Bruised and battered, nearly 100 failed migrants return home

A bullet wound to his knee after a clandestine attempt to enter Europe, Abdourahamane Fadiga is back in his native Guinea after a gruelling year in the desert, but thinks of little other than trying again. Fadiga was among 93 Guineans who arrived in the capital, Conakry, aboard a Moroccan airplane this week, deported from the North African country along with hundreds of other West Africans. His venture began in July 2004 and ended last week at the gateway to Europe - the barrier between Africa and Spain’s last enclaves on the continent in Morocco. “I was shot in the knee on the Spain side when I refused to get down off the wall,” Fadiga told IRIN. He had tried countless times over the year. He envisions trying to scale the wall again. “I can’t stay here,” the 28-year-old said. “There is no work.” Vast unemployment in Guinea is just one of the symptoms of the abject poverty that grips the country despite its mineral wealth. Guinea has a third of the world’s bauxite reserves, as well as gold, diamonds and iron ore. Ample rains mean a potential for robust agricultural production. Still, it is among the world’s 20 poorest countries, according to the UN human development index. A national study last year found that about 51 percent of the population lives under the poverty line. A 50-kilogramme sack of rice - the staple food - costs the equivalent of about half the average monthly salary of a government employee. “The impoverishment of the continent” is what drives Africans to try to reach Europe by any means, said former Malian president Alpha Oumar Konare at a recent meeting with European leaders in Brussels. Among those ready to take the most extreme risks in search of a better life have been Guineans, Fode Tankara, 15, and Yaguine Koita, 14, who died in 1999 trying to escape in the undercarriage of a plane from Conakry to Brussels. The problem of illegal immigration hit world headlines again this month when several young men were killed and injured trying to clear the wall to reach Melilla and Ceuta in Morocco. Humanitarian organisations condemned Moroccan authorities for depositing some of the illegal migrants in the vacant sands of the Sahara Desert with no food or water. Since then, Morocco has been filling Royal Air Maroc planes with would-be migrants and deporting them - in the past two weeks transporting more than 2,000 to the capitals of Mali, Senegal, Guinea and Cameroon. During their furtive stay in Morocco, constantly on the lookout for a chance to change continents, men and women suffered hardship they won’t soon forget - if they survived. Fadiga said he walked hundreds of kilometres in the desert, braving hunger and harsh weather, crossing several Moroccan towns before finding haven in a forest where nearly 1,000 men and women from his home country and nine other sub-Saharan African nations were living. “A young Nigerian woman, eight months pregnant, died,” Nabil Moussa Toure, also repatriated to Guinea, said. The latest expulsions from Morocco have been painful to watch for Mariama Konate, deputy director of Guinea’s humanitarian action service (SENA). “This breaks my heart, as a mother, to see our children deported in this way.” SENA, which is assisting deportees in getting from Conakry to their home villages, says at least two Guineans died in the desert and several are still languishing in Morocco. For Fadiga, the economic hardship at home outweighs the adversity that awaits in the North African desert. He adjusts the bandage on his wounded leg. “As soon as I’m healed, I plan to head back toward Europe.”