The Unstoppable Migrant March : Solution? Expulsion, Abandonment

"Women were lying dead, men .... Other people got missing in the desert because they didn't know the way."
"Everybody was just on their own. I lost my son, my child."
Janet Kamara, Liberian migrant, Niger

Janet Kamara, from Liberia, was expelled from Algeria and left stranded in the Sahara while pregnant. Her baby did not make it.Al   AP Photo/Jerome Delay

"There were people who couldn't take it. They sat down and we left them. They were suffering too much."
"They [Algerian military] tossed us into the desert, without our telephones, without money."
Aliou Kande, 18, Senegalese migrant

"You're facing deportation in Algeria -- there is no mercy. I want to expose them now... We are here, and we saw what they did."
"And we got proof [phone videos of the process of directing migrants to cross the desert on foot, no food, no water, no directions]."
Ju Dennis, Liberian migrant, filming deportation

"They come by the thousands. This time the expulsions that I'm seeing, I've never seen anything like it."
"It's a catastrophe."
Alhoussan Adouwal, IOM (International Organization for Migration) official, Assamaka, Algeria

In this Tuesday, May 8, 2018 photo provided by Liberian migrant Ju Dennis, Algerian gendarmes carrying AK-47 assault rifles load migrants onto trucks to drop them off near the Niger border. Dennis filmed his deportation with a cell phone he kept hidden.   AP Photo/Ju Dennis

The flood of African migrants appears unstoppable. By word of mouth alone there is little doubt that those setting out to leave their places of origin are aware their presence in other countries where they hope to find sanctuary from the oppression, poverty, corruption, violence and conflict they have been subjected to, will be anything but welcome. Even those villages where they cross borders whose residents' compassion has been stirred to give aid, soon find they are suffocating with the presence of strangers whose needs consume their paltry resources and resentment soon sets in.

The desperately vulnerable men, women and children of Africa are setting out resolutely to find an elusive future of opportunity for themselves and their children. On the way they find indifference and resistance to their presence in neighbouring African countries so they dream of somehow making their way through to Europe, already saturated with the presence of other, earlier migrants and refugees calling upon humanitarian impulse to come to their aid. The generosity of strangers has its limits and those limits are reached when hardship is imposed through sheer strength of numbers.

Algeria now stands charged by the world community of deliberately abandoning over 13,000 people in the great heated, hostile environment of the Sahara Desert, left there to fend for themselves in search of haven and ultimately security. Over a fourteen-month period, men, women -- including those pregnant -- and children have been expelled and left without food or water, forced to trek, occasionally at gunpoint, under a pitiless sun. By the hundreds they march listlessly, attempting to escape the vastness of the overheated desert where death looms large under temperatures up to 45C.

The desolation is mind-numbing, and not all those who set out are sufficiently physically fit to reach safety. Hungry, thirsty, burning from the atmospheric conditions, they head for Niger to the border village of Assamaka. For some, a rescue team representing the UN, relieves their march; if they can be found before they perish, but still thousands have. The European Union, in desperation to solve the dilemma of the unwanted arrivals of millions of migrants, has pressured North African countries to counter migrants heading for Europe via Libya and the Mediterranean or breaching the barrier fences with Spain.

Nigerians and third-country migrants head toward Libya from Agadez, Niger, on June 4. (Jerome Delay/Associated Press)

Algeria has responded by expelling their migrants, scooping them up by the hundreds, loading them on trucks and driving them for hours to a central point in the Sahara where they are released to find their way to Niger. Some simply head back toward Algeria. Some will never reach any destination beyond death. According to the International Organization for Migration, the march survivors total 11,276 men, women and children. Another 2,500 accounted for entry on their desert trek to Mali. It is unknown how many altogether simply succumbed to conditions not conducive to human survival.

In the group of a thousand people wandering the Sahara that included Aliou Kande from Senegal, he reported the trek from 8:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. seeing a dozen people collapse in the sand, surrendering to weariness, hunger, thirst. They are among the 'missing' never to be seen again. One man, Ju Dennis, hid his cellphone from the military which had removed them from peoples' possession so they would have no means of communication. Dennis filmed the deportation process, those being expelled and the armed gendarmes.

The IOM estimates that of the tens of thousands who have died crossing the Mediterranean, twice as many may have found their death in the vast Sahara desert. Their figure is upwards of 30,000 dying in the desert since 2014.  Adouwal with the IOM stationed himself in Assamaka from where he alerts his organization at the arrival of new groups out of the desert, at which time rescuers fan out to look for those remaining in the desert. An IOM bus takes them to the town of Arlit, six hours to the south, then on to Agadez, the city in Niger known as a crossroad for African trade and migration.

From there, the migrants will ultimately be returned to their home countries on flights sponsored by the IOM. And as they return south they come across others making the trip north toward Algeria and Europe. Like clockwork each Monday evening, pickups crammed with hopeful migrants pass through a city checkpoint, the migrants carrying water and walking sticks, determined to reach their future.

Migrants from across sub-Saharan African - Mali, the Gambia, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Niger and more - are part of the mass migration toward Europe, some fleeing violence, others just hoping to make a living. (Jerome Delay/Associated Press)