en route from Belgium to Britain.
“That girl who said in her message that she couldn’t breathe in the truck? Her parents can’t breathe here at home,” Nam said.
▻https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-bodies/majority-of-39-uk-truck-victims-likely-from-vietnam-priest-idUKKBN1X503M
« Désolée maman, je suis en train de mourir, je ne peux plus respirer » : les SMS déchirants d’une jeune victime à l’agonie dans le camion de l’Essex
La jeune vietnamienne Pham Thi Tra My, 26 ans, avait parcouru la Chine puis la France dans ses tentatives pour atteindre la Grande Bretagne. Son périple se terminera dans le camion de Mo Robinson, comme celui de 38 autres ressortissants asiatiques.
27 octobre 2019 :
#Calais : huit migrants, dont des enfants, trouvés en hypothermie dans un camion frigorifique
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/808155
UK police: man arrested in Ireland is of interest in truck death investigation
British police said a man arrested in Dublin on Saturday is a person of interest in their investigation into the deaths of 39 people who were found in a truck container.
“A man arrested by the Garda at Dublin Port on Saturday 26 October is a person of interest in our murder investigation regarding the 39 people found dead in a lorry in Purfleet on Wednesday 23 October,” Essex Police said.
▻https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-bodies-ireland-idUSKBN1X70FX
The 39 people who died in the lorry were victims. Why does the law treat them as criminals?
As long as the justice system is focused on immigration status, not on ending modern-day slavery, desperate people will suffer.
What leads someone down the route where they find themselves locked into the back of a lorry, a beating heart in a metal box? What choices – or lack of them – have led someone to be reduced to a piece of human cargo? Can anyone who read the story of the 39 bodies found in the back of a lorry last week not feel the visceral terror of that cold, dark death and wonder at how we live in a world where a business model exists that thrives off this level of human desperation?
At the moment it is unclear whether this tragedy is the work of smuggling gangs – who are in a transactional arrangement with the people they are moving from place to place – or human traffickers, who are exploiting and profiting from their human cargo. In the end, does it even matter? Both are looking to profit from the very human desire to not only survive but to thrive. Across the world, trafficking and smuggling gangs are flogging promises and dreams and then using fear – of pain, of the authorities, of their debts, of their failure – to make vast amounts of money in the knowledge that they’re unlikely to get caught, and in the certainty that their victims are expendable.
One Vietnamese teenager I interviewed last year had, like last week’s victims, crossed the Channel in the back of a lorry. He described the experience to me: the pain of the jolting metal that tore into his skin; the stench of other silent bodies he was pressed up against; the poisonous diesel fumes; and the hunger and thirst that gnawed at his insides.
His journey towards that point had begun with a childhood of crippling and monotonous poverty and the belief that the only way to escape and honour his filial responsibility to provide for his parents was to follow the promise of work in the UK. He embarked on an overland journey across Europe where he was smuggled from safe house to safe house, fell under the control of criminal gangs and was raped, beaten and brutalised. By the time he reached France, he was told he had to pay back £20,000 – an amount he couldn’t even comprehend. His parents would be the ones who would suffer if he didn’t pay them back.
By his point his life was not in his hands. A chain of events had been set in motion that he had no control over. There was no way back: his only future was one where his sole reason for survival was to pay off his debts. He ended up being trafficked into a cannabis farm in Derbyshire.
In the eyes of the law there is a distinction between illegal work and modern slavery – with the former you are a criminal, and the latter a victim – but in reality the line is not so clearly defined. Many who are here to work move between the two. Across the UK, thousands end up being exploited and unpaid in our restaurants, car washes, agricultural fields, care homes, hotels and nail bars – visible but unseen.
Official statistics say up to 15,000 people are trapped in a form of modern slavery in the UK – although those working on the frontline believe this figure to be a huge underestimate. Our government says that with the 2015 Modern Slavery Act it is a global leader in cracking down on this practice, yet prosecutions remain low. In 2017-18 there were only 185 convictions for slavery and trafficking crimes – a fraction of the cases reported to the authorities.
Crucially, prosecutions require victims to come forward and testify. Yet their immigration status is often considered more of a priority than their exploitation. Traffickers tell their victims if they go to the police they will be arrested and detained, and more often than not they’re right. Recent research found over 500 victims of trafficking were arrested and sent to immigration detention centres last year. Even though police guidance tells officers how to identify cases of modern slavery, Vietnamese children found in nail bars or cannabis farms are still routinely arrested, charged and detained.
Even those who are recognised as victims of trafficking by the authorities are in for a rough ride. The government’s national referral mechanism, the framework for identifying and protecting victims of slavery, is sometimes considered by victims to be as traumatising as their trafficking. They can find themselves trapped in a legal limbo in a complex and under-resourced system for years at a time. And in the end victims are probably going to be removed back to the country where they were trafficked: according to the government’s own figures only 12% of victims of slavery are granted discretionary leave to remain.
All of this matters because it creates an environment in which the business of exploiting the desperation of human beings can thrive. Where the gangs know that British people will pay £8 in cash for a pedicure, or to get our car hand washed, without thinking too much about why. It’s a business model where people can be exploited for profit over and over again with the near certainty that in the end it will be the victim who the system comes down upon, for making the journey in the first place.
In 2004 the death of 23 Chinese cockle pickers in Morecambe Bay was a moment of reckoning – a human tragedy that, for many people, raised the spectre of modern slavery in the UK for the first time. Today, 15 years later, maybe these 39 deaths might do the same and remind us that our only chance of beating the business in flogging human lives is to try to understand how people come to be locked inside the backs of lorries in the first place.
▻https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/29/39-people-lorry-victims-law-criminals-immigration-slavery?CMP=share_btn
Des news, liens reçus via la mailing-list Migreurop:
Pour l’instant, l’identification de victimes vietnamiennes n’est toujours pas confirmée, bien que très probable. J’ajoute donc d’autres articles de presse à ceux déjà transmis :
En anglais :
▻https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-50194118
▻https://www.afp.com/en/news/717/bored-and-broke-vietnam-migrants-risk-lives-riches-europe-doc-1lr1jf1
▻https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/20445/vietnamese-victim-paid-34-000-euros-to-be-smuggled-to-uk
▻https://www.rte.ie/radio/radioplayer/html5
En français :
▻https://www.liberation.fr/depeches/2019/10/27/immigration-l-europe-ou-l-illusion-d-un-eldorado-pour-de-jeunes-vietnamie
▻https://www.infomigrants.net/fr/post/20415/camion-charnier-a-londres-l-angoissante-attente-des-familles-vietnamie
En vietnamien (google translate fonctionne bien), deux articles très complets sur des témoignages de Vietnamiens en Europe :
▻https://news.zing.vn/nhung-con-ac-mong-tren-duong-toi-anh-cua-nguoi-viet-post1006586.html
▻https://news.zing.vn/vietnam-city-o-phap-ban-ngay-nau-an-dem-den-nhay-xe-container-post1006585.
En route vers le Royaume-Uni, enquête de terrain auprès des migrants vietnamiens
#France_terre_d'asile a réalisé une enquête de terrain auprès des migrants vietnamiens en transit dans le département du Pas-de-Calais, dans le cadre du projet d’aide aux victimes de traite des êtres humains mené par l’association.
L’étude analyse les parcours migratoires de ces migrants, les raisons de leur départ, leurs profils, leurs relations avec les réseaux de passeurs, les moyens d’emprise et de coercition exercés sur eux et leurs besoins afin d’améliorer leur accompagnement en France et en Europe.
▻https://www.france-terre-asile.org/toutes-nos-publications/details/1/209-en-route-vers-le-royaume-uni,-enqu%C3%AAte-de-terrain-aupr%C
#rapport
Precarious journeys: Mapping vulnerabilities of victims of trafficking from Vietnam to Europe
New research by ECPAT UK, Anti-Slavery International and Pacific Links Foundation traces the journeys made by Vietnamese children and adults migrating irregularly from Vietnam to the UK via Europe. The report, Precarious Journeys: Mapping Vulnerabilities of Victims of Trafficking from Vietnam to Europe, finds that the governments of countries on key trafficking routes routinely fail to protect Vietnamese children from trafficking, leaving them vulnerable to continued exploitation and abuse.
Combating modern slavery experienced by Vietnamese nationals en route to, and within, the UK
Vietnamese migrants are not ‘lured’ by traffickers. They just want a better future
The risks are known and won’t deter people. There will be more deaths in lorries unless Britain changes its immigration policy.
▻https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/05ed4f7268ba39f63a3d283434f6a7c153c96150/0_0_3600_2160/master/3600.jpg?width=620&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=479e7dd01a75bb999e8d74
Thirty-nine bodies found in the back of a refrigerated lorry in an Essex industrial park. Apart from shock and rage, this tragic news feels like deja vu. Almost two decades ago, in 2000, 58 Chinese people were found suffocated to death in Dover, in similar horrific circumstances. Those men and women banged on doors and screamed for their lives, the only two survivors revealed. The tragic deaths left families behind and communities back in Fujian province devastated.
Today, many of the 39 people, eight women and 31 men, are believed to have come from Vietnam, as families there desperately look for their missing loved ones.
The 39 people who died in the lorry were victims. Why does the law treat them as criminals?
Annie Kelly
Read more
I also felt deja vu listening to the response from British politicians and media. “Stop evil human traffickers”; “Stop international criminal networks”. I heard such phrases two decades ago from the home secretary, Jack Straw, and today his successor, Priti Patel, repeats the sentiment. While formal identification of the victims continues, Vietnamese people have mostly been portrayed as “unaware” trafficking victims sent to fill the nail bars and cannabis factories – as having no agency of their own and no control over their migratory decisions.
In reality, the Vietnamese young men and women who choose to travel on these dangerous routes only do so when they cannot come to Britain in formal ways. Having no alternatives, they contact “snakeheads” (smugglers), who are often perceived as “migration brokers” rather than criminals, who organise their transportation to Britain.
It appears that many of the 39 people may have come from the Nghe An and Ha Tinh provinces of Vietnam, which have been hit by economic reforms. Three decades ago, in 1986, the Vietnamese government launched the Doi Moi economic reforms, which aimed to facilitate a transition from a centralised planning to a “socialist-oriented” market economy. From the 1990s onwards, the government boasted of Vietnam’s rise in GDP – what was not said was that the growth was built upon the low-cost labour of millions of Vietnamese, toiling in processing factories and assembling products for overseas companies. The inflow of foreign investment has been a big part of Vietnam’s economic liberalisation. In recent years, it has brought cash to the high-tech processing, manufacturing, agriculture, education and healthcare sectors. Since the start of this year, Vietnam has attracted foreign direct investment of more than $1.1bn (£850m), China alone bringing in $222m.
▻https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/0437ed70716e77799c71a362955e1e1ce116355b/0_175_5568_3341/master/5568.jpg?width=620&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=97d294bd0eb6ec60a2715d
Many of these changes have not been popular: large waves of anti-China protests happened in May 2014, in Ha Tinh and other places. And in 2018 there was popular opposition to legislation enabling special economic zones to grant land leases to foreign businesses for up to 99 years.
In 2016 Ha Tinh was also the site of the country’s worst environmental disaster, caused by a chemical spill from a steel factory, owned by a Taiwanese company, Formosa Plastics, that poisoned up to 125 miles of the northern coastline and ruined the fishing industry. Formosa Plastics was fined $500m by the Vietnamese government, but much of the compensation did not reach the affected fishermen.
The low labour cost in these provinces is the main attraction for Chinese and other foreign investors. For instance, a factory worker here earns around two-thirds of what a similar worker earns in China, and half the local population are under the age of 30.
Rather than wealth, foreign investment has brought mainly dead-end, low-paid jobs with few long-term prospects for young locals. The average wage in Vietnam is around $150 a month; in these provinces many don’t even earn that. Besides, unemployment is severe. Last year, GDP per capita in both Nhge An ($1,600) and Ha Tinh ($2,200) fell below the national average of $2,500. This is the context compelling tens of thousands of Vietnamese from these impoverished provinces to choose to migrate, to seek livelihoods for themselves and their families.
Families often depend on sons and daughters to find their way into advanced capitalist countries in the west, to work and be the breadwinners. Remittances from abroad also help sustain communities – Nghe An, for instance, brought in $225m a year, according to official estimates.
The 39 people were not “unthinking migrants” lured by traffickers, as the media has suggested. They were fighting for a future for their families, and lost their precious lives as Britain firmly kept its doors locked shut.
If the tragic deaths of these men and women truly sadden you, the best thing to do is oppose Britain’s anti-migrant policies. We need to dismantle the false categories of “economic migrants” and “genuine refugees”. Let our fellow human beings have the opportunity to live and work in the open – that is the only way forward.
▻https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/30/vietnamese-migrants-traffickers-deaths-lorries-britain-immigration-poli
Essex lorry deaths should be wake-up call for ministers, MPs say
Policies focused on closing borders counterproductive, says foreign affairs committee
The deaths of 39 people found in the back of a lorry in Essex should be wake-up call for the government to rethink its approach to migration, MPs have said.
Policies focused on closing borders will drive migrants to take more dangerous routes and push them into the hands of smugglers, the foreign affairs select committee says in a new report.
The human cost of irregular migration made international partnerships essential, including with the EU, the committee said.
The report comes just over a week after 39 people, now understood to be Vietnamese nationals, were found dead in the back of a lorry that had arrived in the UK via the port of Zeebrugge.
The driver, Maurice Robinson, has been charged with manslaughter and trafficking offences, and a police investigation into a suspected wider trafficking network continues.
Tom Tugendhat, the chair of the influential committee, said that until the UK left the EU it should continue to attend EU meetings on migration.
“The case of 39 people found dead in a lorry in Essex shocked us all. The full story won’t be clear for some time but this tragedy is not alone,” he said.
“Today, hundreds of families across the world are losing loved ones who felt driven to take the fatal gamble to entrust their lives to smugglers. This case should serve as a wake-up call to the Foreign Office and to government.
“The UK has been relatively isolated from the different migrant crises in recent years, but it’s wrong to assume that we are protected from their impact. The UK has a proud history of helping those fleeing conflict and persecution and cooperating with others to protect human rights. We should lead by example.”
The report also raised concern that deals with countries such as Libya, Niger and Sudan to limit migration risked fuelling human rights abuses.
It said such deals could be used as leverage by partner governments, as the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, had done recently when he threatened to “reopen the gates”.
The committee also said the fact that the Home Office was responsible for the UK’s response to irregular migration could lead to the “error of focusing on preventing migration to the exclusion of other goals such as preventing conflict and promoting stability and respect for fundamental human rights”.
It called for more effort to negotiate future close cooperation on migration policy with the EU and an immediate return of UK officials to EU-level meetings where irregular migration is discussed.
Other recommendations included the expansion of legal pathways to apply for asylum outside Europe and robust monitoring and safeguards to ensure UK funding for migration programmes in Libya did not contribute to human rights abuses.
Tugendhat said the committee’s inquiry had been cut short by the “uncertain nature of parliamentary business”, but that it hoped to return to the issues in the future.
Irregular migration is defined by the International Organization for Migration as the “movement of persons that takes place outside the laws, regulations, or international agreements governing the entry into or exit from the state of origin, transit or destination”.
▻https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/nov/04/essex-lorry-deaths-should-be-wake-up-call-for-ministers-mps-say?CMP=Sha
France: Dozens of migrants found in back of truck near Italian border
The truck had been carrying 31 people, reportedly from Pakistan, when it was inspected by authorities in southern France. The latest discovery comes after dozens of migrants were found dead in a truck near London.
Officers carrying out a routine traffic check in southern France uncovered dozens of migrants in the back of a truck on Saturday, the public prosecutor’s office in Nice said.
Some 31 people, including three unaccompanied minors, were found in the truck during a vehicle spot-check at a toll booth near La Turbie, near the border with Italy.
Prosecutors said that all 31 people on board were Pakistani nationals. The driver of the truck, who is also from Pakistan, was arrested by French authorities.
The migrants were handed over to Italian authorities, the Nice-Matin newspaper reported.
Prosecutors will now try to determine whether a human smuggling ring is behind the operation. Should that prove not to be the case, the driver of the truck will be charged with aiding and abetting illegal immigration, news agency AFP reported.
Concerns after UK migrant truck deaths
The discovery comes just days after French authorities in the northern port city of Calais pulled over a refrigerated truck carrying eight migrants. All those inside the truck, including four children, were taken to the hospital after exhibiting signs of hypothermia.
Border control agencies have been on high alert following the deaths of 39 migrants in the UK on October 23.
The migrants, who were determined to be Vietnamese nationals, had also been transported in a refrigerated truck when the vehicle was found east of London.
The alleged driver of the truck, a 25-year-old from Northern Ireland, has already been charged over the deaths. He faces 39 counts of manslaughter as well as human trafficking and immigration offenses.
▻https://www.dw.com/en/france-dozens-of-migrants-found-in-back-of-truck-near-italian-border/a-51094985
#ceux_qui_restent #vidéo #celles_qui_restent
#Spare_me_the_tears - Britain would have treated the Vietnamese nationals as criminals if they had not died in the lorry
Had the police found the desperate migrants in the back of the truck they would have been arrested and deported
I waited a while before writing this column. The deferral was out of respect for the dead, grieving relatives and the shocked Essex officers who discovered the bodies.
But now it is time for uncomfortable, troublesome, questions: What if those thirty nine Vietnamese migrants found in the back of truck had been discovered still alive?
Would the tabloids have published those tender pictures of young victims, smiling, buoyant, sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters, nieces and nephews, fathers and mothers?
Would Boris Johnson and Home Secretary Priti Patel have been as compassionate as they have been?
Would nationalist Brits have held back from their usual bellyaches about ‘uncontrolled migration’? Let’s not belabour the obvious. We know the answers.
It is believed that all of those who were found were Vietnamese. On Saturday, around one hundred people attended the service at the Church of the Holy Name and Our Lady of the Sacred Heart in east London.
The Reverend Simon Nguyen remembered the 39 who were ‘seeking freedom, dignity and happiness’. Such a low attendance is indicative. The victims are only numbers in the current news cycle.
In 2000 when 58 bodies of Chinese migrants were found in the back of a lorry in Dover, some of us journalists and concerned actors such as Corin Redgrave and Frances de la Tour organised a vigil near Downing St. We wanted to remind people that behind the numbers were names, individual, special lives.
Nothing has been learnt since then. One Vietnamese contact tells me her people are now petrified: ‘Police will come to ask us questions maybe. We know nothing. We are the children of the boat people. Mrs Thatcher asked them to come during the war. Now we are afraid again’.
Thatcher did indeed invite these migrants to settle in Britain and made sure that the tabloids ran their arrival as a good news story. It was a strategic move, her way of winning the PR battle against Vietnamese communists.
The refugees were welcomed and helped to settle. That was the only time I praised the iron lady. No Tory PM would dare to be that bold today.
In the UK, Australia, the US, many eastern European and EU nations too, most citizens and politicians feel for refugees, asylum seekers and migrants only when they perish at sea or in airless, light-less vehicles.
Alive they are a pestilence, dead they become pitiful innocents preyed on by traffickers. There are of course kind and generous people too, who do what they can, for the global wanderers desperately seeking a better life. But millions of others can only raise sympathy for bodies and really get exercised about the crimes, not the victims.
Journalists, politicians and commentators are now well into the whodunnit, madly exhilarating murder mystery, identifying the traffickers, the arrests and extraditions. They are sniffing around for other ploys that could be being used by criminal people smugglers.
A Times investigation this week revealed that at least 15 pupils from Vietnam had vanished after enrolling at private schools. Apparently, this is something that the Human Trafficking Foundation is worried about too.
It fell upon Catherine Baker, the senior campaigns officer at Every Child Protected Against Trafficking to challenge the narrative: ‘ Victims are often criminalised instead of being protected and a hostile environment for people in the UK without immigration status makes those still trapped in exploitative situations nervous to seek help’.
Mercy is in short supply at the Home Office and Ms Patel, utterly benighted and scarily ideological, wants officials to get even tougher because she thinks suffering helps to deter others.
Charities are raising concerns about some devious new tactics being used by the Home office to catch and repatriate undocumented men and women.
Rapar, a Manchester based human rights charity has just discovered that minority community groups are being co-opted and paid thousands of pounds to help find and expel illegal migrants.
Fizza Qureshi, co-chief executive of the Migrants Rights Networks rightly warns that ‘these kinds of practices destroy trust within and between communities. It will leave many marginalised people wondering who they can turn to and trust in their time of need’.
Had the police found the distressed 39 in the back of the truck before they expired, they would all have been treated as criminals, interrogated, detained in abominable centres and sent back.
Few legal options are available to them. People will keep on trying and these inconvenient truths will continue to be avoided by Britain and other receiving nations.
And so the tragedies will go on.
▻https://inews.co.uk/opinion/uk-would-have-treated-vietnamese-migrants-as-criminals-if-they-had-lived-82
Drownings of Turkey’s Purge
–-> 31 Turkish citizens drowned in the Aegean sea while seeking to escape the ongoing post-coup crackdown in Turkey.
Thousands of people have fled Turkey over the past three years due to a massive witch-hunt launched by the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government against its critics such as academics, Kurdish politicians and especially the real or imagined sympathizers of the Gülen group, in the wake of a failed coup attempt on July 15, 2016. The gov’t accuses the group of masterminding the failed coup while the group denies any involvement.
More than 500,000 people have been investigate and some 96,000 including academics, judges, doctors, teachers, lawyers, students, policemen and many from different backgrounds have been put in pre-trial detention over Gulen links July 2016.
Many try to escape Turkey via illegal ways as the government cancelled their passports. Purge-victim Turks often cross Evros river to escape from the snowballing persecution. Around 14,000 people crossed the Evros frontier from January through September of 2018, a Wall Street Journal said, underlining that around half of those crossing the Evros river were Turkish citizens.
ping @isskein
A Calais, la frontière tue ! In Calais, the border kills !
–-----
Deaths at the Calais Border
Uncountable lives are wasted and suffer at the hands of the Calais border regime. There is no accurate count of how many people have died. This is a list of people known in Calais or from news reports.
For sure there will have been more, their deaths ignored, the facts covered up or altogether unreported. Many already go unnamed, without vigils and protests, without families or friends to advocate on their behalf.
But we will never let these deaths be silenced. We will not forgive and we will never forget.
These borders kill! One death is too many!
▻https://calaismigrantsolidarity.wordpress.com/deaths-at-the-calais-border
#morts #décès #mourir_aux_frontières #Calais #France #frontières #Angleterre #UK #migrations #asile #réfugiés #base_de_données #database #liste #timeline #ligne_du_temps #mourir_dans_la_forteresse_Europe #visualisation #infographie #frise #frise_chronologique #time-line
ping @reka @simplicissimus @karine4
Increased deaths at the borders just before the decision on Croatia’s accession to Schengen
Last week was marked by a series of information on dead bodies found at the border between Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
People who found themselves in the area around #Cazin (BiH), Crnaj recorded a dead body. It was a case of drowning, according to Bosnian media (▻https://www.klix.ba/vijesti/crna-hronika/obdukcija-pokazala-migrant-cije-je-tijelo-pronadjeno-kod-cazina-se-utopio/191004072).
Similarly, a dead body was found in an abandoned house (▻http://m.pogled.ba/clanak/migrant-pronadjen-mrtav-u-napustenoj-kuci-kod-cazina/178716) /trailer in the #Osmanagici settlement in the Cazin area - the body was sent for an autopsy (▻https://medium.com/are-you-syrious/ays-daily-digest-9-10-19-violent-refugee-deaths-on-the-rise-in-bosnia-ca47a1) and the exact cause of death is still unknown.
Another case of death occurred in the town of #Bileća, Todorići village, southern Bosnia and Herzegovina - when a local villager, a shepherd, shot a migrant he had encountered (in a group with other migrants) at a farmhouse not far away from a flock he was guarding. According to media reports (▻http://novilist.hr/Vijesti/Svijet/UBOJSTVO-KOD-BILECE-Ubio-migranta-pa-se-prijavio-policiji), there was an altercation between the locals and a group of migrants and the rifle fired, which ended up with one person getting shot and dying. The denial of access to the asylum system and closed borders result in all these deaths as a consequence. The fear that comes from these events affects people on the move and local communities in border areas. The restrictive EU policy that the Republic of Croatia obediently implements and follows threatens human security in the Balkans - and spreads fear at the same time.
Cazin (Bosnie du Nord, proche de la frontière avec la Croatie) :
#Bileca (Bosnie du Sud, proche de la frontière avec le Monténégro) :
Reçu via la mailing-list Inicijativa Dobrodosli, le 14.10.2019
#mourir_aux_frontières #asile #migrations #réfugiés #Bosnie #Bosnie-Herzégovine #route_des_Balkans #frontières #décès #morts ##Bileca
Ajouté à cette liste :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/758646#message806449
Il memoriale voluto dal pescatore-eroe per ricordare la strage di Lampedusa
A Lampedusa è stato inaugurato il memoriale ideato da Vito Fiorino per le ricordare tutte le vittime della strage del 3 ottobre 2013, con il supporto dell’associazione #Gariwo. Durante l’inaugurazione l’abbraccio tra i superstiti e i pescatori di vite umane che quel giorno salvarono i superstiti del naufragio dove morirono 366 persone
"#Atlantique" de #Mati_Diop, un film sur « la #jeunesse fantôme, disparue en mer »
La réalisatrice franco-sénégalaise Mati Diop est la première réalisatrice noire à avoir été sélectionnée puis primée en compétition au Festival de Cannes. « Atlantique », son premier long métrage couronné du Grand Prix du Jury, sort en salles mercredi 2 octobre en France. Un film bouleversant qui montre le drame de l’immigration depuis l’autre côté, depuis la place de celles et ceux qui restent.
https://www.infomigrants.net/fr/post/19896/atlantique-de-mati-diop-un-film-sur-la-jeunesse-fantome-disparue-en-me
#celles_qui_restent #film #mourir_en_mer #morts #décès #Méditerranée #asile #migrations #réfugiés
Bande annonce :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AMmbssjtQk
Memorial In Thermi
29.09.19 Memorial In Thermi. 6 years ago was created the memorial for the dead at the EU borders. Fascists destroyed it twice. During ceremony we commemorated the dead of borders and hot spot system together with survivors and relatives.
#mémoire #monument #migrations #Grèce #Thermi #décès #morts #mourir_dans_la_forteresse_Europe #mémoriel
ping @isskein
Border Memorial: Frontera de los Muertos
#Border_Memorial: Frontera de los Muertos is an augmented reality public art project and memorial, dedicated to the thousands of migrant workers who have died along the U.S./Mexico border in recent years trying to cross the desert southwest in search of work and a better life.
Sorte de #cartographie_macabre...
#mémoire #morts #mourir_aux_frontières #art #art_et_politique #décès #mémoriel #frontières #réalité_augmentée #app #visualisation #squelettes #google_earth
ping @mobileborders @isskein @reka
Travail en cours, #carto des causes de décès des personnes exilées qui tentaient de rejoindre l’Europe, entre 2000 et 2016. Données provenant d’@Opendatasoft
source : ▻https://twitter.com/Gaelle_Sutton/status/1173581123525513216
#mourir_dans_la_forteresse_europe #asile #migrations #cartographie #visualisation #morts #décès #causes #Europe #Sahara #Méditerranée #work_in_progress
« C’est pour qu’il n’y ait plus de témoin sur cette scène de crime » : le coup de gueule du pilote d’un avion humanitaire interdit de vol en Méditerranée
▻https://www.francetvinfo.fr/monde/europe/naufrage-a-lampedusa/le-coup-de-gueule-du-pilote-d-un-avion-humanitaire-interdit-de-vol-en-m
Le pilote José Benavente, qui repère en Méditerranée les bateaux de migrants en difficulté, réagit sur franceinfo alors que son avion est bloqué sur l’île italienne de Lampedusa.
« Tout est mis en œuvre pour qu’il n’y ait plus de témoin sur cette scène de crime » qu’est la Méditerranée, condamne mardi 10 septembre sur franceinfo le pilote professionnel José Benavente. Il est cofondateur de l’ONG Pilotes volontaires, qui repère les embarcations de migrants en détresse en Méditerranée, mais dont l’avion, le Colibri, est cloué au sol par les autorités depuis plus d’un mois sur l’île italienne de Lampedusa.
Over 7,400 Deaths on Migration Routes Across Africa in Last Five Years, IOM Figures Show
African migrants are perishing at a rate of about 25 persons per week – or about 1,300 annually – on the African continent, even before embarking on perilous sea journeys to Europe or the Arabian Peninsula. Since 2014 over 7,400 men, women and children have died in transit across Africa, new records published today by IOM’s Missing Migrants Project (MMP) show.
These recently added records bring the total number of deaths documented on the African continent to 573 in 2019, and 7,401 in the last five years. Moreover, these figures fail to capture the true scale of the tragedy, as they represent only fatalities which have been reported.
The new records are based on hundreds of eyewitness accounts collected from migrants through surveys by the Mixed Migration Centre’s Monitoring Mechanism Initiative (4Mi: ▻http://www.mixedmigration.org/4mi). The interviews with migrants were conducted by 4Mi between December 2018 and April 2019 in West, North and East Africa and were analysed by the Missing Migrants Project team before being added to its MMP database.
However, 4Mi interviews covered only a small sample of the total number of migrants on the move in Africa – meaning that hundreds of additional deaths likely remain unreported and, of course, uncounted.
Nonetheless, due to the absence of other sources of information, surveys such as those conducted by 4Mi reveal important information about migrants’ experiences, including the risks to life that people face during their journeys.
Records show that thousands of people lose their lives as they journey through North Africa, where 4,400 deaths have been reported since 2014. However, deaths in this region are not well documented, and the true number of lives lost during migration remains unknown.
Migration routes in Sub-Saharan Africa also are dangerous, as demonstrated by the 1,830 deaths recorded by the project since 2014. Many of these deaths were recorded in West Africa, where 240 people were reported dead in 2019.
Overland routes in the Horn of Africa and the perilous sea passage across the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea have claimed the lives of at least 1,171 people since 2014. Migrants reported having witnessed others die from starvation, dehydration, exposure to harsh weather conditions, vehicle accidents and violence at the hands of smugglers.
Unfortunately, survey data contain no information on the identities of those whom survey participants witnessed die. Beyond initiatives like 4Mi, little efforts have been made to collect more information on people who die on migration journeys in the African continent. Their remains may never be recovered, nor their deaths investigated. Their deaths may also not be known by their families, who are forced to navigate daily life with the pain of not knowing whether their loved one is alive or dead.
For the latest data on migrant deaths in Africa, visit the Missing Migrants Project website here (▻https://missingmigrants.iom.int/region/africa). Anonymized Missing Migrants Project data can be downloaded from missingmigrants.iom.int/downloads.
For more information on the strengths and weaknesses of different data sources on deaths during migration, including survey data, please see Fatal Journeys Volume 3, Part 1: ►https://publications.iom.int/books/fatal-journeys-volume-3-part-1-improving-data-missing-migrants
▻https://reliefweb.int/report/world/over-7400-deaths-migration-routes-across-africa-last-five-years-iom-figur
#décès #morts #Afrique #désert #Sahara #IOM #OIM #statistiques #chiffres #mourir_dans_le_désert
ping @reka @karine4
Les #frontières 30 ans après la chute du Mur - Extrait de l’exposition “Frontière, histoire d’une transformation” on Vimeo
Les frontières 30 ans après la chute du Mur - Extrait de l’exposition “Frontière, histoire d’une transformation”
#europe #allemagne #berlin #méditerranée #mourir_en_mer #atelier_limo #europe
Bardonecchia : recuperato nel fiume #Dora il corpo di un migrante, morto durante la fuga in Francia
I volontari di Rainbow 4 Africa: «Vittima del clima di odio che ha avvolto l’Italia»
Il corpo di un uomo è riemerso ieri sera dal fiume Dora a #Bardonecchia, in alta #val_di_Susa. È un uomo di colore in avanzato stato di decomposizione probabilmente in acqua da mesi. Il sospetto, quasi una certezza con il passare delle ore, è che si tratti di uno dei migranti dispersi durante la traversata sui passi di montagna - primo fra tutti il Colle alla Scala - nel tentativo di raggiungere a piedi la Francia. La sua identificazione è resa ancora più complicata dallo stato del cadavere. Il corpo è stato avvistato da un passante nella Dora a due passi dal commissariato di Bardonecchia vicino al centro del paese da un passante. Per recuperarlo dall’acqua sono intervenuti i vigili del fuoco.
“Il ritrovamento dell’ennesimo cadavere nella Dora, a Bardonecchia, ci riempie di dolore e cordoglio - scrivono in una nota volontari di Rainbow 4 Africa che da due anni assistono i migranti a Bardonecchia - La montagna restituisce le vittime di quel clima di odio e razzismo che ha avvolto l’Italia ormai da troppo tempo. Un clima che genera una paura tale da muovere i più disperati, quelli che hanno perso ogni speranza di futuro in questo Paese, a cercare vie sempre più difficili e impervie per passare il confine”.
Rainbow4Africa da quasi due anni è sulle montagne piemontesi con la Missione Freedom Mountain, insieme ad altre associazioni della Valle, (Val Susa Oltre Confine, Briser Les Frontiéres, Croce Rossa Italiana, Il Pulmino Verde, il Soccorso Alpino Italiano, Asgi)
“Rimaniamo e rimarremo su queste montagne come sanitari perché nessuno deve morire e nessuno deve morire quassù, e rimaniamo e rimarremo come testimoni perché quello che vediamo, sentiamo, scopriamo deve essere evidente: testimoni del diritto di ogni essere umano a cercare la speranza, ovunque voglia”.
L’anno scorso, sullo stesso confine, erano stati trovati i cadaveri di tre migranti, morti mentre cercavano di raggiungere la Francia. Lo scorso febbraio, invece, un migrante era stato trovato in ipotermia, sulla strada nazionale 94 del colle del Monginevro, in territorio francese, ed era morto poco dopo essere arrivato in ospedale.
▻https://torino.repubblica.it/cronaca/2019/09/08/news/bardonecchia_recuperato_nel_fiume_dora_il_corpo_di_un_migrante_mor
#décès #Italie #France #frontières #asile #migrations #réfugiés #frontière_sud-alpine #Alpes #montagne #mourir_aux_frontières #décès #mort
Ajouté à la liste des morts dans les Hautes-Alpes :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/800822
Val di Susa, trovato il cadavere di un migrante nel fiume Dora: ha tentato di arrivare in Francia
Lʼanno scorso erano stati rinvenuti altri tre corpi senza vita di migranti che volevano attraversare la frontiera. Sul posto è giunta la polizia.
Il cadavere di un uomo è stato trovato nel fiume Dora a Bardonecchia, in alta Val di Susa al confine tra Italia e Francia. Il corpo, in avanzato stato di decomposizione, potrebbe essere stato trascinato a valle dall’acqua. Si tratterebbe di un migrante che cercava di attraversare la frontiera. A dare l’allarme è stato un passante. L’anno scorso erano stati trovati i cadaveri di tre migranti, morti mentre cercavano di raggiungere la Francia.
Lo scorso febbraio, invece, un migrante era stato trovato in ipotermia, sulla strada nazionale 94 del colle del Monginevro, in territorio francese, ed era morto poco dopo essere arrivato in ospedale. Sul posto è giunta la polizia.
▻https://www.tgcom24.mediaset.it/cronaca/piemonte/val-susa-cadavere-di-migrante-in-fiume-cercava-di-andare-in-francia
Liste des personnes en situation migratoire mortes à la frontière dite « haute » (#Mongenèvre, #Val_Susa, #Col_de_l'Echelle, #Bardonecchia, #Oulx, #Briançon) entre la #France et l’Italie ces dernières années.
#frontières #mourir_aux_frontières_alpines #morts #décès #migrations #asile #réfugiés #Alpes #montagne #mourir_aux_frontières #violent_borders #frontière_sud-alpine
Je vais ajouter à cette métaliste sur les morts à la frontière sud-alpine :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/758646
#Beauty, femme enceinte, Italie, mars 2018, morte à #Turin suite à un refoulement :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/688734#message688814
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/688734#message688815
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/688734#message688816
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/688734#message688817
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/688734#message688819
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/688734#message688820
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/688734#message688821
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/688734#message688822
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/688734#message688824
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/688734#message688832
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/688734#message688854
#Mathew_Blessing, mai 2018. Blessing, noyée dans la #Durance dans la #Vallée_de_la_Clarée (#La_Vachette) :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/688734#message693469
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/688734#message694175
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/688734#message694367
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/688734#message694458
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/688734#message694635
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/688734#message694637
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/688734#message694639
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/688734#message694652
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/688734#message694815
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/688734#message694882
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/688734#message694883
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/688734#message694892
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/688734#message695665
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/688734#message695668
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/688734#message697662
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/756096#message779742
#Mamadou, France, mai 2018, retrouvé mort au col du Montgenèvre côté français :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/688734#message695671
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/688734#message696068
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/688734#message696323
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/688734#message696463
#Mohamed_Fofana, Italie, mai 2018, son corps émerge parmi la neige et les débris des gorges du Fréjus :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/688734#message697078
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/688734#message697311
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/688734#message697848
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/688734#message697850
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/688734#message698583
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/688734#message700391
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/688734#message700819
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/688734#message702351
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/688734#message706226
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/688734#message706430
#Derman_Tamimou, France, février 2019, retrouvé sur la route du Mongenèvre, côté français à la hauteur de La Vachette :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/756096#message758498
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/756096#message758645
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/756096#message758655
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/756096#message758931
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/756096#message759092
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/756096#message759111
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/756096#message759124
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/756096#message759494
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/756096#message759647
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/756096#message759694
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/756096#message761389
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/756096#message761734
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/756096#message761793
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/756096#message764749
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/756096#message764907
Voir aussi le témoignage de #Marie_Dorléans de Tous Migrants :
Au-delà de ces personnes qui ont survécu et échappé au pire, on voulait absolument rappeler aussi aujourd’hui celles qui n’ont pas eu cette chance et notamment parce qu’il faut pas s’habituer, parce qu’il ne faut pas que ces gens tombent dans l’anonymat. Le 7 février 2019, Tamimou, un jeune togolais de 28 ans, est mort d’épuisement et de froid au bord de la route nationale que la plupart d’entre vous viennent de monter. »
Et de #Pâquerette_Forest de SOS Alpes solidaires :
« Ils marchent quelques fois avec google maps sur le portable, si le portable fonctionne, parce que si il fait trop froid ils n’ont plus de batterie, et au bout d’un moment ça marche plus. Après il y a un peu des traces de gens qui se promènent et du passage quand il y a des gens qui passent tous les jours, donc ça peut aussi les aider. Après ils se repèrent aux lumières des villages. #Tamimou qui est décédé, il a perdu ses bottes au-dessus de La Vachette. Ils ont coupé, et on a bien compris qu’au début ils étaient sur une espèce de piste et puis à un moment ils ont coupé la piste et ils avaient de la neige jusque là [elle montre la hauteur de la neige avec ses mains sur les jambes, on ne voit pas sur la vidéo]. Lui il a perdu ses bottes, après ils ont essayé de le porter, et puis il était épuisé et puis il est mort »
Sur les morts du printemps 2018...
Tre morti in tre settimane, scoperto il cadavere di un altro migrante in Val di Susa
Ancora un corpo che spunta tra le neve sporca e i detriti all’Orrido del Frejus.
Le peggiori previsioni fatte nell’inverno si stanno rivelando fondate. Si scioglie la neve, si contano i cadaveri. È il terzo morto in poche settimane causato dalla militarizzazione della frontiera operata dalle forze dell’ordine in questi ultimi mesi, da quando la chiusura del passaggio di Ventimiglia ha spostato i flussi verso i valichi alpini. Archiviati i dissapori causati dall’invasione di campo della gendermerie a Bardonecchia, ormai dai due lati della frontiera è caccia al nero, con gendarmerie e polizia unite per respingere in Italia i migranti che vogliono arrivare in Francia. Anche a costo di ucciderli. Vittime collaterali dello spettacolo della frontiera, messo su per compiacere l’Unione europea e qualche cinico politico.
Prima Blessing, una ragazza di 21 anni morta sulle sponde della Durance. Gli amici che erano con lei hanno raccontato che la gendarmeria francese l’ha inseguita di notte per i sentieri scoscesi fino a quando non è caduta nel torrente. Il suo corpo è stato ritrovato a valle qualche giorno dopo. Mamadou, un signore senegalese, invece è morto di sfinimento in montagna. Aveva provato a passare come i suoi coetanei con la pelle bianca in autobus ma la polizia l’ha rispedito indietro, con il nipote ha dovuto inerpicarsi sulla montagna per sfuggire alla battuta di caccia che i gendarmi lanciano ogni giorno e ogni notte, con visori notturni e motoslitte. Da aprile ad aiutare gli agenti sono arrivati i fascisti di Generation identitiare, che con droni ed elicotteri hanno messo in scena un blocco delle frontiere prima che un corteo di trecento valsusini li ridicolizzasse passando la frontiera con qualche decina di migranti. Sotto l’occhio benevole delle autorità francesi e col tifo dei fascisti nostrani, ora continuano di tanto in tanto le loro azioni spot, respingendo i migranti, obbligandoli a percorsi sempre più impervi e a rischiare la vita fino a perderla.
Durante l’inverno tanti abitanti delle valli frontaliere hanno setacciato i sentieri ed accolto le persone in transito, dando informazioni, soccorrendo chi era in difficoltà anche a costo di denunce e processi. Tre di loro, Bastien, Théo ed Eleonora, sono ancora sottoposti a controllo giudiziario in Francia dopo un passaggio di diverse settimane nel carcere di Marsiglia, in attesa de loro processo che comincerà il 31 maggio. Chi quei sentieri li conosce aveva avvertito: la frontiera uccide. Voleva essere una denuncia, a fare qualcosa prima che fosse troppo tardi. Si è trasformata in una previsione che in questi giorni si è fatta dolorosa realtà.
Dai due lati della frontiera è stato lanciato un appuntamento per una risposta collettiva, domenica 27 maggio alle 12:30 a Claviere, al rifugio autogestito chez jesus. Non vogliamo contare i corpi, non vogliamo che la Val di susa si trasformi in un cimitero a cielo aperto. Restiamo umani.
▻https://www.infoaut.org/migranti/tre-morti-in-tre-settimane-scoperto-il-cadavere-di-un-altro-migrante-in-val
Septembre 2019, #Bardonecchia, corps d’un homme retrouvé dans la rivière #Dora :
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/800830
Il serait donc d’utilité publique de commencer à en dresser la carte
Une 5ème victime de la frontière dans les Alpes (passage Bardonneccia/Briançon col de l’Echelle).
Hier le corps d’un homme a été retrouvé dans le fleuve Dora, près de Bardonnecchia. C’est la cinquième personne tentant de traverser cette frontière, au niveau du col de l’échelle, qui est retrouvé décédée.
« Ces dernières années tous les moyens ont été mis en place pour que ce genre de chose arrive : militaire en poste dans les forts autrefois abandonnés, gendarmes, police, douane, police en civils, laisser-passer pour les fascistes de génération identitaire venus épauler la flicaille. Les frontières se sont fermées pour les hommes et les femmes non-blanches.
Les compagnon.n.e.s anarchistes subissent là-haut une répression féroce, les militant.e.s solidaires sont harcelé.e.s.
All Cops Are Borders
Burn the borders »
▻https://www.facebook.com/collectifmigrants13/posts/2085425978430142?__xts__[0]=68.ARC3SUc6HicLfWSZMxbdmmf_CxCNvhE5BUP-usMmqYF
Ethiopians Abused on Gulf Migration Route
Ethiopians undertaking the perilous journey by boat across the Red Sea or Gulf of Aden face exploitation and torture in Yemen by a network of trafficking groups, Human Rights Watch said today. They also encounter abusive prison conditions in Saudi Arabia before being summarily forcibly deported back to Addis Ababa. Authorities in Ethiopia, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia have taken few if any measures to curb the violence migrants face, to put in place asylum procedures, or to check abuses perpetrated by their own security forces.
A combination of factors, including unemployment and other economic difficulties, drought, and human rights abuses have driven hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians to migrate over the past decade, traveling by boat over the Red Sea and then by land through Yemen to Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia and neighboring Gulf states are favored destinations because of the availability of employment. Most travel irregularly and do not have legal status once they reach Saudi Arabia.“Many Ethiopians who hoped for a better life in Saudi Arabia face unspeakable dangers along the journey, including death at sea, torture, and all manners of abuses,” said Felix Horne, senior Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The Ethiopian government, with the support of its international partners, should support people who arrive back in Ethiopia with nothing but the clothes on their back and nowhere to turn for help.”
Human Rights Watch interviewed 12 Ethiopians in Addis Ababa who had been deported from Saudi Arabia between December 2018 and May 2019. Human Rights Watch also interviewed humanitarian workers and diplomats working on Ethiopia migration-related issues.
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) estimates as many as 500,000 Ethiopians were in Saudi Arabia when the Saudi government began a deportation campaign in November 2017. The Saudi authorities have arrested, prosecuted, or deported foreigners who violate labor or residency laws or those who crossed the border irregularly. About 260,000 Ethiopians, an average of 10,000 per month, were deported from Saudi Arabia to Ethiopia between May 2017 and March 2019, according to the IOM, and deportations have continued.
An August 2 Twitter update by Saudi Arabia’s Interior Ministry said that police had arrested 3.6 million people, including 2.8 million for violations of residency rules, 557,000 for labor law violations, and 237,000 for border violations. In addition, authorities detained 61,125 people for crossing the border into Saudi Arabia illegally, 51 percent of them Ethiopians, and referred more than 895,000 people for deportation. Apart from illegal border crossing, these figures are not disaggregated by nationality.
Eleven of the 12 people interviewed who had been deported had engaged with smuggling and trafficking networks that are regionally linked across Ethiopia, Djibouti, Somalia’s semi-autonomous Puntland state, the self-declared autonomous state of Somaliland, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia. Traffickers outside of Ethiopia, particularly in Yemen, often used violence or threats to extort ransom money from migrants’ family members or contacts, those interviewed told Human Rights Watch. The 12th person was working in Saudi Arabia legally but was deported after trying to help his sister when she arrived illegally.
Those interviewed described life-threatening journeys as long as 24 hours across the Gulf of Aden or the Red Sea to reach Yemen, in most cases in overcrowded boats, with no food or water, and prevented from moving around by armed smugglers.
“There were 180 people on the boat, but 25 died,” one man said. “The boat was in trouble and the waves were hitting it. It was overloaded and about to sink so the dallalas [an adaptation of the Arabic word for “middleman” or “broker”] picked some out and threw them into the sea, around 25.”
Interviewees said they were met and captured by traffickers upon arrival in Yemen. Five said the traffickers physically assaulted them to extort payments from family members or contacts in Ethiopia or Somalia. While camps where migrants were held capture were run by Yemenis, Ethiopians often carried out the abuse. In many cases, relatives said they sold assets such as homes or land to obtain the ransom money.
After paying the traffickers or escaping, the migrants eventually made their way north to the Saudi-Yemen border, crossing in rural, mountainous areas. Interviewees said Saudi border guards fired at them, killing and injuring others crossing at the same time, and that they saw dead bodies along the crossing routes. Human Rights Watch has previously documented Saudi border guards shooting and killing migrants crossing the border.
“At the border there are many bodies rotting, decomposing,” a 26-year-old man said: “It is like a graveyard.”
Six interviewees said they were apprehended by Saudi border police, while five successfully crossed the border but were later arrested. They described abusive prison conditions in several facilities in southern Saudi Arabia, including inadequate food, toilet facilities, and medical care; lack of sanitation; overcrowding; and beatings by guards.
Planes returning people deported from Saudi Arabia typically arrive in Addis Ababa either at the domestic terminal or the cargo terminal of Bole International Airport. Several humanitarian groups conduct an initial screening to identify the most vulnerable cases, with the rest left to their own devices. Aid workers in Ethiopia said that deportees often arrive with no belongings and no money for food, transportation, or shelter. Upon arrival, they are offered little assistance to help them deal with injuries or psychological trauma, or to support transportation to their home communities, in some cases hundreds of kilometers from Addis Ababa.
Human Rights Watch learned that much of the migration funding from Ethiopia’s development partners is specifically earmarked to manage migration along the routes from the Horn of Africa to Europe and to assist Ethiopians being returned from Europe, with very little left to support returnees from Saudi Arabia.
“Saudi Arabia has summarily returned hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians to Addis Ababa who have little to show for their journey except debts and trauma,” Horne said. “Saudi Arabia should protect migrants on its territory and under its control from traffickers, ensure there is no collusion between its agents and these criminals, and provide them with the opportunity to legally challenge their detention and deportation.”
All interviews were conducted in Amharic, Tigrayan, or Afan Oromo with translation into English. The interviewees were from the four regions of SNNPR (Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples’ Region), Oromia, Amhara, and Tigray. These regions have historically produced the bulk of Ethiopians migrating abroad. To protect interviewees from possible reprisals, pseudonyms are being used in place of their real names. Human Rights Watch wrote to the Ethiopian and Saudi governments seeking comment on abuses described by Ethiopian migrants along the Gulf migration route, but at the time of writing neither had responded.
Dangerous Boat Journey
Most of the 11 people interviewed who entered Saudi Arabia without documents described life-threatening boat journeys across the Red Sea from Djibouti, Somaliland, or Puntland to Yemen. They described severely overcrowded boats, beatings, and inadequate food or water on journeys that ranged from 4 to 24 hours. These problems were compounded by dangerous weather conditions or encounters with Saudi/Emirati-led coalition naval vessels patrolling the Yemeni coast.
“Berhanu” said that Somali smugglers beat people on his boat crossing from Puntland: “They have a setup they use where they place people in spots by weight to keep the boat balanced. If you moved, they beat you.” He said that his trip was lengthened when smugglers were forced to turn the boat around after spotting a light from a naval vessel along the Yemeni coast and wait several hours for it to pass.
Since March 26, 2015, Saudi Arabia has led a coalition of countries in a military campaign against the Houthi armed group in Yemen. As part of its campaign the Saudi/Emirati-led coalition has imposed a naval blockade on Houthi-controlled Yemeni ports, purportedly to prevent Houthi rebels from importing weapons by sea, but which has also restricted the flow of food, fuel, and medicine to civilians in the country, and included attacks on civilians at sea. Human Rights Watch previously documented a helicopter attack in March 2017 by coalition forces on a boat carrying Somali migrants and refugees returning from Yemen, killing at least 32 of the 145 Somali migrants and refugees on board and one Yemeni civilian.
Exploitation and Abuses in Yemen
Once in war-torn Yemen, Ethiopian migrants said they faced kidnappings, beatings, and other abuses by traffickers trying to extort ransom money from them or their family members back home.
This is not new. Human Rights Watch, in a 2014 report, documented abuses, including torture, of migrants in detention camps in Yemen run by traffickers attempting to extort payments. In 2018, Human Rights Watch documented how Yemeni guards tortured and raped Ethiopian and other Horn of Africa migrants at a detention center in Aden and worked in collaboration with smugglers to send them back to their countries of origin. Recent interviews by Human Rights Watch indicate that the war in Yemen has not significantly affected the abuses against Ethiopians migrating through Yemen to Saudi Arabia. If anything, the conflict, which escalated in 2015, has made the journey more dangerous for migrants who cross into an area of active fighting.
Seven of the 11 irregular migrants interviewed said they faced detention and extortion by traffickers in Yemen. This occurred in many cases as soon as they reached shore, as smugglers on boats coordinated with the Yemeni traffickers. Migrants said that Yemeni smuggling and trafficking groups always included Ethiopians, often one from each of Oromo, Tigrayan, and Amhara ethnic groups, who generally were responsible for beating and torturing migrants to extort payments. Migrants were generally held in camps for days or weeks until they could provide ransom money, or escape. Ransom payments were usually made by bank transfers from relatives and contacts back in Ethiopia.
“Abebe” described his experience:
When we landed… [the traffickers] took us to a place off the road with a tent. Everyone there was armed with guns and they threw us around like garbage. The traffickers were one Yemeni and three Ethiopians – one Tigrayan, one Amhara, and one Oromo…. They started to beat us after we refused to pay, then we had to call our families…. My sister [in Ethiopia] has a house, and the traffickers called her, and they fired a bullet near me that she could hear. They sold the house and sent the money [40,000 Birr, US $1,396].
“Tesfalem”, said that he was beaten by Yemenis and Ethiopians at a camp he believes was near the port city of Aden:
They demanded money, but I said I don’t have any. They told me to make a call, but I said I don’t have relatives. They beat me and hung me on the wall by one hand while standing on a chair, then they kicked the chair away and I was swinging by my arm. They beat me on my head with a stick and it was swollen and bled.
He escaped after three months, was detained in another camp for three months more, and finally escaped again.
“Biniam” said the men would take turns beating the captured migrants: “The [Ethiopian] who speaks your language beats you, those doing the beating were all Ethiopians. We didn’t think of fighting back against them because we were so tired, and they would kill you if you tried.”
Two people said that when they landed, the traffickers offered them the opportunity to pay immediately to travel by car to the Saudi border, thereby avoiding the detention camps. One of them, “Getachew,” said that he paid 1,500 Birr (US $52) for the car and escaped mistreatment.
Others avoided capture when they landed, but then faced the difficult 500 kilometer journey on foot with few resources while trying to avoid capture.
Dangers faced by Yemeni migrants traveling north were compounded for those who ran into areas of active fighting between Houthi forces and groups aligned with the Saudi/Emirati-led coalition. Two migrants said that their journey was delayed, one by a week, the other by two months, to avoid conflict areas.
Migrants had no recourse to local authorities and did not report abuses or seek assistance from them. Forces aligned with the Yemeni government and the Houthis have also detained migrants in poor conditions, refused access to protection and asylum procedures, deported migrants en masse in dangerous conditions, and exposed them to abuse. In April 2018, Human Rights Watch reported that Yemeni government officials had tortured, raped, and executed migrants and asylum seekers from the Horn of Africa in a detention center in the southern port city of Aden. The detention center was later shut down.
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) announced in May that it had initiated a program of voluntary humanitarian returns for irregular Ethiopian migrants held by Yemeni authorities at detention sites in southern Yemen. IOM said that about 5,000 migrants at three sites were held in “unsustainable conditions,” and that the flights from Aden to Ethiopia had stalled because the Saudi/Emirati-led coalition had failed to provide the flights the necessary clearances. The coalition controls Yemen’s airspace.
Crossing the Border; Abusive Detention inside Saudi Arabia
Migrants faced new challenges attempting to cross the Saudi-Yemen border. The people interviewed said that the crossing points used by smugglers are in rural, mountainous areas where the border separates Yemen’s Saada Governorate and Saudi Arabia’s Jizan Province. Two said that smugglers separated Ethiopians by their ethnic group and assigned different groups to cross at different border points.
Ethiopian migrants interviewed were not all able to identify the locations where they crossed. Most indicated points near the Yemeni mountain villages Souq al-Ragu and ‘Izlat Al Thabit, which they called Ragu and Al Thabit. Saudi-aligned media have regularly characterized Souq al-Ragu as a dangerous town from which drug smugglers and irregular migrants cross into Saudi Arabia.
Migrants recounted pressures to pay for the crossing by smuggling drugs into Saudi Arabia. “Abdi” said he stayed in Souq al-Ragu for 15 days and finally agreed to carry across a 25 kilogram sack of khat in exchange for 500 Saudi Riyals (US$133). Khat is a mild stimulant grown in the Ethiopian highlands and Yemen; it is popular among Yemenis and Saudis, but illegal in Saudi Arabia.
“Badessa” described Souq al-Ragu as “the crime city:”
You don’t know who is a trafficker, who is a drug person, but everybody has an angle of some sort. Even Yemenis are afraid of the place, it is run by Ethiopians. It is also a burial place; bodies are gathered of people who had been shot along the border and then they’re buried there. There is no police presence.
Four of the eleven migrants who crossed the border on foot said Saudi border guards shot at them during their crossings, sometimes after ordering them to stop and other times without warning. Some said they encountered dead bodies along the way. Six said they were apprehended by Saudi border guards or drug police at the border, while five were arrested later.
“Abebe” said that Saudi border guards shot at his group as they crossed from Izlat Al Thabit:
They fired bullets, and everyone scattered. People fleeing were shot, my friend was shot in the leg…. One person was shot in the chest and killed and [the Saudi border guards] made us carry him to a place where there was a big excavator. They didn’t let us bury him; the excavator dug a hole and they buried him.
Berhanu described the scene in the border area: “There were many dead people at the border. You could walk on the corpses. No one comes to bury them.”
Getachew added: “It is like a graveyard. There are no dogs or hyenas there to eat the bodies, just dead bodies everywhere.”
Two of the five interviewees who crossed the border without being detained said that Saudi and Ethiopian smugglers and traffickers took them to informal detention camps in southern Saudi towns and held them for ransom. “Yonas” said they took him and 14 others to a camp in the Fayfa area of Jizan Province: “They beat me daily until I called my family. They wanted 10,000 Birr ($349). My father sold his farmland and sent the 10,000 Birr, but then they told me this isn’t enough, we need 20,000 ($698). I had nothing left and decided to escape or die.” He escaped.
Following their capture, the migrants described abusive conditions in Saudi governmental detention centers and prisons, including overcrowding and inadequate food, water, and medical care. Migrants also described beatings by Saudi guards.
Nine migrants who were captured while crossing the border illegally or living in Saudi Arabia without documentation spent up to five months in detention before authorities deported them back to Ethiopia. The three others were convicted of criminal offenses that included human trafficking and drug smuggling, resulting in longer periods in detention before being deported.
The migrants identified about 10 prisons and detention centers where they were held for various periods. The most frequently cited were a center near the town of al-Dayer in Jizan Province along the border, Jizan Central Prison in Jizan city, and the Shmeisi Detention Center east of Jeddah, where migrants are processed for deportation.
Al-Dayer had the worst conditions, they said, citing overcrowding, inadequate sanitation, food and water, and medical care. Yonas said:
They tied our feet with chains and they beat us while chained, sometimes you can’t get to the food because you are chained. If you get chained by the toilet it will overflow and flow under you. If you are aggressive you get chained by the toilet. If you are good [behave well], they chain you to another person and you can move around.
Abraham had a similar description:
The people there beat us. Ethnic groups [from Ethiopia] fought with each other. The toilet was overflowing. It was like a graveyard and not a place to live. Urine was everywhere and people were defecating. The smell was terrible.
Other migrants described similarly bad conditions in Jizan Central Prison. “Ibrahim” said that he was a legal migrant working in Saudi Arabia, but that he travelled to Jizan to help his sister, whom Saudi authorities had detained after she crossed from Yemen illegally. Once in Jizan, authorities suspected him of human trafficking and arrested him, put him on trial, and sentenced him to two years in prison, a sentenced he partially served in Jizan Central Prison:
Jizan prison is so very tough…. You can be sleeping with [beside] someone who has tuberculosis, and if you ask an official to move you, they don’t care. They will beat you. You can’t change clothes, you have one set and that is it, sometimes the guards will illegally bring clothes and sell to you at night.
He also complained of overcrowding: “When you want to sleep you tell people and they all jostle to make some room, then you sleep for a bit but you wake up because everyone is jostling against each other.”
Most of the migrants said food was inadequate. Yonas described the situation in al-Dayer: “When they gave food 10 people would gather and fight over it. If you don’t have energy you won’t eat. The fight is over rice and bread.”
Detainees also said medical care was inadequate and that detainees with symptoms of tuberculosis (such as cough, fever, night sweats, or weight loss) were not isolated from other prisoners. Human Rights Watch interviewed three former detainees who were being treated for tuberculosis after being deported, two of whom said they were held with other detainees despite having symptoms of active tuberculosis.
Detainees described being beaten by Saudi prison guards when they requested medical care. Abdi said:
I was beaten once with a stick in Jizan that was like a piece of rebar covered in plastic. I was sick in prison and I used to vomit. They said, ‘why do you do that when people are eating?’ and then they beat me harshly and I told him [the guard], ‘Please kill me.’ He eventually stopped.
Ibrahim said he was also beaten when he requested medical care for tuberculosis:
[Prison guards] have a rule that you aren’t supposed to knock on the door [and disturb the guards]. When I got sick in the first six months and asked to go to the clinic, they just beat me with electric wires on the bottom of my feet. I kept asking so they kept beating.
Detainees said that the other primary impetus for beatings by guards was fighting between different ethnic groups of Ethiopians in detention, largely between ethnic Oromos, Amharas, and Tigrayans. Ethnic tensions are increasingly common back in Ethiopia.
Detainees said that conditions generally improved once they were transferred to Shmeisi Detention Center, near Jeddah, where they stayed only a few days before receiving temporary travel documents from Ethiopian consular authorities and deported to Ethiopia. The migrants charged with and convicted of crimes had no opportunity to consult legal counsel.
None of the migrants said they were given the opportunity to legally challenge their deportations, and Saudi Arabia has not established an asylum system under which migrants could apply for protection from deportation where there was a risk of persecution if they were sent back. Saudi Arabia is not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention.
Deportation and Future Prospects
Humanitarian workers and diplomats told Human Rights Watch that since the beginning of Saudi Arabia’s deportation campaign, large numbers of Ethiopian deportees have been transported via special flights by Saudia Airlines to Bole International Airport in Addis Ababa and unloaded in a cargo area away from the main international terminal or at the domestic terminal. When Human Rights Watch visited in May, it appeared that the Saudi flights were suspended during the month of Ramadan, during which strict sunrise-to-sunset fasting is observed by Muslims. All interviewees who were deported in May said they had returned on regular Ethiopian Airlines commercial flights and disembarked at the main terminal with other passengers.
All of those deported said that they returned to Ethiopia with nothing but the clothes they were wearing, and that Saudi authorities had confiscated their mobile phones and in some cases shoes and belts. “After staying in Jeddah … they had us make a line and take off our shoes,” Abraham said. “Anything that could tie like a belt we had to leave, they wouldn’t let us take it. We were barefoot when we went to the airport.”
Deportees often have critical needs for assistance, including medical care, some for gunshot wounds. One returnee recovering from tuberculosis said that he did not have enough money to buy food and was going hungry. Abdi said that when he left for Saudi Arabia he weighed 64 kilograms but returned weighing only 47 or 48 kilograms.
Aid workers and diplomats familiar with migration issues in Ethiopia said that very little international assistance is earmarked for helping deportees from Saudi Arabia for medical care and shelter or money to return and reintegrate in their home villages.
Over 8 million people are in need of food assistance in Ethiopia, a country of over 100 million. It hosts over 920,000 refugees from neighboring countries and violence along ethnic lines produced over 2.4 internally displaced people in 2018, many of whom have now been returned.
The IOM registers migrants upon arrival in Ethiopia and to facilitate their return from Saudi Arabia. Several hours after their arrival and once registered, they leave the airport and must fend for themselves. Some said they had never been to Addis before.
In 2013 and 2014, Saudi Arabia conducted an expulsion campaign similar to the one that began in November 2017. The earlier campaign expelled about 163,000 Ethiopians, according to the IOM. A 2015 Human Rights Watch report found that migrants experienced serious abuses during detention and deportation, including attacks by security forces and private citizens in Saudi Arabia, and inadequate and abusive detention conditions. Human Rights Watch has also previously documented mistreatment of Ethiopian migrants by traffickers and government detention centers in Yemen.
Aid workers and diplomats said that inadequate funding to assist returning migrants is as a result of several factors, including a focus of many of the European funders on stemming migration to and facilitating returns from Europe, along with competing priorities and the low visibility of the issue compared with migration to Europe.
During previous mass returns from Saudi Arabia, there was more funding for reintegration and more international media attention in part because there was such a large influx in a short time, aid workers said.
▻https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/08/15/ethiopians-abused-gulf-migration-route
#migrations #asile #violence #réfugiés #réfugiés_éthiopiens #Ethiopie #pays_du_Golfe #route_du_Golfe #mer_Rouge #Golfe_d'Aden #Yémen #Arabie_Saoudite #frontières #violent_borders #torture #trafic_d'êtres_humains #exploitation #routes_migratoires
signalé par @isskein
Migrants endure sea crossing to Yemen and disembark in hell
Zahra struggled in the blue waters of the Gulf of Aden, grasping for the hands of fellow migrants.
Hundreds of men, women and teenagers clambered out of a boat and through the surf emerging, exhausted, on the shores of Yemen.
The 20-year-old Ethiopian saw men armed with automatic rifles waiting for them on the beach and she clenched in terror. She had heard migrants’ stories of brutal traffickers, lurking like monsters in a nightmare. They are known by the Arabic nickname Abdul-Qawi — which means Worshipper of the Strong.
“What will they do to us?” Zahra thought.
She and 300 other Africans had just endured six hours crammed in a wooden smuggling boat to cross the narrow strait between the Red Sea and the gulf. When they landed, the traffickers loaded them into trucks and drove them to ramshackle compounds in the desert outside the coastal village of Ras al-Ara.
There was Zahra’s answer. She was imprisoned for a month in a tin-roofed hut, broiling and hungry, ordered to call home each day to beseech her family to wire $2,000. She said she did not have family to ask for money and pleaded for her freedom.
Instead, her captors raped her. And they raped the 20 other women with her — for weeks, different men all the time.
“They used each of the girls,” she told The Associated Press. “Every night there was rape.”
With its systematic torture, Ras al-Ara is a particular hell on the arduous, 900-mile (1,400 kilometer) journey from the Horn of Africa to oil-rich Saudi Arabia. Migrants leave home on sandaled feet with dreams of escaping poverty. They trek through mountains and deserts, sandstorms and 113-degree temperatures, surviving on crumbs of bread and salty water from ancient wells.
In Djibouti, long lines of migrants descend single file down mountain slopes to the rocky coastal plain, where many lay eyes on the sea for first time and eventually board the boats. Some find their way safely across war-torn Yemen to Saudi Arabia, only to be caught and tossed back over the border. The lucky ones make it into the kingdom to earn their livings as a servant and laborers.
But others are stranded in Yemen’s nightmare — in some measure because Europe has been shutting its doors, outsourcing migrants to other countries.The European Union began paying Libyan coast guards and militias to stop migrants there, blocking the other main route out of East Africa, through Libya and across the Mediterranean to Europe. The number of Mediterranean crossings plummeted — from 370,000 in 2016 to just over 56,000 so far this year.
Meanwhile, more than 150,000 migrants landed in Yemen in 2018, a 50% increase from the year before, according to the International Organization for Migration.
This year, more than 107,000 had arrived by the end of September, along with perhaps tens of thousands more the organization was unable to track — or who were buried in graves along the trail.
And European policies may be making the Yemen route more dangerous. Funded by the EU, Ethiopia has cracked down on migrant smugglers and intensified border controls. Arrests of known brokers have prompted migrants to turn to unreliable traffickers, taking more dangerous paths and increasing the risk of abuses.
Many of those migrants end up in Ras al-Ara.
Nearly every migrant who lands here is imprisoned in hidden compounds while their families are shaken down for money. Like Zahra, they are subjected to daily torments ranging from beatings and rapes to starvation, their screams drowned out by the noise of generators or cars or simply lost in the desert.
“Out of every thousand, 800 disappear in the lockups,” said a humanitarian worker monitoring the flow of migrants.
Traffickers who torture are a mix of Yemenis and Ethiopians of different ethnic groups. So victims cannot appeal to tribal loyalties, they are tortured by men from other groups: If the migrants are Oromia, the torturers are Tigrinya.
At the same time, because the three main ethnic groups don’t speak each others’ languages, Yemeni smugglers need translators to convey orders to the migrants and monitor their phone conversations with their families.
The AP spoke to more than two dozen Ethiopians who survived torture at Ras al-Ara. Nearly all of them reported witnessing deaths, and one man died of starvation hours after the AP saw him.
The imprisonment and torture are largely ignored by Yemeni authorities.
The AP saw trucks full of migrants passing unhindered through military checkpoints as they went from the beaches to drop their human cargo at each desert compound, known in Arabic as a “hosh.”
“The traffickers move freely, in public, giving bribes at the checkpoints,” said Mohammed Said, a former coast guard officer who now runs a gas station in the center of town.
From Ras al-Ara, it’s nearly 50 miles in any direction to the next town. Around 8,000 families live in a collection of decaying, one-story stone houses beside dirt roads, a lone hotel and two eateries. The fish market is the center of activity when the daily catch is brought in.
Nearly the entire population profits from the human trade. Some rent land to traffickers for the holding cells, or work as guards, drivers or translators. For others, traffickers flush with cash are a lucrative market for their food, fuel or the mildly stimulant leaves of qat, which Yemenis and Ethiopians chew daily.
Locals can rattle off the traffickers’ names. One of them, a Yemeni named Mohammed al-Usili, runs more than 20 hosh. He’s famous for the red Nissan SUV he drives through town.
Others belong to Sabaha, one of the biggest tribes in southern Yemen, some of whom are famous for their involvement in illicit businesses. Yemenis call the Sabaha “bandits” who have no political loyalties to any of the warring parties.
Many traffickers speak openly of their activities, but deny they torture, blaming others.
Yemeni smuggler Ali Hawash was a farmer who went into the human smuggling business a year ago. He disparaged smugglers who prey on poor migrants, torturing them and holding them hostage until relatives pay ransom.
“I thought we need to have a different way,” he said, “I will help you go to Saudi, you just pay the transit and the transportation. Deal.”
The flow of migrants to the beach is unending. On a single day, July 24, the AP witnessed seven boats pull into Ras al-Ara, one after the other, starting at 3 a.m., each carrying more than 100 people.
The migrants climbed out of the boats into the turquoise water. One young man collapsed on the beach, his feet swollen. A woman stepped on something sharp in the water and fell screeching in pain. Others washed their clothes in the waves to get out the vomit, urine and feces from the rugged journey.
The migrants were lined up and loaded onto trucks. They gripped the iron bars in the truck bed as they were driven along the highway. At each compound, the truck unloaded a group of migrants, like a school bus dropping off students. The migrants disappeared inside.
From time to time, Ethiopians escape their imprisonment or are released and stagger out of the desert into town.
Eman Idrees, 27, and her husband were held for eight months by an Ethiopian smuggler.
She recalled the savage beatings they endured, which left a scar on her shoulder; the smuggler received $700 to take her to Saudi Arabia, but wouldn’t let her go, because “he wanted me.”
Said, the gas station owner, is horrified by the evidence of torture he has seen, so he has made his station and a nearby mosque into a refuge for migrants. But locals say Said, too, profits from the trafficking, selling fuel for the smugglers’ boats and trucks. But that means the traffickers need him and leave him alone.
On a day when the AP team was visiting, several young men just out of a compound arrived at the gas station. They showed deep gashes in their arms from ropes that had bound them. One who had bruises from being lashed with a cable said the women imprisoned with him were all raped and that three men had died.
Another, Ibrahim Hassan, trembled as he showed how he was tied up in a ball, arms behind his back, knees bound against his chest. The 24-year-old said he was bound like that for 11 days and frequently beaten. His torturer, he said, was a fellow Ethiopian but from a rival ethnic group, Tigray, while he is Oromo.
Hassan said he was freed after his father went door to door in their hometown to borrow money and gather the $2,600 that the smugglers demanded.
“My family is extremely poor,” Hassan said, breaking down in tears. “My father is a farmer and I have five siblings.”
Starvation is another punishment used by the traffickers to wear down their victims.
At Ras al-Ara hospital, four men who looked like living skeletons sat on the floor, picking rice from a bowl with their thin fingers. Their bones protruded from their backs, their rib cages stood out sharply. With no fat on their bodies, they sat on rolled-up cloth because it was too painful to sit directly on bone. They had been imprisoned by traffickers for months, fed once a day with scraps of bread and a sip of water, they said.
One of them, 23-year-old Abdu Yassin, said he had agreed with smugglers in Ethiopia to pay around $600 for the trip through Yemen to the Saudi border. But when he landed at Ras al-Ara, he was brought to a compound with 71 others, and the traffickers demanded $1,600.
He cried as he described how he was held for five months and beaten constantly in different positions. He showed the marks from lashings on his back, the scars on his legs where they pressed hot steel into his skin. His finger was crooked after they smashed it with a rock, he said. One day, they tied his legs and dangled him upside down, “like a slaughtered sheep.”
But the worst was starvation.
“From hunger, my knees can’t carry my body,” he said. “I haven’t changed my clothes for six months. I haven’t washed. I have nothing.”
Near the four men, another emaciated man lay on a gurney, his stomach concave, his eyes open but unseeing. Nurses gave him fluids but he died several hours later.
The torment that leaves the young men and women physically and mentally shattered also leaves them stranded.
Zahra said she traveled to Yemen “because I wanted to change my life.”
She came from a broken home. She was a child when her parents divorced. Her mother disappeared, and her father — an engineer — remarried and wanted little to do with Zahra or her sisters. Zahra dropped out of school after the third grade. She worked for years in Djibouti as a servant, sending most of her earnings to her youngest sister back in Ethiopia.
Unable to save any money, she decided to try her luck elsewhere.
She spoke in a quiet voice as she described the torments she suffered at the compound.
“I couldn’t sleep at all throughout these days,” as she suffered from headaches, she said.
She and the other women were locked in three rooms of the hut, sleeping on the dirt floor, suffocating in the summer heat. They were constantly famished. Zahra suffered from rashes, diarrhea and vomiting.
One group tried to flee when they were allowed to wash at a well outside. The traffickers used dogs to hunt them down, brought them back and beat them.
“You can’t imagine,” Zahra said. “We could hear the screams.” After that, they could only wash at gunpoint.
Finally, early one morning, their captors opened the gates and told Zahra and some of the other women to leave. Apparently, the traffickers gave up on getting money out of them and wanted to make room for others.
Now Zahra lives in Basateen, a slum on the outskirts of southern Yemen’s main city, Aden, where she shares a room with three other women who also were tortured. .
Among them is a 17-year-old who fidgets with her hands and avoiding eye contact. She said she had been raped more times than she can count.
The first time was during the boat crossing from Djibouti, where she was packed in with more than 150 other migrants. Fearing the smugglers, no one dared raise a word of protest as the captain and his crew raped her and the other nine women on board during the eight-hour journey.
“I am speechless about what happened in the boat,” the 17-year-old said.
Upon landing, she and the others were taken to a compound, where again she was raped — every day for the next two weeks.
“We lived 15 days in pain,” she said.
Zahra said she’s worried she could be pregnant, and the 17-year old said she has pains in her abdomen and back she believes were caused by the rapes — but neither has money to go to a doctor.
Nor do they have money to continue their travels.
“I have nothing but the clothes on me,” the 17-year old said. She lost everything, including her only photos of her family.
Now, she is too afraid to even leave her room in Basateen.
“If we get out of here,” she said, “we don’t know what would happen to us.”
Basateen is filled with migrants living in squalid shacks. Some work, trying to earn enough to continue their journey.
Others, like Abdul-Rahman Taha, languish without hope.
The son of a dirt-poor farmer, Taha had heard stories of Ethiopians returning from Saudi Arabia with enough money to buy a car or build a house. So he sneaked away from home and began walking. When he reached Djibouti, he called home asking for $400 for smugglers to arrange his trip across Yemen. His father was angry but sold a bull and some goats and sent the money.
When Taha landed at Ras al-Ara, traffickers took him and 50 other migrants to a holding cell, lined them up and demanded phone numbers. Taha couldn’t ask his father for more money so he told them he didn’t have a number. Over the next days and weeks, he was beaten and left without food and water.
One night, he gave them a wrong number. The traffickers flew into a rage. One, a beefy, bearded Yemeni, beat Taha’s right leg to a bloody pulp with a steel rod. Taha passed out.
When he opened his eyes, he saw the sky. He was outdoors, lying on the ground. The traffickers had dumped him and three other migrants in the desert. Taha tried to jostle the others, but they didn’t move — they were dead.
A passing driver took him to a hospital. There, his leg was amputated.
Now 17, Taha is stranded. His father died in a car crash a few months ago, leaving Taha’s sister and four younger brothers to fend for themselves back home.
Taha choked back tears. In one of their phone calls, he remembered, his father had asked him: “Why did you leave?”
“Without work or money,” Taha told him, “life is unbearable.”
And so it is still.
▻https://apimagesblog.com/blog/migrants-endure-sea-crossing-to-yemen-and-disembark-in-hell
#réfugiés_éthiopiens #famine #mourir_de_faim #Oromo
The Disappeared report
The #Disappeared_report series is collaborative project between two Tucson-based organizations, La Coalicion de Derechos Humanos and No More Deaths. Between Derechos Humanos’ 20 years of community work, including the 24-hour Missing Migrant Crisis Line, and No More Deaths’ 12 years of humanitarian aid in the Arizona backcountry, we have witnessed and listened to thousands of stories of border crossings throughout Southern Arizona. Our research goals are transformative: to expose and combat those US government policing tactics that cause the crisis of death and mass disappearance in the borderlands.
#vidéos:
Partie 1: the chase
►https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7Ux__uVfNA
partie 2: interference with humanitarian aid
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnmOOnRALfI
ping @isskein
#Espagne : les migrants inconnus des cimetières du détroit de #Gibraltar
https://scd.infomigrants.net/media/resize/my_image_big/ef57e6b83926bf254393c3b682b9f2fc1d181ba3.jpeg 
Selon le décompte de plusieurs ONG andalouses, entre 6 700 et 8 000 personnes sont mortes en tentant la traversée de la mer Méditerranée entre le Maroc et l’Espagne, ces trois dernières décennies. Des tombes mais aussi des plaques à la mémoire de ces migrants morts en mer parsèment les cimetières qui bordent le détroit de Gibraltar.
De Tarifa, on aperçoit facilement les côtes marocaines. En ce mois de juin, le vent souffle avec sa force et sa régularité habituelle. Les voiles aux couleurs vives des kitesurf flottent dans un ciel d’un bleu intense.
La petite ville située tout au bout de la péninsule ibérique a des allures de station balnéaire. Mais ses habitués savent-ils que le vieux fort à l’entrée du port est un centre de détention pour les migrants entrés de façon irrégulière sur le territoire espagnol ? Qui sait que c’est sur la plage de Los Lances, à la pointe de la péninsule, qu’en novembre 1988 le premier corps d’un migrant marocain a été rejeté par la mer ?
Une visite au petit cimetière sur les hauteurs de la ville offre un autre regard sur Tarifa. Les sépultures sont simples, blanches, fleuries et se logent dans des niches, comme bien souvent en Andalousie. Un seau d’eau à la main, des habitants viennent enlever le sable et la poussière qui s’accumulent sur les tombes de leurs proches.
https://scd.infomigrants.net/media/resize/my_image_big/d0366fb6a8bac7f1ef1dc39c9424a5827dc5c684.jpeg En regardant vers les niches en hauteur, on découvre les tombes d’hommes et de femmes qui ont perdu la vie en traversant le détroit dans la clandestinité. « Immigrant du Maroc, 7 mars 2001 » : quatre plaques funéraires portent cette inscription. Un peu plus loin, deux autres portent la même mention mais sont datées de 2009. Enfin, une simple plaque déposée dans une niche porte une inscription encore plus administrative : « cadavre non identifié. 3ème chambre du tribunal d’Algésiras. Décision provisoire 47/2017 ».
En 2018, selon l’APDHA, 1064 personnes ont perdu la vie en tentant la courte mais périlleuse traversée vers l’Europe. La plupart de ces victimes sont rapidement identifiées, car, lorsque se produit un naufrage, les survivants connaissent souvent l’identité de ceux qui n’ont pas réussi à gagner le rivage. Mais il y a aussi les anonymes, ceux dont les corps sont alors enterrés sans noms, en Espagne.
En continuant la visite du cimetière de Tarifa, d’autres stèles attirent l’attention. Celles-ci portent des noms aux consonances peu espagnoles : Esther Adawale, Nigéria, 24 février 2003. Hope Ibrahim, Nigéria, 19 avril 2005. Yacouba Koné, Côte d’Ivoire, 17 avril 2013. Dans ces tombes reposent des migrants qui ont été identifiés par la police judiciaire espagnole mais qui, pour diverses raisons, n’ont pas été rapatriés vers leurs pays d’origine.
https://scd.infomigrants.net/media/resize/my_image_big/b7d9a8ae8339f09546aaa653509c20b06eab3538.jpeg José Maria Perez, un membre actif de la paroisse locale, raconte que ces tombes reçoivent les visites périodiques de « chrétiens et de musulmans » et que « de l’autre côté du détroit, on connaît l’existence de ces sépultures ».
Miguel Delgado, en charge de l’aide aux migrants à l’archevêché de Cadix (dont dépend la commune de Tarifa), organise, lui, chaque 1er Novembre une cérémonie œcuménique à la mémoire des immigrants morts dans les eaux du détroit.
Fidèle au message de l’église catholique sur le sujet des migrations, il réclame « un passage sûr pour ceux qui veulent émigrer en Europe et dont l’Europe a besoin ». Pour sensibiliser ses paroissiens et l’opinion publique, chaque deuxième mercredi du mois, dans plusieurs villes de part et d’autres du détroit (Cadix, Barbate, Tarifa, Algésiras, Ceuta, Tanger, Tétouan, Melila etc…) son association organise des « rondes du silence » qui réunissent des personnes de tous horizons derrière un seul mot d’ordre « solidarité avec les immigrants ».
Chaque année, pour la journée internationale des migrants, il se rend sur la plage de Tarifa pour une prière publique qui réunit militants, habitants et parfois quelques surfeurs.
A 25 kilomètres de Tarifa, dans le port de Barbate, l’apparition de corps de migrants sans vie sur les rivages n’est pas non plus inédite. Dans le cimetière, les mêmes tombes blanches nichées sur les murs révèlent les histoires des disparus du détroit.
Là aussi, des emplacements sont marqués par un simple numéro ou une mention « inconnu », ainsi qu’une date. Les plus anciennes de ces tombes de migrants anonymes datent de 2002, les plus récentes de 2019. Là encore, des corps non identifiés. Et une plaque à la mémoire « des victimes du détroit ».
Mais dans une des allées, une tombe se distingue des autres. Celle de Samuel Kabamba, un enfant originaire de la RD Congo âgé de 5 ans. Son histoire a provoqué une grande émotion dans cette région du sud de l’Espagne et bien au delà.
https://scd.infomigrants.net/media/resize/my_image_big/3fa9fa6a30ee71d3b7e2b483373cc6092d4f338a.jpeg Fin janvier 2017, son corps a été retrouvé sans vie sur une plage proche du petit port de pêche andalou. Celui de sa mère, Véronique, est rejeté par la mer 15 jours plus tard sur les côtes algériennes.
La découverte du corps du petit garçon a provoqué l’indignation des associations de défense des migrants et de Gabriel Delgado qui a organisé une veillée funèbre le 1er février sur la plage où il s’était échoué. Une centaine de personne sont venues prier et lancer des fleurs à la mer. L’affaire s’est médiatisée faisant écho à celle du petit Alan Kurdi, cet enfant syrien retrouvé noyé sur une plage de Turquie en septembre 2015.
Début mars, les autorités espagnoles ont autorisé le père du petit garçon à se rendre en Espagne. Un test d’ADN a confirmé que le petit Samuel était bien son fils. Le père de famille a organisé l’enterrement de son fils à Barbate, le 10 mars.
Ce jour-là, l’église était pleine à craquer. Les habitants de Barbate sont venus en nombre, le petit Samuel repose désormais parmi eux. Chaque jour, des femmes fleurissent sa tombe « car ses proches sont loin, il faut bien que quelqu’un s’occupe de lui » confie une vieille dame.
https://scd.infomigrants.net/media/resize/my_image_big/02d5a9ae5d410f1f6d455d2eeb02dd52bed3072b.jpeg
