Clandestine emigration: a tragedy

Péncoo, the newspaper of the Union of African Workers of Senegal (RTA/S), published this editorial in September. It was translated from the French by G. Dunkel of Workers World.

Today, the phenomenon of clandestine immigration in the form of “boat people” fills the news. However, this phenomenon didn’t arise recently. For more than a year, young Africans, a considerable number of them Senegalese, have taken to the seas on rickety boats, canoes and other flimsy craft to reach the shores of Europe.

It’s estimated that 17,000 young Africans have attempted this adventure since the beginning of the year. How many have drowned no one knows.

Regularly, on certain Senegalese beaches, lifeless bodies are thrown up by the sea. The pictures in the media are unbearable. They recall the horrible period of slavery and the slave ships that transported millions of Africans to the Americas and Europe against their will.

Today, it is misery and despair that chase young Africans from their continent. Here is the paradox: Africa is full of natural riches—from the soil, under the soil and in the sea. But unfortunately all these riches are systematically pillaged by Western countries and their multinationals through cooperative agreements in which one side gets all the benefits. This is how rich countries exploit poor countries in a frightful fashion.

What this means is that poverty is constructed by an unequal system based on unjust relations. It is not a divine curse.

The sole objective of these youths is to leave the hell that their countries represent for them in a risky attempt to reach more hospitable locations. Their own countries have become shipwrecked. What is more legitimate, more human than to look for a safe haven, wherever it is? And emigration, for them, represents this safe haven.

Whatever measures [French Interior Minister Nicolas] Sarkozy (1) takes, whatever decisions come from the European Union in complicity with the heads of state in Africa, nothing can stop this human movement of self-preservation, which is what emigration has become.

In Senegal, [President Abdoulaye] Wade and his government push “REVA” (2) to keep the youth working the land.

Peasants have enormous problems with their production. The whole process of peanut production is undergoing progressive extinction. Peasants have difficulty in selling their grain and getting paid what they are owed. Those cultivating rice, onions or tomatoes likewise have difficulty in selling their products and are faced with the removal of tariff barriers that had kept Western products out of their markets.

Given this, how can we seriously believe that this plan, which does not help the peasants maintain themselves, can succeed in the bet to draw young people back to the countryside?

The only long-lasting solution to the permanent tragedy in which our youth live is to tackle this basic problem at its source: stop the pillage of African countries so that the riches and resources of the continent remain in African countries, and at the same time stop the pillage of these resources by the governments in place.

Translator’s notes:

(1) Sarkozy is notorious for helping provoke rebellions in the working-class suburbs of France’s cities last fall with racist remarks about immigrants and their descendants.

(2) REVA is a plan encouraging a return to farming, but without defending the local producers. Wade signed an agreement with Sarkozy Sept. 23 allowing France to send home any Senegalese without papers and agreeing that Senegal will now accept the deportees without requiring France to obtain consular permission.