Harraga and Hittistes III

The coast of Annaba in Algeria, from where
  harraga try to reach France or Spain.

AnAnd even worse (see Harraga and Hittistes II).

Today's El Watan (an Algerian newspaper published in French) reports:

Des harraga âgés de 10 ans en Espagne

Several harraga (African immigrants who try to smuggle themselves into Europe by boat) were intercepted earlier this week by the Spanish authorities as they tried to flee across the Mediterranean on "un petit bateau pneumatique" - that is, a small rubber dinghy.  This time,  it was neither a woman nor a grandfather who was fleeing to the West for a "better life"... but five boys aged 10 and one aged 16. 

The children were found on board alone, with no adults accompanying them.

A smuggler in illegal immigrants tells his story

For well over a year now, on a number of different posts, Culturissima's David Winter has been drawing attention to the plight of Algeria's harragas, the young men - and increasingly women - who pay smugglers to ferry them across the Mediterranean to the "El Dorado" that is Europe. The following article has just appeared in the French press.


In spite of increased surveillance on the Spanish coast and around the islands off Italy, large numbers of young Algerians are still trying to cross the Mediterranean to reach the European Union - ensuring happy times for the smuggling industry in the Algerian town of Annaba, the hub of illegal immigration.

The coast off Annaba

At least one million dinars [£8, 500] is the gold mine reaped by a smuggler for each "crossing" or "consignment". The books are closed after three crossings per season at the rate of one crossing every two weeks. How is this "turn-over" achieved? What kind of logistics are called for?

We spent weeks trying to find out before being put in direct contact with a smuggler whom we are going to call "Ahmed". After several days of prevarication, our smuggler ended up by agreeing to meet in a restaurant situated at the end of Annaba's Rizzi Ameur beach, the headquarters of the smugglers' union. For nearly two hours, Ahmed explained to us the initial steps involved in organising a crossing.

They start by collecting details about the number of applicants so that they can narrow down what type of boat to buy, and whether to order it from an illegal workshop or to hire it from some off-shore fishermen. Once the boat has been supplied, it has to be painted black to avoid being intercepted by the coast-guards at night. The assignment to find the boat is entrusted to intermediaries who receive on average a sum of 1,000 to 1, 500 dinars [from £8.50 to £13]: a craft 7 metres long, able to take up to 20 people, costs a smuggler some 70,000 dinars [£600], as opposed to 40,000 dinars [£340] for a 5 metre boat with a capacity of 10 to 12 places.

For VIP applicants - known in the trade as fachafich - the smuggler, at the request of his clients,  will opt for a small boat with an outboard-motor, with the price varying between a million [£8,500] and one and a half million dinars [£12,750]. According to Ahmed, the motor-boat itself is either bought (following a levy on the VIP harragas) or stolen. Then they have to procure the outboard-motor through casual networks in the capital, Algiers. New,  and with a 10 HP motor,  it comes to 460,000 dinars [£3,900],  with a 5 HP and 7 HP costing respectively 150,000 [£1,300] and 200,000 dinars [£1,700]. 

The next step,  as outlined by Ahmed,  consists of acquiring a GPS and a compass - two pieces of equipment that are essential for the crossing - for which the smuggler will have to pay out the tidy sum of from 30,000 [£256] to 80,000 dinars [£685] for the former and 3,000 [£25] to 4,000 dinars [£35] for the latter. Twenty drums (each with a capacity of 20 litres) represents the amount of petrol necessary for the crossing,  as well as drum of oil. For this,  explains Ahmed,  recourse to an intermediary is absolutely necessary. To dispel any suspicion that might be aroused by buying so much petrol in a service station,  the smuggler calls on the help of the owners of high-powered cars,  often the sons of well known figures in Annaba,  with whom he enjoys "good" relations.

Rare are the smugglers who think to equip a boat with life-jackets: the harragas are deemed to be good swimmers,  Ahmed makes clear. Having gathered together all the logistical equipment,  negotiations are opened about the price of the trip,  that is to say with the "passengers" to be carried. These prices are fixed according to what the client looks like and where he comes from: the price per place can go from 40, 000 [£350] to 200,000 dinars [£1,700] for the applicants known as zawalia (the poor). The price applied to the most well off,  the VIP harragas or those hailing from other towns in Algeria,  varies between 150,000 [£1,300] and 200,000 dinars [£1,700].

Half of the sum is paid in advance a few days before departure. The balance is paid on D Day. "We demand that half the price is paid before departure so that we can settle all the preliminary expenses. The remainder is cashed in a few minutes before departure and is then entrusted to a member of the family who must be on the spot at the moment they leave. This money has to be held as security as there's always the risk that the relevant authorities might mean the operation has to be aborted",  emphasises Ahmed.

Questioned on the possible turn-over, Ahmed first of all refrained from replying then,  as we insisted,  finished up by letting slip the figure of one million dinars [£8,500] minimum per crossing,  at the rate of three or four shipments per season.  Sniffing this juicy bonanza,  numerous are those who have launched themselves into this new market. When this activity first started to emerge, in 2005,  it was under the control of only three individuals. Today,  their number has risen to more than a dozen in Annaba.

This article first appeared in the French journal Courrier International and was translated from the French by Culturissima's managing director, Dr David Winter.


Links to further harraga posts:

Harraga and Hittistes I
Harraga and Hittistes II
Harraga and Hittistes III

Harraga and Hittistes II

It gets worse (see Harraga and Hittistes I).

There are reports coming out of Algeria that towards the end of August the Algerian coast-guard intercepted two-dozen would-be clandestine escapees, known as harraga and the subject of my earlier post.

Nothing new in that, except to say that one of these 21st century "boat people" was a man aged 70.

Why should a man in his twilight years flee the only country that he has ever known for seven decades?

"I wanted to get to France"

"But why?"

"To see my five children who've been living there for years and years. I've asked (the Algerian authorities) so many times for a visa to visit them, but each time en vain".

Harraga and Hittistes I

When I was working in Algeria earlier this year, the big talking point in the street cafés of Annaba (in the north-east of the country) was that, for the first time, the body of a girl - a young girl, a girl with her whole life ahead of her - had been found washed up on the sea-shore near the former French city of Bône.

Corpses - bloated and anonymous - have become an increasingly common sight on the beaches of Algeria's Mediterranean coast over the past three or four years. The country has, on the whole, become resigned to the nightmarish phenomenon of young men, usually in their twenties but sometimes in their teens, so desperate to avoid the misery of their homeland that they flee their patria by any possible means.

And the most common means is to pay a faceless, moral-free "shark" to convey them across the Mediterranean to mainland Europe - on boats that, more often than not, are doomed never to reach their destination. 

It is hard for a western European to imagine such desperate hopelessness: would you do anything, absolutely anything, would you knowingly risk your life, for a "better future" that might involve - if you’re lucky - ending up ten to a room in some seedy Parisian hostel? Yet this is the El Dorado, the profane Mecca, not just for troops of young Algerians but also for many Libyans and Moroccans and, indeed, a sizeable slice of sub-Saharan Africa.

A few years ago, in the middle of the Sahara, I stumbled across a Nigerian man, little more than a boy, who was walking the length of the desert to reach Tripoli and, he hoped, eventually the southern shores of Italy. This young man wasn't, as I later learned, some rara avis. A Tuareg guide told me that earlier that year, as he was searching for firewood in the Akakus region of the Libyan Sahara, he had encountered the corpses of nearly fifty men, bleached and burned by the African sun, who, seeking shadow where there is none, had died of the hands of thirst.

So, to return to the cafes of Annaba: why was every Algerian seemingly talking about the unidentified girl washed up on the shore?  Quite simply because hers was the first female body that had ever been found. Up to that moment the harraga - literally "those who burn (their identity papers)" - had all been men seeking to avoid the life of the hittiste, "those who prop up the walls (because there's nothing else to do)". Now, for the first time, Algeria, this most patriarchal of countries, was having to wake up to the fact that life was as meaningless for its young brides-to-be as for its disenchanted manhood.
 
It begs the question: when will the Algerian government acknowledge the misery of its citizens? And when will we in the west have the desire to do something about these weekly mass migrations?

For hittistes, see this link, and for an evocative description of the desperation that drives young North Africans to desert their homeland, see Tahar Ben Jelloun's Partir.