Pakistani migrants lucrative commodity in odyssey of turbulence
Foreign Desk Report

GAO (Mali)—They are clean, drink bottled mineral water and have money — nationals from Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi transiting through the west African state of Mali, candidates for illegal immigration to Europe. And they are conspicuously more wealthy than their African “colleagues”. In Gao city, northeast of the Malian capital Bamako and a key transit point for migrants, the Pakistanis are rather pampered by the traffickers shuttling this human tide northward.
“What you get with 10 African migrants, you get with one Pakistani,” said a trafficker who, obviously, did not want to be identified.
According to information gathered in Gao among the migrants, a Pakistani pays 100,000 CFA francs (200 dollars) per head for a 700-kilometre (430-mile) long trip between Gao and the Algerian border. But an African pays only a tenth of that.
While Pakistanis move in convoys of hired, air-conditioned four-wheel-drive vehicles, with just four passengers per car, up to 25 Africans are packed into the back of any old open truck. With each of the Pakistani convoys is a back-up car transporting tents for temporary camping in the desert. But the Asian migrants are very discrete and avoid contact with foreigners. “I come from Pakistan. My mother is Indian. It’s my father who is Pakistani. I was turned back from Algeria, and I came back to withdraw money sent by my family,” said one man near a bank in Gao.
In the courtyard of a house, another migrant, also from the south Asian peninsula, fled the scene on the arrival of journalists, taking them for police officers. “If these Pakistanis are afraid, it is because they know that what they are doing is illegal,” said a hotel owner in the city.
“These people have transit visas. When they arrive here, for example in Gao, their papers are generally in order, but they are in a hurry to carry on with their trip,” said a local police officer.
Last year, near the northern desert town of Timbuktu, suspecting them to be smugglers resisting inspection, Malian customs officers opened fire to deflate the tyres of one luxury vehicle.
The Pakistanis on board admitted they had wanted to smuggle themselves through northern Mali to Mauritania, en route to Europe where — like the legions of African migrants trying to escape dire poverty — they hope to find a better life.
Timbuktu police said the Pakistanis usually proceed to the north of Mali by road from Bamako, where they generally arrive by plane after flying in via another country in east or west Africa.
They then cross the Malian desert to get to the northern town of Taoudenni, from where dusty tracks branch into neighbouring Mauritania and Algeria.
If they fail the first time, the traffickers propose a second attempt for the Pakistanis. The price for the second attempt is included in the fixed price at the start of the trip.
Police estimate that each “luxurious” Pakistani migrant spends a total of between 10,000 and 12,000 dollars in the hope of reaching the European “El Dorado” from their country of origin.