The Sahara Desert’s Forgotten Refugees
With ambushes, illness and police persecution, the journey through the Sahara to Algeria is a path of misery and danger. But this doesn’t stop refugees from Africa’s sub-Saharan regions, who dream of making it to Europe. Many die along the way.
Johnson Varny is back after four months away, spent somewhere in the no man’s land between Mali and Algeria. He’d been caught by the police here, who loaded him and 80 others onto the back of a truck, carting them back to Tin Sawatin. They spent two days and 700 miserable kilometers (400 miles) traveling southwest through nothing but sand and rocks. When they reached their destination — a small collection of tin huts — the police simply unloaded their human cargo and left them to fend for themselves.
“They treated us like animals,” says Varny, 32. “One loaf of bread a day and water from a trough. They would never drink that themselves.”
Yet here Varny is, back in Tamanrasset, southern Algeria, in the middle of the Sahara. He’s a bit gaunter, perhaps, than he was before struggling through the 700-kilometer journey back here. He started out together with another man in Tin Sawatin, but only Varny has arrived. He says he buried his friend 40 kilometers (25 miles) short of the city, after the other man died of a burst appendix. “He didn’t make it,” he says simply.
Few refugees know the desert city of Tamanrasset as well as Johnson Varny does. He arrived here the first time in 1995, when he was 16 and had fled war-torn Liberia three years before. He’s lost count of how many times he’s been here since, both willingly and unwillingly. In 2000, he says, he made it on as far as Oran, an Algerian city on the Mediterranean coast. But before he could find a boat to take him to Europe, police caught him and deported him.