Exodus of Africans a 'crisis'
2006-03-17 12:57
Nouakchott - African migrants desperate to escape the world's poorest continent are streaming through Mauritania in "unimaginable" numbers to embark on a perilous ocean voyage to Europe that has already killed hundreds, says the prime minister.
The exodus prompted a call for help from Mauritania on Thursday, and European leaders concerned about absorbing the immigrants already on their shores were eager to cooperate.
Mauritania's Red Crescent branch said more than 1 000 Africans - some driven by hope for jobs, others escaping their continent's many wars - had died for the past four months alone while trying to sail in small wooden boats from Mauritania to Spain's faraway Canary Islands.
3 900 migrants arrested
Prime Minister Sidi Mohamed Ould Boubacar - calling on the West to send planes, boats and vehicles so Mauritania could better patrol its borders - said on Thursday that authorities had arrested 3 900 migrants in 2005, but that 1 200 had already been detained this year, only 10 weeks old.
He said: "What is arriving is unimaginable." Boubacar appealed in particular to the European Union, the destination of most of the African migrants.
The appeal came at a time when Islamic terrorism and ethnic clashes in Europe had some Europeans questioning whether immigrants from the developing world could be transformed into citizens of the West.
Counterterrorism exercises
Counterterrorism experts also had expressed concern about militants establishing bases in ungoverned spaces like Mauritania's deserts.
Though that had yet to be established as a major threat in west or north Africa, last year the United States military conducted counterterrorism exercises with nine African armies, among them Mauritania's.
The EU's top justice and interior affairs official, Franco Frattini, said on Thursday that the EU stood ready to provided emergency aid to Mauritania to help it police its borders.
Frattini, speaking to reporters on the sidelines of a United Nations migration conference in Belgium, said he would also lay out new proposals for an emergency fund for quick responses in the coming weeks, as well as setting up European patrols in the Mediterranean to intercept illegal migrants.
Clashes claim 11 migrants
Mauritania did not offer the easiest route to Europe, but other countries just across the ocean from southern Europe had cracked down on would-be immigrants.
Last year, Africans who had traveled across the Sahara Desert stormed Spanish enclaves in northern Morocco. The September and October clashes left 11 migrants dead, some shot by security forces.
Mauritania's neighbours also had reportedly increased patrols along long-established trans-Sahara Desert trade routes, perhaps pressuring human traffickers to step up efforts to send their cargo by traditional wooden fishing canoe to Spain's Canary Islands - hundreds of kilometres across treacherous Atlantic waters from Mauritania.
- AP