GUELMIM, Morocco, 15 October 2005 — A five-day airlift to repatriate hundreds of West Africans from Morocco in a crackdown on clandestine immigration ended in the north yesterday and foreign diplomats headed south to monitor a new one.
A last chartered flight by Royal Air Maroc took off carrying 102 Malians to Bamako from the airport of Oudja, an official in the district administrator’s office said, bringing to more than 1,600 the number of people flown to Senegal and Mali.
With that, attention has turned to Guelmim, another desert town around 1,000 kilometers away, as often destitute West Africans are brought or flocked here instead, not far from the Moroccan-annexed Western Sahara where convoys of buses dropped expellees early in the week.
Oudja, a generally placid town near the northwestern border with Algeria, had served as road transport hub, bureaucratic processing center and a last stop in Morocco for West Africans who abandoned any dream of escaping poverty and famine somehow to cross the Mediterranean into Europe.
The ambassadors of Senegal and Gambia came straight to Guelmim from Oudja yesterday, along with a diplomat from Mali, to participate in monitoring the next airlift and dealing with hundreds of their nationals. The airlifts are part of the North African kingdom’s response to a surge of violence in a permanent human drama of mainly West Africans who make dangerous treks in the hands of costly guides north across the vast Sahara desert, hoping often to get into Spain.
Senegal’s Ambassador Ibou Ibou Nidiaye said before leaving Oudja that 827 of his compatriots had been flown out and he was told 309 people who said they were Senegalese had gathered in Guelmim.
Morocco has come under fire from human rights bodies, aid organizations and a domestic charity that helps families of clandestine migrants once reports of brutality became TV footage and the security forces had dumped expellees in desert areas to fend for themselves. Ndiaye, however, said that “Morocco made an immense considerable financial and human effort to resolve this affair, which could have had drastic consequences.”
An armed separatist movement that wants self-determination for the Western Sahara, the Polisario Front, said yesterday through its new agency and envoy to Madrid, Abdullah Arabi, that Polisario fighters had rescued a group of 25 lost, starving and dehydrated people in an area strewn with Land mines.
