AFRICA REPORT: MOROCCO INCREASES JAIL TERM OF MIGRANTS
The number of documented migrants within and from the African region has nearly doubled since 2010, continuing a two-decade trend of expansion. African migration is being driven by a varied combination of push-pull factors for each country. The primary push factors are conflict, repressive governance, and limited economic opportunities. Nine of the top 15 African countries of origin for migrants are in conflict. North Africans make up the majority of African immigrants to Europe. The top three—Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia—comprise over 5 million of the 11 million African migrants in Europe. This underscores the importance of proximity, established diasporas, and economic opportunity as key “pull” factors influencing migration decision making.
Surveys of African migrants in or heading toward Europe reveal that the majority were either employed or in school at the time of their departure. Yet, they felt despair over their economic prospects. Tunisians fleeing economic pressures, for example, comprised more than a quarter of the irregular migrants intercepted crossing the Mediterranean to Italy in 2021. We will just take a look at 3 top Countries in west Africa with high population of Migrants.
- LRC ,/Southern Cameroons-AMBAZONIA
Violence and insecurity have uprooted thousands of people. Cameroons now hosts around 486,000 refugees and asylum seekers. Cameroon is affected by 3 simultaneous and complex humanitarian crises:
(i) in the country’s Far North (close to Lake Chad and Nigeria),
(ii) in the Northwest and Southwest regions (where armed groups are fighting the government), and
(iii) in the neighbouring Central African Republic.
Violence and insecurity have uprooted thousands of people. Cameroon now hosts around 486,000 refugees and asylum seekers.
All 3 humanitarian emergencies also affect host communities, which share their already scarce resources and strained basic services with those who are displaced. The COVID-19 pandemic has further increased humanitarian needs and strained an already fragile health system.
What are the needs?
Some 3.9 million people require humanitarian assistance. Humanitarian access remains a major challenge due to administrative hurdles, insecurity brought about by armed actors, damaged road infrastructures, and COVID-19 mitigation measures.
What caused this needs, the senseless war did.
The conflict has driven over 598,000people out of their homes within Cameroon and 79,000 Cameroonians have sought refuge in neighbouring Nigeria. The spillover from this crisis affects the neighbouring West and Littoral regions in Cameroon. Since 2013, sectarian violence in the Central African Republic has resulted in a massive influx of refugees in Cameroon’s East region, already chronically vulnerable. There are currently around 348,000 Central African refugees in Cameroon. Most of them live in local communities, adding pressure on access to basic services and local resources.
The conflict in northeast Nigeria still affects Cameroon’s Far North region, with killings of civilians, villages being randomly looted or burnt, cattle being stolen and kidnappings. Cameroon hosts over 135,000 Nigerian refugees. Around 378,000 Cameroonians have fled their homes in the region. Farmers are insecure, families are at risk of food shortages, women and girls are exposed to sexual and gender-based violence and healthcare services are reduced to a minimum.
- NIGERIA
The inability of the labor market to provide employment leaves the youth no option but to leave Nigeria. As a result, children become vulnerable to human trafficking. Dissatisfaction with the socio-economic conditions of the country, along with high unemployment rates, has increased emigration from Nigeria.
Some people move in search of work or economic opportunities, to join family, or to study. Others move to escape conflict, persecution, terrorism, or human rights violations. Still others move in response to the adverse effects of climate change, natural disasters, or other environmental factors.
Nigeria has one of the largest populations of youth in the world with several abundant natural resources such as petroleum, natural gas, tin, iron ore, coal, limestone, niobium, lead, zinc, and arable land. It is Africa’s largest economy and oil exporter (with the largest number of natural gas reserves in the continent). However, with the advantage of these resources to the nation, an increase in economic and security challenges has continued. Nigeria is currently experiencing high unemployment and poverty, as of 2021 the total unemployed population in Nigeria was estimated at a peak of around 6.3million.
- Democeatic Republic Congo
The ongoing conflict in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has cost approximately six million lives since 1996, making it one of the deadliest conflicts in world history. Ethnic and geopolitical competition among DRC, Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, and various non-state armed groups fuel the fighting. The Democratic Republic of the Congo's government announced that 272 civilians were killed in a massacre in the eastern town of Kishishe, North Kivu. The Congolese government blamed the killings on the M23 movement, in which M23 denied. An investigation was opened by Democratic Republic of the Congo's attorney general..
The United States has provided more than $1.7 billion in health assistance to the DRC over the past 20 years. The DRC is also a U.S. global health security intensive support partner country, which serves as a platform for cooperating on zoonotic disease, workforce development, lab systems, and more.
Why Are They all Fleeing to Morocco
Migrants often leave their country of origin because poverty and lack of regular employment limit their options, and they have no opportunity for education. Morocco is attractive in that it provides higher salaries, borders with Europe, and offers greater employment opportunities.
Is Morocco a welcoming country?
Morocco is a Muslim country, with 99% of its population identifying as Sunni Muslim, but religious minorities are widely respected. Moroccans are a very welcoming and tolerant people towards different cultures, ideas and ways of life.
Why is Morocco important to the World?
It has the fifth-largest economy in Africa and wields significant influence in both Africa and the Arab world; it is considered a middle power in global affairs and holds membership in the Arab League, the Union for the Mediterranean, and the African Union.
While they are all running to Morroco,
Morocco increases jail-term of migrants by 6 months*
A Moroccan appeals court increased the sentences of 13 migrants by six months to three years over a deadly attempted crossing into the Spanish enclave of Melilla, their lawyer said on Monday (Jan. 09).
Around 2,000 people, many of them Sudanese, stormed the frontier on June 24 in a bid to reach Spanish territory across one of the European Union's two land borders with Africa. At least 23 people died.
The court in Nador, a northeastern town near the border with Melilla, "increased the sentences of a group of migrants by six months, taking them to three years in prison each", lawyer Mbarek Bouirig revealed. They are accused of "participation in a criminal gang of clandestine immigration", illegal entry to Morocco and violence against law enforcement officials, Bouirig said. Moroccan authorities said 23 undocumented migrants died in the June incident, the worst death toll in years of such attempted crossings.
The Moroccan Association for Human Rights (AMDH) put the number of dead at 27, while rights group Amnesty International said at least 37 people lost their lives. In a report, Amnesty International described the events as crimes under international law, and questioned the inquiries run by both countries as stalled and inadequate.
Amnesty International says all the events happened on European soil which Spain rejects. The Spanish government spokesperson, minister Isabel Rodríguez, said late last year that the national police offered a proportionate response to a painful tragedy. Still in December 2022, Spanish prosecutors dropped their investigation into the deaths of more than 20 migrant, saying they found no evidence of criminal misconduct by Spanish security forces.
According to the authorities, 140 Moroccan police officers were wounded. Morocco has since handed dozens of migrants sentences of up to three years' imprisonment.
AMDH said last month that the punishments were "severe and unjust".
Both Morocco and Spain have insisted the migrants were to blame for the tragedy, with Rabat saying some died after falling while trying to scramble over the fence, while others suffocated as people panicked and a stampede started.
If African Leaders are interested in the welfare of it's people it can can this Story.
Youths will prefer to stay in thier home countries.
