Europe’s funding of "Human dumps" in the desert in the desert, and North African Countries Complicity in Abuse of Migrants

The investigation undertaken by the Washington Post and advocacy organizations examines the support and funding of the European Union and some of its member states for operations carried out by governments in North Africa, which involve detaining tens of thousands of migrants each year and placing them in remote areas, often in arid deserts.

Records and interviews uncovered by the investigation show that European funds have been used to train personnel and buy equipment for units involved in human rights abuses.

According to the joint investigation, migrants have been returned to the harshest areas of North Africa, abandoned without food or water, and faced other risks, including torture to death.

According to testimonies and documents, Spanish security forces in Mauritania photographed and reviewed lists of migrants before forcing them to Mali, and left them in the open for several days in an area where armed groups are active.

In Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia, vehicles collected black migrants from the streets and transported them, along with those in detention centres, to remote areas, according to verified footage and photos, along with testimonies from migrants and interviews with officials.

These vehicles are of a type and model that European countries have previously provided to local security forces in these countries. The European Union has provided more than €400 million to Tunisia, Morocco and Mauritania between 2015 and 2021, as part of the largest migration fund, the Emergency Trust Fund for Africa, an initiative to boost local economic growth and stop irregular migration.

To combat the wave of irregular migration last year, Europe moved to deepen its partnerships in North Africa, providing an additional €105 million to Tunisia.

Europe also signed an agreement last February with Mauritania, which includes granting it an additional 210 million euros. The investigation focuses on Tunisia, Morocco and Mauritania, three countries with deep ties to the EU.

The investigation is based on first-hand information from journalists, analysis of visual evidence, geospatial mapping, internal EU analysis with documents and interviews with 50 migrants “victims of desert dumps” as well as European and North African officials and other people familiar with the operations.

Like François, several migrants agreed to speak on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.

In Tunisia, visual evidence and testimonies were used to verify 11 human dumps, each holding up to 90 migrants in the desert, near the borders with Libya and Algeria, as well as one case in which migrants were handed over to Libyan militants.

At least 29 people were reportedly killed and dozens more missing after being dumped or expelled from Tunisia at the Libyan border, according to the UN Support Mission in Libya and humanitarian organizations.

The EU, under its own laws as well as international treaties, is obliged to ensure that its money is spent in ways that respect fundamental human rights.

But the European Commission has acknowledged that human rights assessments are not carried out when funding migrant management projects abroad.

A spokesperson for the European Commission said in a statement that migrant management aid to North African countries aims to combat human trafficking and “defend the rights” of migrants. The bloc seeks to monitor the programmes through spot check missions, monitoring teams and external evaluations, he added.

Records and interviews show that European funds have been used to train personnel and buy equipment for units involved in desert dumps and human rights abuses.

However, accountability for how the equipment and funding are used is often opaque, and senior European officials privately acknowledge that it is “impossible” to regulate all uses.

In comments to European lawmakers in January, EU Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson acknowledged reports of human dumping sites in the desert in at least one country, Tunisia.

Johansson said she could not confirm that the practice had stopped, but she categorically denied that the EU was “sponsoring” the mistreatment or deportation of migrants through financial support.

Senior officials in Tunisia, Morocco and Mauritania have also denied racial discrimination and dumping migrants in remote areas, insisting that migrants’ rights are respected.

Officials in Tunisia and Mauritania have said that some migrants have been sent back or deported across their countries’ arid borders.

“The truth is that European countries don’t want to have dirty hands, they don’t want to be accused of human rights violations, so they subcontract these violations to other countries. But I think, under international law, they are responsible,” said Marie-Laure Bassilien Gainche, a human rights and legal expert at Jean Moulin Lyon 3 University in France.

Analysts and former officials say the aim of the operations in North Africa is clear: deterrence. “You have to make life difficult for migrants,” said one contractor who worked on EU-funded projects.

“If a migrant from Guinea is in [one of these countries] and you take him to the desert twice, the third time he asks to be returned home voluntarily,” said the person, who asked not to be named to avoid jeopardizing future contracts.

The anti-migrant operations often involve random street raids or arrests based on racial discrimination, the investigation found, which has been acknowledged in the EU.

But the Moroccan interior ministry said in a statement that allegations of racial discrimination in the deportations of migrants were “baseless,” adding that the migrants were being transferred only to protect them from “trafficking networks” and to “increase protection.”

It added that European “technical support” for managing the migrant file was “minimal compared to the efforts and costs incurred by our country.”

The investigation revealed that the desert is an increasingly frequent and dangerous punishment for migrants who dare to cross the sea to Europe.

François, a 38-year-old Cameroonian, set off four times in overcrowded boats from the Tunisian coast, hoping to reach Europe. All four times, he was pushed back from the sea to land.

François says he witnessed migrants being thrown back on the deserted Algerian-Tunisian border three times, adding that he and his companions begged for bread and water, and sometimes received them.

He recounts that after being violently attacked in a village, they went out onto the road “in the middle of the desert, looking right and left, and seeing nothing.

Witness accounts and photos reviewed by the Washington Post speak of the presence of the Tunisian National Guard at the “(human) desert landfill operations center.”

In this regard, it is worth noting that between 2015 and 2023, the German Federal Police deployed 449 personnel and spent more than a million euros to train nearly 4,000 Tunisian National Guardsmen.

As the landfill operations continued in November 2023, a €9 million border management training center was opened in Tunisia, funded by Austria, Denmark and the Netherlands.

“I think Tunisia is not responsible for what is happening. The European Union does not like us. Why is a man from sub-Saharan Africa considered garbage?” François said.

Tunisian President Kais Saied recently acknowledged the existence of “ongoing coordination to return migrants to neighboring countries,” and confirmed that the Tunisian military is intervening to stop illegal immigration. He previously said, “Tunisia will not be a place for them, and Tunisia is working to prevent them from being a transit point.”

Tunisian tactics have led to a decline in numbers on the central Mediterranean route, which saw a 59% drop in arrivals in the first quarter of this year.

The Tunisian Foreign Ministry stressed in a statement that it supports the rights of migrants, only expelling them “voluntarily” and only then returning them to their countries of origin.

The ministry rejected all accounts in this investigation, presented by migrants against Tunisian security forces, describing them as inflammatory.

The ministry announced that it had carried out 2,718 operations during the first four months of this year, saying that it had “rescued” and “prevented” 21,545 migrants from crossing the sea to Europe, and stopped 21,462 others from “infiltrating Tunisian territory” by land.

The far-right Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, during a visit to Tunisia last April, said that this cooperation was achieving many results, praising Saied’s efforts.

In Mauritania, Spanish officials provided vehicles to transport migrants, assisted in maritime interceptions, “raided migrants and human traffickers, and funded new detention centers,” according to interviews with Mauritanian officials and Spanish promotional videos.

With Spanish complicity, Idiatou, 23, and Bella, 27, two friends from Guinea, were transferred in January to the Nouakchott migrant detention center, a cluster of heavily fenced buildings, after a failed attempt to cross by sea to Libya and then to Spain, according to the investigation.

The center became a collection point used by Mauritanian officials before transporting migrants to the remote border with Mali, often without food or water, according to interviews with detainees and aid workers.

A person familiar with Idiatou and Bella’s detention said that two Spanish police officials filmed the women while they were being held. According to the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, the officers also reviewed a list of prisoners who were later deported to Mali.

As with other migrants interviewed for this investigation, the women said they were denied due process.

In one interview, the women recalled seeing “white” officers, who Mauritanian officials told them were from the Spanish police, before they were taken to a deportation bus.

Reporters on the ground observed a white Toyota Coaster with tinted windows, following the deportation bus for 16 kilometers along the highway to Mali.

Many of the vehicles used by Mauritanian authorities to detain and deport migrants were purchased with Spanish money, according to a senior European official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Journalists photographed Toyota pickup trucks entering and exiting detention facilities, the same make and model of vehicles provided to Mauritania by the Spanish development agency and interior ministry.

A leaked European Commission document from 2023 said the commission interviewed more than 300 people who had been deported from Mauritania to Gogui in Mali.

The European Parliament document said asylum seekers and migrants in Mauritania face arbitrary mass expulsions to Senegal and Mali, and deportations without due process.

Asked for detailed comment, the Spanish interior ministry neither confirmed nor denied knowledge of the desert dumps, the use of Spanish-purchased vehicles in the operations, nor that its officers were in a detention centre documenting the forced deportations of migrants.

The ministry acknowledged that Spain had deployed a force of around 50 police and Civil Guard officers to Mauritania “to investigate and dismantle the human trafficking mafia.”

The ministry said the forces operate with “full respect for the human rights and freedoms” of migrants, and the Spanish development agency denied knowledge of human dumps, saying Spanish police officers working in its programmes in Mauritania “have never witnessed any behaviour by Mauritanian police that violates human rights”.

The agency said those officers also denied filming “any migrants in any centre”.

When asked about the Spanish police officers at the detention centre, Mauritanian government spokesman Nani Ould Chrouga said the bilateral agreement with Madrid “provides for a number of reciprocal obligations, including the exchange of information in the fight against illegal immigration while respecting the privacy of individuals and protecting their personal data”.

He said migrants trying to cross the sea to Europe are subject to deportation, but denied allegations that migrants in Mauritania were mistreated. He added that those deported are handed over to the “competent authorities” at “official border posts” before being transferred to their countries of origin.

He said migrants are only returned to their countries of origin.

But the two women from Guinea said Mauritanian forces abandoned their group in a desolate, uninhabited part of the border with Mali, then “chased” them towards the border “like animals” and walked for four days until they reached a village in Mali, where they eventually arranged a flight to a relative in Senegal. “If I had known all this was going to happen, I would not have tried to go to Europe. I swear I wouldn’t do it. Because we have suffered so much, we have nothing,” Bella said.

Some detained migrants suffer even worse fates. Moussa, a 39-year-old Cameroonian, recalls hiding in the desert sands with other black men on the Libyan-Tunisian border last November.

He says the sub-Saharan migrants were rounded up on the streets of Sfax, Tunisia, and forced into white Nissan trucks with the Tunisian National Police logo.

At a border guard post on an off-road road, Moussa said he saw Libyan militiamen hand a bag to a Tunisian official.

He guessed what his new Libyan captors would later confirm: “The migrants were sold.” Moussa’s cousin, a 20-year-old Cameroonian who was detained with him, confirmed his account.

The investigation also reviewed testimonies with similar allegations made by other migrants to MSF.

In Tunisia, security forces have at least 143 Nissan Navara pickup trucks provided by Italy and Germany between 2017 and 2023 “to combat human traffickers” or “fight illegal immigration and organized crime,” according to posts on those countries’ Facebook accounts.

Moussa and his cousin said they were forced, along with other migrants, into the same make and model of vehicle.

The Washington Post has verified several videos showing the same Nissans involved in other migrant detentions in Sfax.

Italian authorities declined to comment on the matter.

But the German Interior Ministry acknowledged knowledge of limited transfers of refugees and migrants to the Libyan-Tunisian and Algerian-Tunisian border areas in the summer of 2023.

It said Berlin had “repeatedly made clear to its Tunisian partners” that “the human rights of migrants must be respected,” describing the issue as “a normal topic of discussion.”

After being sold to plainclothes militiamen armed with automatic rifles, Moussa said he was taken to a small, dirt-floored prison at Libya’s Al-Assa site, about 56 kilometers (35 miles) south of the coastal border crossing at Ras Ajdir.

There, about 500 migrants were crammed in, and middlemen asked him to provide a phone number for his family in Cameroon, who were asked for ransom.

A guard boasted that Moussa and other migrants had been bought for 20 Tunisian dinars each, or just over $6, according to his account.

Moussa said they were fed once a day, jostling for the pasta they were given.

He said he and other migrants were beaten repeatedly, and speaking by video from a Libyan city, he showed scars on his feet.

To keep the migrants in line, his captors sometimes fired their weapons indiscriminately, he said.

Musa said he witnessed the deaths of three migrants who were wounded by stray bullets.

Musa was released after his mother paid $1,000 for his freedom, a story that her mother confirmed, saying it took her two months to raise the $1,000.

Musa said he was unable to shower while in captivity and came out with scabies and lice. After paying the ransom, he was transferred to a coastal Libyan city, where he now works odd jobs for different employers.

The Cameroonian said some of his employers brandished weapons after his work and then refused to pay him, adding that he lacked the means to leave Libya.

“What they are doing to us is still slavery,” he said. “They don’t respect human beings, they don’t respect African men.”