Africans Risk Death at Sea for New Life Abroad

Mauritania Becomes a Gateway to Europe

NOUADHIBOU, Mauritania -- Magat Jope kicked gently at his dead friend's clothes, which lay in a rotting heap in a corner of the desert graveyard.

A yellow fisherman's oilskin. A lavender jacket. The clothes that Goure Deye was wearing in February when he and close to 30 other illegal immigrants drowned in the Atlantic Ocean, trying to reach Spanish soil on a tiny boat. The garments were clinging to the bloated body when Jope identified his friend and brought him to this cemetery a few miles from shore.

The gravediggers were supposed to have burned the clothes by now. But death on the water has kept them busy lately. They wield heavy iron crowbars in 100-degree heat to chip grave after grave from the brick-hard Sahara. They bury the bodies first, wrapped in the white funeral shrouds of Muslim tradition, then burn the jackets and pants when they can.

Humanitarian officials estimate that at least 1,000 African immigrants have died in the past four months attempting to ride narrow, open fishing boats across 600 miles of rough Atlantic water to Spain's Canary Islands.

Thousands of other Africans seeking a way out of punishing poverty have fled by boat in the Mediterranean toward southern Italy or climbed barbed wire into Ceuta and Melilla, two Spanish territories on the northern coast of Africa. Now, with crackdowns making those routes increasingly impassable, the beaches of this desert country are the newest back door into Europe.

Wealthy beyond belief in the eyes of destitute people almost everywhere, the European Union also draws an illicit flow of migrants from the former Soviet Union, China, Latin America and the Arab world. Together, these tides of people are adding up to one of the most significant migrations of current times.

The new route from Africa appears to be far more dangerous than the older ones, but people keep coming. "If you are as poor as we are, you are not afraid of death," said Jope, 34, an electrician and polite father of two. "I want a house. I want to educate my children. The risk doesn't matter."

Jope is from Senegal. He is here, he explained in a lengthy interview, because his country has nothing to offer. His father has diabetes; Jope and his wife and children have been living mainly on help from his mother, who runs a little business selling drinking water. If his mother died, he worried, his family would have nothing.

Then one day the phone rang and on the other end was a friend, calling from the Canaries. He'd made the six-day sea voyage safely. In Spain a laborer could earn close to $2,000 a month, the friend said; when Jope worked, he made about $40 a month.

So Jope got on a long-distance bus, carrying with him more than $1,000, money provided by his mother to pay for his sea passage and, hopefully, his new start in Europe. Three days later, he stepped down in Nouadhibou, a noisy oceanside market town of 90,000 people. It is the second-largest city in Mauritania, a million-square-mile expanse of desert with a population of only 2.9 million.

On any day, the town's markets are filled with traders in flowing robes selling oranges and dates. There are nearly as many donkeys as cars on the rutted streets. Along the beaches, hundreds of open fishing boats deliver cargos of mullet, shark and bright-colored shellfish.

Jope soon became aware there were many people like him in town, outsiders trying to blend in, avoid the police and find boats heading to the Canaries. They were from Mali, Gambia, Nigeria and other West African countries. A population boom and ballooning joblessness in many African countries, driven in part by a wave of subsistence farmers moving from their villages into cities, has caused thousands to risk the journey here.