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Migrants told to ditch ID papers
06/09/2006 09:07 - (SA)
Dakar - As Spain struggles to halt an armada of illegal African immigrants coming ashore in the Canary Islands, one Senegalese website offers free advice to would-be migrants; take a life jacket, but ditch your identity papers.
In what it called a "D-Day package" to reach Europe, the site recommended that Senegalese club together to buy boats big enough to take 50 people and outboard motors to make the trip.
It said: "You don't have to be a sophisticated military strategist", adding that the Canaries - more than 1 000km to the north - was the closest and easiest landing for aspiring migrants from Senegal and the rest of West Africa.
Despite European-African summits on migration and desperate Spanish diplomatic moves to tackle the problem, the numbers of young Senegalese setting off for the Canaries in flimsy fishing boats to seek a better life in Europe had risen sharply.
Hundreds drown, die of hunger
The tally of illegal Sub-Saharan Africans coming ashore in the Canaries had soared to unprecedented levels - more than 21 000 so far this year, more than five times the 2005 total - touching off a political storm about immigration in Spain.
Hundreds drowned or died of hunger, thirst and exposure as their flimsy vessels lost their way or capsised in the Atlantic.
Laurent de Boeck of the Geneva-based International Organisation for Migration (IOM) said: "The more we talk about it, the more people arrive."
He said that despite frantic Spanish efforts to put together joint patrols of European Union vessels and aircraft off the West African coast, it was simply impossible to stem the exodus without a longer-term co-ordinated international strategy.
De Boeck, who helped cover West and Central Africa for the IOM from Dakar, said: "It's a huge machinery to put in place."
African governments 'failing'
Spain, in the frontline of Europe's fight to curb clandestine migration, had lost patience with what it saw as a poor response from African countries to its pleas for help.
In Madrid's toughest comments yet, Spain's deputy prime minister Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega on Monday accused African governments of failing to fulfil agreements pledging to combat illegal migration.
She said everyone arriving in Spain illegally would eventually be made to leave.
But, such threats made little impression on young Senegalese desperate to sneak into Europe to find work and send money home to their families, who gained pride and even social standing in having a breadwinner overseas.
Despite the risks, families in local coastal communities admitted to pooling funds to send their sons on the risky trip.
The IOM's De Boeck said he believed social peer pressure, as much as poverty, was contributing to the migrant exodus.
He said: "Mothers are pushing their kids to leave ... it's an honour thing to have a son abroad and sending back money."
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