Assamaka: A long line of people appears in silhouette, walking along the flat desert in northern Niger.
The strong walkers are at the front. The weakest at the rear.
Every week hundreds more migrants thrown out of Algeria end up here in Assamaka, the first village on the Niger border.
More than 4,500 of them so far have washed up in this tiny windswept corner of the Sahara — Malians, Guineans and Ivorians mainly, but also Syrians and even Bangladeshis. They have marched across 15 km of wasteland only to enter a new purgatory.
A transit center run by the UN’s International Organization for Migration cannot cope with the numbers and only handles about a third of arrivals.
“When we got here we were told we were not recognized as migrants by the IOM and so we had to pay for our own transport to return home,” said Abdoul Karim Bambara from the Ivory Coast.
Assamaka’s water tanks are nearly dry, food rations insufficient and shelter from the cruel sun is in short supply.
In temperatures that can nudge 48 degrees Celsius (118 degrees Fahrenheit), thousands seek shade beneath walls or under tarpaulins.
The migrants say that they were stripped of their possessions in Algeria, the stepping-stone to a hoped-for new life in Europe.
They cannot afford to pay for travel home, or even to phone relatives. They are stranded in what is an open prison in the desert, sometimes for months.
Their numbers include talented and educated people — doctors, students and traders.
But around the barbed-wire walls of the IOM compound, individual traits are forgotten as an angry crowd of needy people forms, pushing and shoving in visceral despair.
“We have become like cattle,” said Herman, also from Ivory Coast.
Many of the migrants are physically ill, ravaged by scabies or suffering infected wounds. All are hungry.
“You saw that?” one man said, showing a lump of fly-infested sticky rice. “Would you eat that? We are falling sick from that.”
Off to the side, two groups of hungry men are throwing stones at each other amid a cloud of dust.
Fights are common. Days earlier, the death of a Cameroonian ignited a riot that was put down with tear gas. The IOM centre was ransacked by the protesters.
“We are all traumatised. People can no longer control themselves, they are losing their minds, there’s nothing here. People are dying,” raged Aboubacar Cherif Cisse from Sierra Leone. AFP
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