Mauritania
Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania, lies sandwiched between the encroaching sands of the Sahara Desert and the Atlantic Ocean. It’s hot, dry, dusty, and prone to plagues. Swarms of locusts periodically blacken its skies, devouring leaves. Giant fruit bats—resembling foxes with wings—also descend upon the capital by the thousands, feasting on fruits such as dates.
On August 3, 2005, Mauritania’s President, Maaouya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya, was in Saudi Arabia attending the King’s funeral. While he was away, a group of renegade soldiers seized control of the country, announcing, “The armed forces and security forces have unanimously decided to put an end to the totalitarian practices of the deposed regime under which our people have suffered much over the last several years.”
Scott’s Story
At the time of the coup, I was negotiating a petroleum concession with Taya’s oil minister. When the coup leaders appointed a new minister, my employer sent me there to meet with him.
Planes flying into combat zones follow a safety protocol. My plane flew into Nouakchott under the cover of darkness. As it approached from the Atlantic Ocean, it turned off all of its lights, and we shut the window shades. The descent was steeper, too, making it harder for anyone to shoot at the plane. My stomach felt the same way it did on a descending roller coaster. This also made the landing faster and harder than usual. When the plane halted, the pilot told us that the plane’s right engine would run while passengers disembarked on the left side—citing this as “a requirement of its insurance company.”
My security detail met me on the runway. There were two vehicles, one of which was a lead that traveled a few blocks ahead. Its responsibility was to survey the route for any signs of danger, as occasional firefights continued in the streets. The lead vehicle could then radio my driver to adjust course and avoid the gunfire. But for the occasional patter of automatic rifles in the distance and the hurried movements of young boys with large guns, most citizens were continuing their day-to-day lives.
What I learned in Mauritania was that danger is easily avoidable, even in times of conflict. The fighting was not going on everywhere, all the time. It was comprised of sporadic, little battles, here and there. Danger was very time and place specific. Life went on, albeit more cautiously than usual.
Toward the end of my trip, I asked my bodyguard what was the strangest thing he had seen in Nouakchott.
“The city of the dead,” he said, without pausing.
“Is that a cemetery?” I asked.
“Yes and no,” he said. “You see, there are thousands of Africans trying to immigrate to Europe. They come up from the south, and then they reach the Sahara Desert here. Mostly men, they often underestimated how much it would cost, and for many of them, Nouakchott becomes the end of the line. They are broke or nearly so, and there is no work to be found for them here.”
“Can they turn around and go home?” I asked.
“Unfortunately, no,” said my bodyguard. “They don’t even have enough money to get back home.”
I was beginning to understand the picture.
“You have to see it to believe it,” he said. “I’ll drive you there.”
My bodyguard took me to the outskirts of the capital, where hundreds of West Africans were dispersed across an expanse of blowing sand. It was similar to a tent city, but the shelters were too flimsy to qualify as tents. We got out and walked along the edge of the encampment. Each resident had dug a hole in the soft sand, trying to find a way to cool down and escape the scorching Saharan sun. Most of them also had rigged a tattered shade over their hole in the ground, using what was left of their clothing.
A donkey cart pulled up beside me, carrying a big drum of water. Its driver jumped off and filled a bucket. After grabbing a ladle, he walked up and down the aisles of holes in the ground, selling drinks of water for a few coins to the few who still had enough left to afford one.
“The water comes from central storage facilities,” said my bodyguard, “which are filthy. Nouakchott has hundreds of donkey carts like this one that collect and disperse water through the slums. Médecins Sans Frontières is currently fighting a cholera epidemic that is being spread by the water haulers.
“The men who get cholera are the lucky ones,” he said. “They either die quickly, or maybe they get taken in and are fed by one of the hospitals or aid societies. The others are trapped. They don’t have enough money to make it to Europe. Nor enough to go back home. When they can no longer buy food and water, they just die in their holes.”
“What happens to their bodies?” I asked.
“A gravedigger from the city comes around. He deepens the dead man’s hole and then buries him there. His home becomes his grave.”
I looked across the masses but could not see any graves.
“Where are the buried?” I asked.
“The other side. These are the more recent arrivals. Newbies come camp here, gradually moving their little town further into the desert. The other side—closer to Nouakchott—is the cemetery. Like a sand dune, the refugee camp gradually crawls across the desert, leaving the dead and their refuse behind it.”
My bodyguard then drove around to the back side. It was perhaps a hundred yards of rolling sand, with little sticks here and there, some of which had tatters of cloth attached to them, blowing like flags in the wind. Where the cemetery met the camp, the men were hardly moving. They were just waiting for the end.
The plight of refugees pulls on the heart strings. The lucky ones make it to Europe or the United States, where they seek asylum status. I wondered, though, whether the welcoming of refugees was an example of good-intentioned harm. Over the last decade, at least thirty thousand African refugees have died in transit. Even that number was based on published accounts of deaths, mostly sinking boats. They were not counting the ones whose journeys ended in unmarked graves. Would these people have lost their lives had Europe not enticed them to leave?