False rumours about resettlement to Europe spur influx of migrants to Niger

TMP – 27/02/2018

Photo credit: Mehdi Chebil/France 24/ Portrait of a Sudanese refugee with her luggage in Agadez, February 3, 2018.

False rumours about a safe passage to Europe have drawn a large number of migrants to the city of Agadez in Niger, the website InfoMigrants has reported.

One such rumour states that the UNHCR is moving people indiscriminately from Agadez to Europe causing many African and Asian migrants to come to the desert country.

“There are refugees and migrants from all sorts of countries that now come to Agadez because they think there’s some brand of simplified procedure to apply for asylum,” said Agadez mayor Rhissa Feltou.
“I have been told by local authorities that among the recent surge in migrants in Agadez, there are many people from Afghanistan, people from Sudan, from Chad and many other nationalities,” locally-based DW journalist Tilla Amadou told InfoMigrants.

“There are some people of course who, when they read on the media that people are being resettled from Niger, assume that they can have the same thing,” UNHCR’s Louise Donovan says.

When asked where she thinks the rumours came from, Donovan explained that genuine information often gets distorted as it is passed on, until it starts to roll out of control.

“Basically, this is what happened: the UNHCR are doing an evacuation program called ETM, the Emergency Transit Mechanism, from Libya. This is for extremely vulnerable refugees who are trapped in detention centres in Libya. As part of this program, we’ve been trying out evacuation flights from there to Niger on a temporary basis to look for solutions,” Donovan says.

UNHCR has since November evacuated 1,084 highly vulnerable refugees, mainly from Eritrea, Somalia and Ethiopia out of Libya.
Locals in Agadez, are also feeling the strain of the recent upsurge of refugees and migrants in their city. Omar Kata, a local resident, told InfoMigrants that migrants arriving in Agadez are a “burden” for the impoverished city.

“There aren’t sufficient infrastructures in place for locals to begin with, such as hospitals and sanitary facilities. There just aren’t enough public services to begin with. Do you think there will be adequate infrastructures then to accommodate all these migrants?” Kata said.
Leonard Doyle, a spokesman for the International Organization for Migration (IOM) added that, “The vast majority of the people coming to Niger are economic migrants. They will be rejected. They have no hope of getting asylum.”