Flugten mod en ny og bedre fremtid kan også gå mod syd, nemlig fra Østafrika til Sydafrika, men vejen er lang og tornet og menneskesmuglere udsætter ofte deres last af dyrt betalende og håbefulde vandrearbejdere for pinsler – og død.
JOHANNESBURG, 11 July 2012 (IRIN): When Abdo Giro (ikke hans rigtige navn), a 55-year-old evangelist minister and political dissident from southern Ethiopia, paid smugglers 55.000 birr (3.095 US dollar) to take him from the Kenyan border town of Moyale to Johannesburg in South Africa, he was completely unprepared for the ordeal that lay ahead.
“It was totally different from what they promised me,” he told IRIN, speaking through a translator.
Instead of the promised “nice car”, he was lucky to end up in a packed mini-bus for the first leg of the journey through Kenya and Tanzania. The other half of his group of 76 fellow Ethiopians were hidden in a load of wood in the back of a pick-up truck.
The two vehicles took rough back roads and travelled mainly at night to avoid detection. When they encoun-tered police, a bribe was paid and they were allowed to continue.
Before they reached the border with Malawi, Giro’s smugglers unloaded the migrants in an area of bush and left them there for five days without food or water while they checked the route ahead.
“We shared the little water we had and ate leaves. Many of us got sick from the heat and malaria; four people died while we were there”, recalled Giro.
While Giro was hiding in the bush, another group of Ethiopian migrants using a different smuggler were attempting to cross Lake Malawi. When their overloaded boat capsized, 47 of the migrants drowned.
A week later, while Giro was struggling to breathe in the back of a packed truck travelling through Mozambique, 42 Ethiopian migrants suffocated (kvalt) to death in another truck travelling through central Tanzania.
The driver dumped the dead bodies on the side of the road along with 85 survivors and drove on.
There were no deaths in the vehicle that Giro was travelling in, but 16 of his group who were travelling in the vehicle loaded with wood died during the journey.
“I sometimes do not sleep thinking about [them]. There should be more laws to punish such inhumane individuals”, he said.
Hidden trade
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http://www.irinnews.org/Report/95845/MIGRATION-Human-smugglers-profit-as-tragedies-multiply
