EU patrols cut into migrant armada off West Africa
21 Sep 2006 16:00:12 GMT
Source: Reuters
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 By Pascal Fletcher and Nick Tattersall

DAKAR/BANJUL, Sept 21 (Reuters) - European Union patrols are harrying the
armada of illegal migrants from West Africa, intercepting dozens a day and
forcing them to shift departures further down the Atlantic coast,
officials said on Thursday.

As interceptions by Spanish and Italian aircraft and patrol boats increase
in Senegal's waters, more and more migrants are trying to sneak off
further south from the mangrove-lined river deltas and islets of Gambia
and Guinea-Bissau. Since Sept. 7, Senegalese, Spanish and Italian security
forces have been conducting joint sea, air and land patrols, meshing with
similar EU-coordinated operations already under way since August around
Mauritania and Cape Verde.

Officials said these patrols had started to make some headway in
disrupting the flotilla of flimsy open boats which has been ferrying
record numbers of sub-Saharan Africans -- more than 24,000 so far this
year -- to the Spanish Canary Islands.

"We have patrol vessels and aircraft out in the seas and skies every day,"
said Lt.-Col. Alioune Ndiaye, a Senegalese police officer who acts as
spokesman for the Senegal operation of the EU's new border agency Frontex.

Spain's Civil Guard said that since the start of the Frontex patrols off
West Africa last month, 40 craft carrying 2,379 would be migrants heading
for Spain had been intercepted.

Migrant smugglers, denounced by U.N. crime experts as ruthless traffickers
of humans they treat as disposable goods, were now moving to more
southernly countries like Gambia, the tiny state that pokes like a crooked
finger into Senegal.

"Instead of leaving Senegal, more and more migrants are now departing from
further down the coast, from Gambia and Guinea-Bissau," Ndiaye said.

In the Gambian capital Banjul, police said more than 100 migrants and
smugglers had been arrested since August.

"A greater number have left or are still leaving. ... It's a matter we're
struggling with. The magnitude is very alarming," police spokesman
Superintendent Aziz Bojang told Reuters.

"Gambia has very porous land borders. It has virtually no capability to
police the seas around it," the British High Commissioner in Banjul, Eric
Jenkinson, said.

DREAM OF JOB ABROAD

Illegal migrants -- mostly young African men desperately fleeing poverty
and unemployment in their own countries in search of a better life in
wealthy "fortress Europe" -- have become a sensitive political issue in
both Spain and Senegal.

Despite the coordinated crackdown, they keep on coming.

In the run-down Tobacco Road neighbourhood of Banjul, a maze of low-rise
concrete shacks with "Burn all cops" scribbled on one wall, many young men
dream of making money abroad.

"Everybody here wants to travel," said Sulayman Balajo, 19, who has
relatives in Britain and in the United States.

Off Senegal, an Italian reconnaissance plane and a Spanish helicopter act
as spotters in the sky, while Senegalese and European patrol vessels zero
in on the brightly painted wooden fishing boats, known as "pirogues", that
carry the migrants.

Ndiaye said the patrols on Wednesday netted a large "pirogue" off Dakar
carrying some 130 Africans, mostly Gambians. The day before, they cornered
another pirogue carrying 67.

The Frontex operation involves 14 boats, two planes, two helicopters and
crew from Spain, Italy and Portugal patrolling the waters off Mauritania,
Senegal and the Canary Islands.

Sulayman Barry, 28, a Gambian market trader, had planned to leave with a
Senegalese smuggling network. "The boat was too small. When I saw it, I
decided not to risk my life," he said.

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