It took them two weeks to find all the bodies in the desert. What little remained was enough to traumatize the responders.
Almoustapha Alhacen, a man from a humanitarian organization in the nearby town of Arlit, Niger, described the scene to reporters: “They were dehydrated, decomposed. Some of them had been eaten by jackals. You couldn’t recognize them.” The migrants had fanned out from their broken-down vehicles in search of a well, making the recovery work slow. Alhacen’s team found groups of corpses spread all around.
“Some were lying under trees, others exposed to the sun. Sometimes we found a mother and her children. Some were children alone.”
Scattered among the dead—92 in total, almost all women and children—were scant details of the lives once lived. Tattered Qurans and small blackboards of the kind children use to copy verses… were these students and teachers? Would-be mendicants in the oil-rich cities of neighboring Algeria?
Dying in the attempt to become beggars—one possibility. Another: They could have been en route to Europe, like the 365 engulfed off the Italian island of Lampedusa when their boat capsized in October. It is impossible to say for sure. The desert destroyed too much of the story.
Still, some facts are certain.
These former humans were fleeing poverty of an intensity most of us cannot imagine. Niger ranks dead last on the United Nations Human Development Index, 80 percent of its population facing food insecurity. Nearly one in five Nigerien children is malnourished, in some regions one in two.
An estimated 80,000 people make the perilous journey through the Sahara each year, many of them climate refugees, all of them economic migrants.
Africa will be the hardest hit among all continents by climate change, despite being historically least responsible for the crisis. Rainfall in the Sahel has decreased by 25 percent in the last 30 years, and droughts have increased in severity and frequency. Crop yields will fall by as much as 22 percent by 2050.
In Niger, billboards advertise lotteries for food. Mobile phone companies raffle off sacks of grain as top prizes.
Shortages at the moment, however, are more of sympathy than of seed. Food is plentiful in many of Niger’s markets, but it is out of reach to ordinary people. Speculation on agricultural commodities since 2006 has been linked to price increases of up to 300 percent for some basic staples, a situation that United Nations Special Rapporteur Jean Ziegler has called “silent mass murder.”
In the United States, a single country whose emissions surpass that of the entire African continent, the murder of Africans (silent or loud) does not ever resonate much.
How many Americans know, for example, that their government has over the years invested millions in Niger, starting as part of the State Department’s Pan-Sahel Initiative? Not many, likely because these dollars are doing little to relieve the pain of Niger’s people, by some accounts the world’s most indigent. Mostly the point has been to end lives, not save them.
The amount of grain equivalent to a base of drones—a new one built in Niger earlier this year—is difficult to determine, because Pentagon budgets are notoriously opaque. They are also known for being large. (Probably a lot of sacks.)
Michael Shurkin, a former CIA analyst who took the revolving door to the RAND Corporation, told the New York Times that the new Air Force base in Niger is part of the U.S. response to “a security environment in Africa that is increasingly more complex and therefore more dangerous.”
Wherefrom this complexity-therefore-danger? Unlike the erased histories of those found in the desert, we know a fair amount about America’s recent past in Africa. And a single point is enough to start tracing the shape of the beast.
May 23, 2013: Arlit, the town in Niger that the migrants left behind, saw suicide car bombs explode at a French-operated uranium facility. Taking credit for the strike was an Algerian militant, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, groomed into violence during the U.S.-backed Afghan war against the Soviet Union. It was claimed retaliation for the joint U.S.-French intervention in Mali, whose state collapsed after a coup led by an American-trained officer. That coup was part of a trend: U.S.-trained armies have seized control in two other Sahel nations—including Niger—in the past eight years, trying and failing in one more (Chad, 2006).
Triggering the takeover in Mali was the prior U.S.-led bombing of Libya. Tuareg fighters once in Qaddafi’s service looted his weapons caches, crossed over into their native northern Mali and declared independence.
An even broader picture: In 2006, before the U.S.’s military’s latest global command in Africa—AFRICOM—was born, 11 African countries ranked among the Fund for Peace’s top 20 “Failed States.” That number is now 16.
It is easy enough to see these cycles of violence, to step back from the insanity in building more bases, emitting more carbon, speculating on more commodities… all at once, blind to the suffering of those who bear the burden.
But in the desert of compassion, Africans are invisible, and profits loom bright.
Prashanth Kamalakanthan is a Trinity senior. His column runs every other Wednesday. Send Prashanth a message on Twitter @pkinbrief.
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