Thursday April 03, 2025
Rosso, Senegal

By Soulé Dia

The scene continues to haunt Ismaïla Bangoura’s sleep: that night, as the young Guinean and his compatriots slept, Mauritanian police burst into their home in Nouakchott and beat them up, before taking them manu militari to the police station.
Ismaïla, 25, who came to Mauritania in 2024 to earn a living, was then deported with his comrades to neighboring Senegal after three days of detention without being able to eat or have access to toilets, recounts this carpenter by training.
“They beat us up and took us to prison without telling us anything” and ‘took everything we owned: money, watches, phones’, Ismaïla accuses, wearing a Guinea national soccer team jersey matched with black shorts, the ‘only clothes he has left’.
“They (then) handcuffed us and put us on overcrowded buses to deport us like scoundrels,” he recounts.
Since then, the group of men has been wandering the streets of Rosso in northern Senegal, with no precise destination and no acquaintances in this remote part of the country.

For several weeks now, Mauritania has been carrying out a campaign of expulsions of migrants from Senegal, Mali, Côte d’Ivoire and Guinea, prompting fierce criticism in the region.
-Inhumane expulsions”-
Mauritania, a predominantly desert country in West Africa on the Atlantic coast, is a departure point for many migrants from all over the continent attempting to reach Europe by sea.
According to the Mauritanian authorities, expulsions of migrants are “routine” operations aimed at people in an irregular situation, but no figures were given on the scale of these refoulements.
None of the migrants interviewed by AFP claimed to want to set sail.
NGOs denounced the expulsions as “inhumane”, and the Senegalese government said it was “outraged” by the treatment its nationals were subjected to.
The expulsions are “carried out in compliance with international conventions”, explained Mauritania’s Minister of the Interior, Mohamed Ahmed Ould Mohamed Lemine, to the press.
According to the government, migrants are returned to the border posts through which they entered the country.
A few meters from the Rosso border post, around thirty migrants, mostly Guineans including women and children, squatted in a narrow, dilapidated building strewn with garbage, each trying to make their own little space.
“To get a place to sleep at night, you have to settle in quickly,” says Abibou. And the rest? “They sleep on the streets,” he assures us.
The luckiest ones end up on Red Cross premises, where they are taken care of. But according to Mbaye Diop, president of the organization’s local committee in Rosso, the influx of migrants over the past few days has been such that they no longer have room to accommodate them all.
“Those who come here generally arrive very tired. They’re hungry and need a shower, but some also need psychological assistance,” says Mr. Diop.
On this afternoon, some migrants, lying on old mats, try to doze off, despite the noise and comings and goings of their makeshift comrades. Others remain huddled in a corner, staring into space.
– On the banks of the Senegal River –
“We’re hungry. We haven’t eaten anything since this morning”, some complain, while others get restless, saying they want to go home.
Amid the hustle and bustle, Ramatoulaye Camara tries to cradle her child. Deported at the beginning of March, the young woman claims to have been subjected to violence by Mauritanian guards, despite her advanced pregnancy.

Like many migrants, she recounts being beaten, imprisoned and robbed of all her luggage. “We’ve suffered a lot,” she says, as her child cries.
Idrissa Camara, 33, had been working as a carpenter in Nouakchott since 2018, wearing a gray-yellow overalls and safety shoes. On March 16, he was stopped and turned back while he was working. Since then, he’s been hanging around in the same outfit, the only possession he has left.
“It’s been so dirty and smelly for the last few days, I had to go and wash it in the river. I had to stand next to it in my shorts until it dried,” he says.
Married with two children, Idrissa says he is keeping his deportation a secret from his family so as not to “traumatize” them.
“All I want to do is work and provide for my family. I haven’t hurt anyone,” he says, assuring us that he wants to return to his activities in Nouakchott.

Humaniterre with AFP