Conakry, Guinea

It has been nine months since Mariam Soumah, a 23-year-old Guinean woman, says she last saw her little girl Sabina. The mother is in Guinea, West Africa, but her daughter is, against her will, in an orphanage in Belarus.

The young migrant was deported without her baby a few months ago from this country located between Russia and the EU, according to her account and human rights NGOs following the case.

Her case has been denounced by the UN, NGOs, and Guinean diplomats.

“I begged them not to do it,” Mariam Soumah laments during an interview in Conakry, where she is staying with relatives.

She scrolls through photos of Sabina, who celebrated her first birthday in November, on her phone.

Wanting to flee Guinea, where more than half of the population lives below the poverty line according to the World Bank, Mariam, who was living off odd jobs in Conakry, chose to go to Belarus in the hope of then reaching the European Union. This is an increasingly popular route.

The EU accuses President Alexander Lukashenko’s regime of encouraging migrants to follow this route to increase pressure on the 27 member states, against a backdrop of confrontation between Minsk, an ally of Moscow, and the West.

Like many others, Mariam was persuaded via the internet to come to Belarus on a student visa

“I didn’t want to go illegally (to Europe) by sea. I looked at a map and saw that Belarus was surrounded by Schengen countries,” she explains.

– 600 grams –

Her ordeal began when, already in Belarus, she tried to renew her visa. Pregnant by a Guinean man who had also left to join the EU, Mariam gave birth two months before her due date.

Her daughter, Sabina, weighed only 600 grams at birth in November 2024. She was rushed to intensive care, where Belarusian doctors managed to save her.

But shortly afterwards, Mariam was forbidden from seeing her child unless she paid expensive medical fees. She was later imprisoned for exceeding the validity period of her visa. Finally, she was forced to board a plane without her daughter.

“I said I would only leave with my baby. I begged them: ‘Let my baby recover and I will go home with her’. They refused,” she said.

Since her deportation in August 2024, Mariam has been allowed to make two brief video calls to see Sabina, who is being kept in an orphanage in Minsk.

UN experts have described this forced separation as “extremely worrying,” and the Guinean embassy in Moscow, which oversees Belarus, said it was monitoring the case and had requested “clarification.”

When contacted by AFP, the Belarusian authorities did not respond.

– “How is my baby?” –

Attempts to prevent Mariam from seeing Sabina began while she was recovering from an emergency C-section.

“At the hospital, I asked, ‘How is my baby?’ and was told that she was sick and tired,” she says, knowing only that Sabina had been transferred to another hospital.

She searched Minsk for ten days before finding the hospital where her daughter was being treated, visiting her every day.

Sabina was eventually transferred to a third hospital. Mariam received a medical bill for around €28,000, and the hospital staff refused to let her see her daughter until she had paid.

“I kept coming back, and they kept saying she was asleep (…) or that she had gone out with the nurses,” says the young mother.

Last summer, a woman at the hospital finally revealed to the mother that Sabina was going to be sent to an orphanage.

At the same time, Mariam, herself an orphan, was trying to enroll in other studies to renew her visa, but her application was rejected.

In July 2025, she says she was imprisoned for violating immigration rules.

“They simply separated the mother and child,” denounces Enira Bronitskaya, an activist in exile who works for Human Constanta, an organization defending the rights of migrants in Belarus

“Threatening not to return her child is, of course, illegal” without an official decision to terminate her parental rights, according to Ms. Bronitskaya.

In prison, immigration officials tried to convince Mariam to find a family member who could pay for her return ticket, which she refused to do without her child.

Then, one day, she was handcuffed and taken to the airport for a flight to Istanbul, with instructions not to return. In Turkey, Mariam called the woman who had raised her in Guinea.

“I’m coming. But I have nothing, not even my child,” she told her, sobbing.

Humaniterre with AFP