African migrants report torture, slavery in Algeria

Dozens of Africans migrants say they were sold for labour and trapped in slavery in Algeria in what aid agencies fear may be a widening trend of abusing migrants headed for a new life in Europe.

The tightly governed state has become a popular gateway to the Mediterranean since it became tougher to pass through Libya, where slavery, rape and torture are rife.

Amid a surge in anti-migrant sentiment, Algeria since late last year has sent thousands of migrants back over its southern border into Niger, according to the United Nations Migration Agency (IOM), where many tell stories of exploitation.

The scale of abuse is not known, but an IOM survey of thousands of migrants suggested it could rival Libya.

The Thomson Reuters Foundation heard detailed accounts of forced labour and slavery from an international charity and a local association in Agadez, Niger’s main migrant transit hub, and interviewed two of the victims by telephone.

The first time they sold me for 100,000 CFA francs ($170), said Ousmane Bah, a 21-year-old from Guinea who said he was sold twice in Algeria by unknown captors and worked in construction.

They took our passports. They hit us. We didn’t eat. We didn’t drink,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “I was a slave for six months.

Accounts of abuse are similar, said Abdoulaye Maizoumbou, a project coordinator for global charity Catholic Relief Services. Of about 30 migrants he met who were deported from Algeria, about 20 said they had been enslaved, he said.

In most cases, migrants said they were sold in and around the southern city of Tamanrasset shortly after entering the country, often by smugglers of their own nationality, he said.

Some said they were tortured in order to blackmail their parents into paying the captors, but even when the money arrived they were forced to work for no pay, or sold, said Maizoumbou.

One man told the Thomson Reuters Foundation he slept in a sheep pen and suffered beatings if an animal got sick or dirty.

They would bring out machetes and I would get on my knees and apologise and they would let it go, said Ogounidje Tange Mazu, from Togo.

The IOM in Algeria has received three reports this year from friends and relatives of African migrants held hostage and forced to work in the country. 

It’s probably just an indication that it is happening. How big it is we don’t know, said its chief of mission Pascal Reyntjens.

Reuters