The massive and ruthless round-up of some 1,500 sub-Saharan migrants in Algiers during the first week of December and their immediate deportation to Niger has given Morocco a further opportunity to cash in on Algeria’s increasingly damaged reputation in the Sahel.

Morocco’s King Mohammed VI immediately ordered that ‘emergency aid’ be delivered to the expelled migrants who Algeria had bused and then trucked to Agades in Niger. The official Moroccan news agency (MAP) described the migrants ‘expelled from Algeria’ as being in ‘an extremely precarious situation in a centre in the north of Niger’.

The Mohammed VI Foundation for Solidarity, the Moroccan Agency for International Cooperation, and the Moroccan Ministry of Interior will provide a humanitarian kit consisting of food products, blankets and tents. This aid, which amounts to some 116 tons, also aims to help Niger ‘to respond to an exceptional migratory crisis’ which could have a ‘dramatic humanitarian implications.’

The reasons for the round-up and expulsion are unclear but seem to have been triggered by escalating tension and clashes between migrants and local Algerians in the poor Algiers suburb of Dely-Brahim in early December. Around 1,400 sub-Saharan men, women and children, were arbitrarily rounded-up, arrested and bused south to Tamanrasset where they were taken to a transit camp outside the town before being taken in some 50 trucks to Agades.

Saida Benhabylès, president of the Red Crescent, told the El Moudjahid newspaper that ‘promiscuity in the capital (Algiers) poses a security problem’. The authorities therefore decided to ‘transfer the migrants to the south where the reception conditions are better.’

She also gave a completely untrue account of the round-up and deportations when she told the press that the evictions were ‘not a forced departure but a voluntary return to their country. We are repatriating Nigeriens at the request of their government. As for migrants from other nationalities, they were the ones who asked us to take them home. No migrant was forced to leave Algerian soil.’

Interviews with the migrants gave a rather different picture, describing how they were hunted down in Algiers, largely being identified by their skin colour, seized, then thrown into camps and immediately transported south. Many had lived in Algiers for several years. There were also widespread reports of the migrants being robbed of their money and possession by the police.

This article was taken from Menas Associates’ Algeria Politics & Security publication.