Pride and Concrete. 10 Years Later.

Over a decade ago, we first came looking for the locals in the northern Romanian region of Oaș in their homeland. We did not find them. They were away in Paris. In their villages, we were greeted by elderly people outside stainless steel gates.

You are going to read a decades-long story about the hopes, ambitions and sufferings of a whole community. These people have sacrificed the comfort of a hard-earned life in Western Europe for the sake of the tradition of social competition, which forces them to build themselves a luxury life in their home villages – a life they will, most likely, never get to live.

In August and for major holidays, Oaș people make their ritualistic return home, and their villages become an open stage for this social competition. They proudly throw money around, thousands of euros on weddings, luxury cars and high-end clothing. In a single generation, they have proven that they can turn their villages of origin into concrete châteaux, a testimony to their success abroad.

Today’s rural Romania is rife with contradictions. Tourist flyers promote an idyllic, out-of-time village where peasants wear traditional garb, women do the laundry in the riverbed, and bread is baked at home. At the same time, at the height of COVID-19 restrictions two years ago, airports in the north of the country arranged flights for Romanian emigrants whose work was vital for Western economies. These two different words exist and coexist, and the essential aim of this project is to document both of them together, for as long as they will continue their parallel lives.

The brides table, wedding in Turt (Author: Petrut Calinescu)

The change began in one village: Certeze, Oaș County, Romania 

When the Revolution that ended Communism came, the villagers of Certeze – who were seasonal migrants within their country’s borders even before 1989 – were already well-used to the austere life of those who spend most of the year away from home. They had some savings and were organised in tight-knit, mobile communities, ready to explore the European labour market.

Known as resilient, diligent workers, the people of Oaș had been used by the Ceaușescu dictatorship for hard, but well-paid, labour all across the country. To increase the country’s arable land area, reclamation projects that couldn’t be mechanised had employed Oaș locals. The money they made before 1989 also went into building houses. At a time when poverty in Romania reached record lows as a result of an extreme plan of Ceausescu to pay off all external debt, villages in Oaș prospered and old family homes grew their first extra storey.

After the fall of Communism, when the country’s centralised production system collapsed and work opportunities at home dwindled, the first Oaș people crossed the border illegally in search of work.

Their children grew up alone, as they worked themselves to exhaustion in construction and housekeeping, thousands of kilometres from home, until they managed to get a foothold in the local labour market. They lived in abandoned houses or improvised shacks in the forests on the outskirts of Paris, saved up every cent they earned and sent their money back to Romania, where it would be used to build the enormous houses that would speak to everyone of their successful exile.

30 years later

Today, Oaș people brought their children over to the countries where they emigrated, and where their grandchildren were then born. They are legal residents there and many have their own construction companies, through which they are able to integrate other Oaș fellows, who have come later, into the labour market.

Between the first generation, which fought hard to make a living in France, and their children and grandchildren, fluent in foreign languages and perfectly integrated in the French society, there is an ever-wider chasm. The first-come dream of one day returning home and the next generation dream of breaking the ”concrete curse” that binds them, by tradition, to sink their hard-earned money in houses with more and more stories.

Those sprawling homes keep dreams out of reach for both generations of emigrants born in Romania. Those who dream of returning are forced to work away from their houses just so they can maintain them, and those who dream of making a life for themselves in Paris are forced to channel their earnings into finishing their houses back home. And that, in many cases, can take a lifetime.

A life that can accommodate several lives

What we have found, 10 years later, is that their existence abroad has fallen into a settled pattern. The people of Oaș have bought homes in Paris, renovated them, filled their gardens with flowers.

It appears that, in the decade since, a generation was born with the power to break the concrete curse. That of children who saw the light abroad, who no longer belong to Romania and who, 10 years ago, when we began our research, docilely accepted to put on the uncomfortable traditional Oaș costume, but then play-chased each other on the village streets of Oaș launching mock taunts in French. They are today’s bilingual teenagers – integrated, cosmopolitan.

Some of the people we met 10 years ago are now gone. They have passed away, leaving behind in Romania concrete (and concreted) proof of their dreams: almost-finished houses swallowed by ivy. Some of the children we met a decade ago, looking bored on holiday and eager to return home to Paris, are now students, future attorneys, doctors, accountants, aircraft engineers.

On the streets of Negrești, young people chat in foreign languages, while the elders look upon their grandchildren and great-grandchildren lovingly, but without understanding a word of what they are saying. Most constructions have been finished. The old wooden houses are almost completely gone, and a typical village in Oaș now looks like a suburb of a city.

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Cotroș and his familly

Sas Grigore “Cotroș” Griga from Certeze village, Satu Mare County, left Romania in 1994. He has been living in Paris with his wife, Lică, for over 27 years. He works in construction, she does housecleaning. Together they have three children and six grandchildren, all of whom live with them in France. In the whole of their life together, Cotroș only took his wife out to a restaurant in France once. To this day, she hasn’t forgiven him for all the money he spent on that evening.

“If today you make 50 euros, you set 40 aside.” This is Cotroș’s life philosophy.

All their three children have bought homes on the outskirts of Paris, but they each built impressive houses back in Certeze, too. The grandchildren also have a house each in their village of origin, and in 2021, when the elders were expecting their sixth grandchild, the land in Certeze was already bought and the builders’ team was already booked for beginning construction on the house of the youngest member of the family.

Cotroș’s two sons have their own prosperous construction companies in France. He works for his younger son. To him, the adventure is long over. Cotroș is part of the avant-garde of the Romanian workforce migration. After the fall of Communism, when the country’s centralised production system collapsed and work opportunities in Romania disappeared, the first Oaș people from Certeze village forced their way across the border in search of employment. Cotroș was one of them. After them, in only a few years, an enormous percentage of the active population of the Oaș region flowed abroad. After several attempts at finding work in various European countries, most of them regrouped in the early ’90s in Paris, France.

In 2011, Cotroș only had one wish – to go back home. “I’ll stay here a few more years to get my minimum contribution period for my pension, then I’ll move back home.” Ten years later, in 2021, over a barbecue and a shot of homemade plum brandy, outside his house in Certeze, Cotroș told us: “I’ll stay with the children in France for another year or two, then I come back home for good.”

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In the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, colorful turbans were the norm in the streets smelling of exotic condiments from the kitchens of African emigrants in 2011, when we met Cotroș. The block of flats where he had been living for over 10 years, however, smelled of Romanian sarmale and perișoare soup.

“There’s just a few of us living in this building, not the whole family. My brother is next door, my oldest son and my grandchildren upstairs, my brother-in-law just downstairs, the in-laws are in the same building, on the other stairwell, my cousin too… It’s still not like home. It’s never like home!”

When we happened to drop by, on a Sunday, the entire block blared with Oaș music and through the open doors of the apartments you could see laden tables surrounded by families crammed together, talking loudly and laughing – toddlers with bibs, elderly women with traditional headscarves, neighbors from the old village and anyone who happened to visit.

“There are 12 families of us living here now; two are Moroccan, and the others are all Romanian. We have our fun too. There are lots of us, so there’s always an anniversary to celebrate. For Christmas we butcher a pig and make sausage and caltaboși just like back home. A new Romanian grocery store opened just down the street. The owners are from Săpânța. That’s how we have fun: anniversaries, weddings, christening parties. It’s not like we had any other entertainment back home either. We never went on holiday, to the seaside or the spa towns,” remembered Cotroș back in 2011.

He grew up in a family with 17 siblings and a father who taught them one word of wisdom: be optimistic, brave, and always look forward. That’s how you’ll get ahead in life. “And we did,” says Cotroș.

In the 27 years he has been working in Paris, he only took his wife, Lică, out for a restaurant dinner once. To this day they sometimes argue for the amount of money they spent that day. It’s hard to imagine Lică picking a fight with someone. Most of the time, she is silent and busy tidying up. Like most Oaș women who come to Paris, Lică has been working in housecleaning in French homes for 27 years.

She’s worked her whole life. At 14, she left home on one of the buses loaded with seasonal laborers leaving at the beginning of each summer from Oaș villages, taking people to work all over Romania, and she never stopped working since. She didn’t even have a lot of time to be a mother, though she has three children.

“I grew up without my parents,” remembers Dana Ciocan, Lică and Cotroș’s daughter. “When my parents left to work abroad, I stayed home to look after my brothers. I didn’t cry that much when they left, but I did cry a lot when they took my older brother to work with them. They took me along when I turned 16. I wasn’t with them in those years when they slept in abandoned homes. By the time I got to Paris, they had already rented a place. At first, I went with my mother when she did housecleaning, so I could learn the ropes. Every time I stepped inside a bathroom, I was terrified. I didn’t even know how to turn on a tap. When I left home, we only had an outhouse. I had never seen an indoor bathroom. The moment my mother plopped all those cleaning products into my arms, I threw up from the smell. It was so hard getting used to the smell… I’d clean and throw up, clean and throw up.”

Now Dana has her own home in Paris, and her daughter Jessica is a Law student.

Author: Petrut Calinescu

Two stairwells and three stories brimful of Romanians 

The flat Cotroș and Lică were renting in 2011 had two rooms furnished with a wardrobe, two bunk beds and a few rattan chairs for guests, often doubling as coffee tables. That was all. The TV was always on ProTV, a Romanian channel. The ten years they had spent there didn’t seem to have changed the apartment’s vibe – it still looked like a place for commuters’ overnight stays. Perhaps a little less crowded. Back in the day, five or six people would live in a single room like that. Cotroș’s whole family had lived there. His three children, one son-in-law, two daughters-in-law, not counting friends and neighbors from the village whom he put up until they found their place in Paris. Then came the grandchildren, five in all back then. Gradually, the young families started to occupy other flats in the building or migrated to other neighborhoods on the outskirts of Paris.

The block had two stairwells back to back, each with three stories brimful of Romanians. The owner, an Arab with enterprising acumen, used to have an abandoned three-storey building on that spot. Cotroș had a team of Oaș people from his homeland, eager to work, with palms the size of shovels and a dogged determination to feel like proper human beings again.

It was almost seven years since they had fled their country, hanging under train carriages or hidden in suffocating vans, chased by frontier police dogs. For almost seven years, they had been living like animals in the forests around Paris, in improvised shacks or abandoned houses: with no legal documents, no one would have them as tenants. “From the beginning, the deal was that we’d build these flats for ourselves. When we finished them, we finally moved in as tenants, like proper people. That’s how we filled the building with people from Oaș. Somehow, we made it fit us all,” remembers Cotroș.

Now, Oaș people are recognised on the Paris labour market as some of the best construction workers, but back then, in the beginning – Cotroș laughs to himself – they didn’t really know much about the job. They took the building and renovated it as they thought was best. No apartment is like another. Some of them have two rooms, others three. They broke down walls or built new ones depending on the sizes of their respective families.

In the early 2000s, for dozens of people from Oaș – exhausted, forever on the lookout for a job, eating whenever they had a chance to, spending years leaning against the walls of construction materials warehouses, where black labour markets are held to this day, as they waited for orders – Paris was finally becoming a home of sorts.

Cotroș still can’t speak French very well, after 27 years working in Paris. And he is not one bit embarrassed by it. He told us, laughing, about the time he went to the doctor and was prescribed eye drops, but he couldn’t understand what the doctor told him, so he drank them.

Besides, what would he need French for? His direct boss is his youngest son, who has his own construction company, he works 10 hours a day in a team made up of Oaș people and spends his Sundays with his family or visiting village neighbours who have settled in Paris.

Cotroș | 2011

“The golden rule: you never eat away your profit. If today you make 50 euros, you set 40 aside. Only once I had a beer in town and it cost me a few franks. I felt so sorry for that money I was sick for a week. You’ll never make money if you start going to restaurants. We have fun too, but we do it at home.”

I’ve been in France for 15 years. Before that, I was in Belgium, Germany, Austria, but I ended up settling here. We’re very well regarded, as trusty workers. Of all of us who came over, Romanians and Serbians are the most well-seen. We are respected, France as a country is good to us, but we’re still foreigners here. That’s the trouble. Only home is at home.

The people here got used to living together, we fell into this habit of living on top of each other – Serbians, Portuguese, Romanians, Arabs, Black people, Japanese, Chinese, every nation on Earth. They have their own customs, we have ours, we don’t get in each other’s way, we each mind our own business. We wouldn’t have time to cause trouble anyway – we leave for work at the break of dawn and come back late at night…

This block we live in was built by us from A to Z. When we started renovating it, it was a ruin, completely abandoned. We divided the space. Sometimes we made two apartments out of three, or enlarged some. We somehow made it fit us all, so we could pay rent like normal people. Back then, no one would rent us a place to live, since we didn’t have our documents.

We couldn’t go on living like animals in abandoned houses.

My younger son is 23 and has his own construction company. I raised them to be hard workers. My older son and my daughter, too – every month they set aside 700 euro. I’d like to see anyone in Romania managing to do that. Why do you think people are so eager to work here? Money! Anything you do here, you get paid for it! I love going to work at 5 in the morning and coming back at 7 in the evening, as long as I know that I get paid for my work. That makes me want to work even more.

When I go back home, the silence at night scares me. I wake up and can’t tell where I am. Here, I get up from my bunk bed on the other side. So, when I’m back home, I turn to get out of bed on the wrong side and bump against the wall. It makes me angry. You can say whatever you like, life’s good in France, life’s good in Germany, life’s good in the UK, but there’s no place like home. Even if someone told me they’d pay me 2,000 euro a month to stay here for the rest of my life… never! I’ll stick around for another five-six years, until I get my pension that I’ve been struggling so hard for, and then you’re not seeing me dead around here. I’m going home.

Cotroș | 2021

“I always tell my children: enjoy your life! We never knew how to, all we did was work. Do whatever your soul wants. This heap of money we made – we’ll use it to pay the doctor in our old age. We lost all that was best in our lives. Me and my old lady, we started off with nothing, we had to earn it all. ”

Half of my life was spent in foreign countries. That’s what I regret the most, not staying home. I might not have been so successful, but I’d have been a lot healthier. I lost what was most important: my youth, my health, my identity. I never cared about politics. I cared about having a place to work. You think I’d have stayed abroad and not come back home to sleep in my bed, otherwise? Even potatoes would have tasted better in my own country.

In France I miss my house, the people in my village, my village, these forests, this water, the air –  I even miss Romanian stupidity.

I wish I could bring my whole family back to the country. I’d come tomorrow and start working again, at 60. But where to find work? My grandchildren can’t speak Romanian properly. My children built much better lives abroad, but the stress and the homesickness took their toll. My son has all the paperwork done trying to open a pig farm in the country, but the administration is leading him around by the nose. They won’t move a finger to help, not one bit, all they do is get in your way until you say – forget it, let’s go back abroad.

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The wedding industry in Oaș and the grand return of the emigrants

For 11 months a year, the villages of Oaş are deserted. No sound of cattle coming home, of hens or horse hooves. In the past 20 years, the soundtrack of the traditional Romanian village seems to have switched to the muffled noise of concrete mixers, as the village elders have become site inspectors.

In August, however, everyone returns home and the narrow village streets are blocked by luxury cars. Especially after the Assumption of Mary, when wedding season begins. Once it begins, it won’t stop until September. A single village can have as many as 10 weddings in a day.

Wedding parties are held at home, not among strangers. No matter how cosmopolitan their lives, no matter how many nationalities they might come into contact with in their block of flats in Paris, in the subway, at work, at the corner shop, people still take spouses from their own village. The parents still get to have the last word.

Author: Petrut Calinescu

Weddings as Forms of Interest-Free Loan

If they don’t want the whole village to talk behind their backs, a Oaș local can go to as many as 20 weddings  in one summer. Oaș weddings function as interest-free loans. They are investments in the future weddings of your offspring. Those with small children begin to attend weddings diligently, to ensure a large number of invitees for their sons’ and daughters’ in the future. How else could an average wedding bring together 1,000 guests, all of them physically and financially exhausted? If not more. A regular wedding here costs 40,000 to 50,000 euros and, if almost all guests honour the invitation, makes about 100,000 euros in gift money.

Wedding food is, like most things in Oaș, between two worlds. The party tables are heaped with platters with catering finger snacks, side by side with hearty plates of steaming food fresh out of the hands of the village wives. Wedding food is cooked with great enthusiasm, in large cauldrons – sarmale, mutton or chicken soups, sensational stews after traditional recipes.

The women who cook for Oaș weddings are called socăcițe and are often relatives, friends or neighbours of the bride and bridegroom. They usually do it for free, to help lower the expenses involved in a wedding. You often see them suddenly dropping what they are doing and joining a round dance or the țâpurit (singing).

“In this one month, I make as much as my dad earns in one year in Spain. But I only slept 90 minutes last night,” confesses a young university student from Cluj, who spends summers working for a catering company in Satu Mare.

For a month, the upper level of the wedding hall in Târșolț, not yet finished, hosts seasonal workers brought from all over the country for the Oaș wedding season. Waiters, cooks, kitchen aids, table clearers, dishwashers and others sleep on inflatable mattresses laid directly on the concrete floor, in rooms that haven’t yet been mortared, with no furniture at all.

Last autumn, the owners of the wedding hall in Târșolț brought from Paris a team of Oaș people just to do the general cleaning and prepare the enormous venue for winter. They touched up the building, painted the walls, washed windows, prepared and stored away thousands of chairs, washed and stacked tons of plates, and then returned to their work in France.

The pride of holding a wedding does not come cheap – but wait, there are two of them

In one summer, a single Oaș local will spend about 3,000 euros on weddings – unless the bride or groom are from their own family, in which case the expense grows considerably, to about 5,000 euros.

Add to this the cost of evening dress and hairstyling for each wedding – no woman would go to a wedding without an elaborate bun. It’s impossible to slip in between appointments at a hairdresser’s in the area in August. There are over 25 of them in the village of Negrești Oaș, all filled to the brim, appointments secured from abroad months earlier.

One day, when one of the hairstylists passed out from sheer exhaustion, her female clients waited at the salon, as if stuck on a bus at rush hour, for her to return from the hospital and finish constructing their buns. None of them gave up their appointment. It gave them time to complain about how many weddings they had to attend that year.

People in Oaș hold two wedding parties. The one in traditional outfits, held at the bride’s house and called the Bride’s Honour, and the one in “city clothes”, held at event halls in the villages in the region.

The number of days the wedding party spreads over differs from village to village. In some, the Bride’s Honour comes first, then she is given a few days to mend the raw wounds from her boots and the bruises left by the Oaș traditional wedding dress, followed by the “city” wedding. In others, it all happens in one go, in a single day.

A bride’s gown weighs over 20 kilos and costs 2,500 to 8,000 euros, depending on the rhinestones and the complexity of the decorations. As locals migrated, Swarovski crystals began to appear on Oaș traditional clothes. The boots are made to order by a village craftsman, so rigid that no bride ends her wedding without raw sores on her ankles. A pair costs about 500 euros and can only be put on by wrapping a plastic bag over the stockings, or the foot won’t go in.

On average, brides wear this outfit for about 12 hours. At the end of the day, their hips are black and blue and – no matter how hard they work in housekeeping abroad – their muscles are sore. In the sweltering heat of August, brides suddenly turn white in the face and need to sit down in the shade before they pass out.

The dressing of the bride used to begin two days before the wedding, and most of the time was taken up by the braiding, a craft only a few women in the village still knew. 10 years ago, the brides’ hair was still plaited after the traditional method, which could take as long as eight hours. Nowadays, only Rusca village still keeps this painstaking tradition, while the others  take a shortcut that uses wedding headdresses – elaborate, but no longer organically braided into the bride’s hair.

In Rașca village, brides still spend the night before their wedding sleeping in a fixed position, with part of the headdress already attached to their head. Regular food-grade margarine is used in the plaiting, to help the beads slip down hair strands.

Maria Veletean from Certeze, one of the few women who still know how to do a bride’s traditional hairstyle, earns 9,000 euros each August from the plaiting alone. Maria spent many years working as a housekeeper in Paris.

In the second half of August, in Oaș, cars with brides and bridegrooms parade around, to be seen by as many people as possible. What starts as an exotic tableau for a foreigner becomes the norm in a few days. Cars with brides and bridegrooms advance slowly, stuck in the traffic jam on the main street of Negrești village, now turned into a stage paved with hot asphalt for those who come to display the new cars they have bought since last year.

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Mișca’s Dream

In the winter of 2010, Mișca’s house was standing alone and proud on an empty, snowy field. It’s been over 10 years. Dozens of houses have been built around it. Streets have been paved, streetlights have been put up. Yet Mișca’s house is lonelier than ever.

Ghiță Zelea, nicknamed Mișca, spent over 20 years pouring concrete in Paris. He started work on his house after a bet with a relative who told him he would never manage to build a home bigger than his. Not only did he add two storeys on top of what the wager involved, but he wanted to set up a gym in the attic. At least so he told us when we met him in Saint Denis, Paris, in 2011.

We met again in the summer of 2012 in Târșolț village, right outside his house. A gentle breeze was blowing between the brick walls. It was warm outside, and Mișca was having a beer while considering what to do, rather at a loss. Soon he would have to leave, but the double-glazed windows he had ordered far ahead of time still weren’t there. Construction was advancing at a snail’s pace under his long-distance guidance. Apart from unforeseen financial issues, the worker teams in Romania, which Mișca coordinated from Paris, either didn’t stick to the agreement or did shoddy work.

Mișca’s house is something of a flagship of Oaș homes that never lived to fulfill their destiny. Mișca never fulfilled his either. In the summer of 2021 we learned that he had passed away in a French hospital, after a long suffering. His wife had died a few years earlier in a traffic accident; their two children were also in the car. It was August and they were going back to Romania. Paris-Oaș drives are long and exhausting. Eager to return home, most Oaș people do the drive in one go, with no overnight stops. Speed and lack of sleep often cause accidents on this route. By some miracle, Mișca’s children were unharmed. He survived, but never recovered from the shock of the accident.

Today, only the green leaves of ivy populate Mișca’s dream.

Credits:

Co-financed by the Administration of National Cultural Fund (AFCN) and the Romanian Order of Architects, through the Architectural Stamp Duty (OAR).

Thanks to all who allowed us to share their stories and helped us with the field research, especially: Remus Țiplea, Mihaela Grigorean, Cotroș family from Certeze, Solomeș family from Târșolț.

Media partners: Panorama, Scena9, Igloo, Radio Romania Cultural

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Web documentary & book:

Web development: Dani Ivan
Book design: Alice Stoicescu
English translation: Anca Bărbulescu

How Europe Outsourced Border Enforcement to Africa

When Cornelia Ernst and her delegation arrived at the Rosso border station on a scorching February day, it wasn’t the bustling artisanal marketplace, the thick smog from trucks waiting to cross, or the vibrantly painted pirogues bobbing in the Senegal River that caught their eye. It was the slender black briefcase on the table before the station chief. When the official unlatched the hard plastic carrier, proudly unveiling dozens of cables meticulously arranged beside a touchscreen tablet, soft gasps filled the room.

Called the Universal Forensic Extraction Device (UFED), the machine is a data-extraction tool capable of retrieving call logs, photos, GPS locations and WhatsApp messages from any phone. Manufactured by the Israeli company Cellebrite, renowned for its phone-cracking software, the UFED has primarily been marketed to global law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, to combat terrorism and drug trafficking. In recent years it’s also gained infamy after countries like Nigeria and Bahrain used it to pry data from the phones of political dissidents, human rights activists and journalists.

Now, however, a UFED had found its way to the border guards stationed at the crossing between Rosso, Senegal, and Rosso, Mauritania, two towns with the same name along the winding river that divides the countries, and a crucial waypoint on the land migration route to North Africa. In Rosso, the technology is being used not to catch drug smugglers or militants, but to track West Africans suspected of trying to migrate to Europe. And the UFED is just one troubling tool in a larger arsenal of cutting-edge technologies used to regulate movement in the region — all of it there, Ernst knew, thanks to the European Union technocrats she works with.

As a German member of the European Parliament (MEP), Ernst had left Brussels to embark on a fact-finding mission in West Africa, accompanied by her Dutch counterpart, Tineke Strik, and a team of assistants. As members of the Parliament’s Left and Green parties, Ernst and Strik were among a tiny minority of MEPs concerned about how EU migration policies threaten to erode the EU’s very foundation— namely, its professed respect for fundamental human rights, both within and outside of Europe.

Author: Matt Rota

The Rosso station was part of those policies, housing a recently opened branch of the National Division for the Fight Against Migrant Trafficking and Related Practices (DNLT), a joint operational partnership between Senegal and the EU to train and equip Senegalese border police in hopes of stopping migration to Europe before migrants ever get close. Thanks to funding by EU taxpayers, Senegal has built at least nine border posts and four regional DNLT branches since 2018, supplied with invasive surveillance technologies that, besides the black briefcase, include biometric fingerprinting and facial recognition software, drones, digital servers, night-vision goggles and more. (A spokesperson for the European Commission, the EU’s executive body, noted in a statement that the DNLT branches were created by Senegal and the EU only funds their equipment and training.)

Ernst worried that such tools could violate the fundamental rights of people on the move. The Senegalese officials, she recalled, had seemed ​“very enthusiastic about the equipment they received and how it helps them track people,” which left her concerned about how that technology might be used.

Ernst and Strik also worried about a controversial new policy the Commission had begun pursuing in mid-2022: negotiating with Senegal and Mauritania to allow the deployment of personnel from Frontex, the EU border and coast guard agency, to patrol land and sea borders in both countries, in an effort to curb African migration.

With a budget nearing $1 billion, Frontex is the EU’s best-funded government agency. For the past five years, it’s been mired in controversy following repeated investigations — by the EU, the United Nations, journalists and nonprofits — that found the agency violated the safety and rights of migrants crossing the Mediterranean, including by helping Libya’s EU-funded coast guard send hundreds of thousands of migrants back to be detained in Libya under conditions that amounted to torture and sexual slavery. In 2022, the agency’s director, Fabrice Leggeri, was forced out over a mountain of scandals, including covering up similar ​“pushback” deportations, which force migrants back across the border before they can apply for asylum.

While Frontex has long had an informal presence in Senegal, Mauritania and six other West African countries — by helping transfer migration data from host countries to the EU — Frontex guards have never been permanently stationed outside of Europe before. But now the EU hopes to extend Frontex’s reach far beyond its territory, into sovereign African nations Europe once colonized, with no oversight mechanisms to safeguard against abuse. Initially, the EU even proposed granting immunity from prosecution to Frontex staff in West Africa.

The potential for problems seemed obvious. The day before Ernst and Strik traveled to Rosso, they’d listened to stark warnings from civil society groups in Senegal’s capital city of Dakar. ​“Frontex is a risk for human dignity and African identity,” one advocate, Fatou Faye from the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, a progressive policy nonprofit, told them. ​“Frontex is militarizing the Mediterranean,” agreed Saliou Diouf, founder of Boza Fii, a migrant advocacy group. If Frontex is stationed at African borders, he said, ​“It’s over.”

The programs are part of a broader EU migration strategy of ​“border externalization,” as the practice is called in eurospeak. The idea is to increasingly outsource European border control by partnering with African governments, extending EU jurisdiction deep into the countries from which many migrants come. The strategy is multifaceted, including the distribution of high-tech surveillance equipment, police trainings and development programs — or at least the illusion of them — that claim to address the root causes of migration.

Author: Matt Rota

In 2016, the EU designated Senegal, both a migration origin and transit country, as one of its five priority partner nations in addressing African migration. But in total 26 African countries have received taxpayer euros aimed at curbing migration through more than 400 discrete projects. Between 2015 and 2021, the EU invested $5.5 billion in such projects, with more than 80% of the funds coming from developmental and humanitarian aid coffers. In Senegal alone, according to a report from the German Heinrich Böll Foundation, the bloc invested at least $320 million since 2005.

These investments carry significant risks, since it appears the European Commission does not always conduct human rights impact assessments before unleashing them on countries that, as Strik notes, often lack democratic safeguards to ensure the technology or policing strategies aren’t misused. To the contrary, the EU’s suite of African anti-migration efforts amount to techno-political experiments: equipping authoritarian governments with repressive tools that can be used on migrants, and many others as well.

“If the police have this technology at their disposal to track migrants,” explains Ousmane Diallo, a researcher with Amnesty International’s West Africa bureau, ​“there is nothing to ensure it won’t be used to target others, such as civil society or political actors.”

Over the past year, I have trekked through Senegal’s border towns, spoken with dozens of people and sifted through hundreds of public and leaked documents to piece together the impact of EU migration investments in this key country. What has emerged is a complex web of initiatives that do little to address the reasons people migrate — but a lot to erode fundamental rights, national sovereignty and local economies in African countries that have become EU policy labs.

The EU’s frenzy to half migration can be traced to the 2015 migration surge, when more than one million asylum-seekers from the Middle East and Africa — fleeing conflict, violence and poverty — arrived on Europe’s shores. The so-called migrant crisis triggered a rightward shift in Europe, with populist leaders exploiting fears to frame it as both a security and existential threat, bolstering xenophobic, nationalist parties.

But the peak of migration from West African countries like Senegal came well before 2015: In 2006, more than 31,700 migrants arrived on boats in the Canary Islands, a Spanish territory 60 miles from Morocco. The influx caught Spain’s government off guard, prompting a joint operation with Frontex, dubbed ​“Operation Hera,” to patrol the African coast and intercept boats heading toward Europe.

Operation Hera, which civil liberties nonprofit Statewatch described as ​“opaque and unaccountable,” marked the first (though temporary) Frontex deployment outside EU territory — the first sign of externalizing European borders to Africa since the end of colonialism in the mid-20th century. While Frontex left Senegal in 2018, the Spanish Guardia Civil remains to this day, continuing to patrol the coast and even carrying out airport passport checks to stop irregular migration.

It wasn’t until 2015’s ​“migrant crisis,” however, that EU bureaucrats in Brussels adopted a blunter strategy by dedicating funds to stem migration at the source. They created the ​“European Union Emergency Trust Fund for stability and addressing root causes of irregular migration and displaced persons in Africa,” or EUTF for short.

While the name sounds benevolent, it’s the EUTF that’s responsible for the Rosso border station’s black briefcase, drone and night-vision goggles. The fund has also been used to send European bureaucrats and consultants across Africa to lobby governments to draft new migration policies — policies that, as one anonymous EUTF consultant told me, are frequently ​“copy-pasted from country to country” without regard for the unique circumstances faced by each.

“The EU is forcing Senegal to adopt policies that have nothing to do with us,” Senegalese migration researcher Fatou Faye told Ernst and Strik.

But European aid serves as a powerful incentive, says Leonie Jegen, a University of Amsterdam researcher who studies EU influence on Senegal’s migration governance. Such funds, she says, have led Senegal to reform its institutions and legal frameworks along European lines, reproducing ​“Eurocentric policy categories” that stigmatize and even criminalize regional mobility. All of it, Jegen notes, comes wrapped in the underlying suggestion that ​“improvement and modernity” are things ​“being brought from the outside” — a suggestion reminiscent of Senegal’s colonial past.

Centuries ago, the very borders now being fortified by EU demand were drawn by European empires negotiating among themselves in the rush to plunder African resources. Germany seized swaths of West and Eastern Africa; the Netherlands staked its claim in South Africa; the British captured a belt of land spanning from north to south in the eastern part of the continent; and French colonies stretched from Morocco to the Republic of the Congo, including present-day Senegal, which gained independence just 63 years ago.

I arrived at the dusty checkpoint in the village of Moussala, on Senegal’s border with Mali, at noon on a sweltering early March day. As a main transit point, dozens of trucks and motorcycles were lined up, waiting to cross. After months of ultimately fruitless efforts to get government permission to access the border posts directly, I was hoping the station’s chief would tell me how EU funding is shaping their operation. The chief refused to go into detail, but confirmed they’d recently received EU training and equipment, which they regularly use. A small diploma and trophy from the training, both emblazoned with the EU flag, sat on his desk as proof.

The creation and equipping of border posts like Moussala has also been an important element in the EU’s partnership with the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM). Besides the surveillance tech the DNLT branches receive, migration data analysis systems have also been installed at each post, along with biometric fingerprinting and facial recognition systems. The stated aim is to create what eurocrats call an African IBM system: Integrated Border Management. In a 2017 statement, IOM’s project coordinator in Senegal loftily declared that ​“IBM is more than a simple concept; it is a culture,” by which he apparently meant a continent-wide ideological shift toward embracing the EU’s perspective on migration.

In more practical terms, the IBM system means merging Senegalese databases (containing sensitive biometric data) with data from international police agencies (such as Interpol and Europol), allowing governments to know who’s crossed which borders and when. That’s something, experts warn, that can easily facilitate deportations and other abuses.

The prospect isn’t abstract. In 2022, a former Spanish intelligence agent told Spanish newspaper El Confidencial that local authorities in different African countries ​“use the technology provided by Spain to persecute and repress opposition groups, activists and citizens critical of power,” and that the Spanish government was well aware.

A European Commission spokesperson claimed that ​“All security projects funded by the EU have a training and capacity building component on human rights” and that the bloc conducts human rights impact assessments prior to and during the implementation of all such projects. But when Dutch MEP Tineke Strik asked for those assessment reports earlier this year, she received official responses from three separate Commission departments saying they did not have them. One response read: ​“There is no regulatory requirement to do so.”

In Senegal, where civil liberties are increasingly at risk, the threat of surveillance technology being misused is amplified. In 2021, Senegal’s security forces killed 14 anti-government protesters; in the past two years, several Senegalese opposition politicians and journalists have been jailed for criticizing the government, reporting on politically sensitive issues or ​“spreading fake news.” Many feared that in 2024 current President Macky Sall intended to seek reelection for an unconstitutional third term. In June, Sall’s main opponent was sentenced to two years in jail on charges of ​“corrupting the youth.” The sentence set off nationwide protests that left 23 people dead in its first few days and saw the government restrict internet access. Sall finally announced in July that he won’t be seeking reelection, restoring stability throughout the country, but not dispelling fears among its citizens that their government is becoming increasingly authoritarian. And in that context, many worry the tools the country is receiving from the EU will only make things worse at home, while doing nothing to stop migration.

Just as I was about to give up trying to talk with local police, an undercover immigration officer in Tambacounda, another transit hub that sits between the Malian and Guinean borders, agreed to speak under condition of anonymity. Tambacounda is one of Senegal’s poorest regions and the source of most of its outbound migration. Everyone there, including the officer, knows someone who’s tried to leave for Europe.

“If I wasn’t a policeman, I would migrate as well,” the officer said through a translator after hustling away from his station. The EU’s border investments ​“haven’t done anything,” he continued, noting that, just the next day, a group was crossing into Mali en route to Europe.

Since gaining independence in 1960, Senegal has been hailed as a beacon of democracy and stability, while many of its neighbors have struggled with political strife and coups. But over a third of the population lives below the poverty line, and the lack of opportunities drives many to migrate, particularly to France and Spain. Today, remittances from that diaspora constitute nearly 10% of Senegal’s GDP. As Africa’s westernmost mainland nation, many West Africans also cross through Senegal as they flee economic hardship as well as violence from regional offshoots of al Qaeda and ISIS, which has forced nearly 4 million people to leave their homes.

“The EU can’t just solve things by raising walls and throwing money,” the officer told me. ​“It can finance all they want but they won’t stop migration like this.” Much of the EU money spent on policing and borders, he said, has accomplished little more than buying border town officials new air-conditioned cars.

Meanwhile, services for deported people — such as protection and reception facilities — are left severely underfunded. Back at the Rosso border crossing, hundreds are deported weekly from Mauritania. Mbaye Diop works with a handful of volunteers at the Red Cross center on the Senegalese side of the river to receive those deportees: men, women and children, sometimes bearing wounds on their wrists from handcuffs or after being beaten by Mauritanian police.

But Diop lacks the resources to actually help them.

The entire approach was wrong, Diop says. ​“We have humanitarian needs, not security needs.”

The EU has also tried a ​“carrot” approach to dissuade migration, offering business grants or professional training to those who return or don’t try to leave. Outside Tambacounda, scores of billboards advertising EU projects pepper the road into town.

But the offers aren’t all they promise, as 40-year-old Binta Ly knows well. Ly runs a pristine corner shop in Tambacounda, selling local juices and toiletries. Although she finished high school and studied a year of law in college, the high cost of living in Dakar ultimately forced her to drop out and move to Morocco to find work. She lived in Casablanca and Marrakech for seven years; after falling ill, she returned to Senegal and opened her shop.

In 2022, Ly applied for a small business grant, meant to entice local Senegalese to not migrate, from an EU-funded migration reintegration and prevention initiative office called BAOS, which opened within the Tambacounda branch of Senegal’s Regional Development Agency that year. Ly’s proposal was to start a printing, copying and laminating service in her shop, conveniently located next to a primary school with a need for such services.

Author: Matt Rota

Ly was approved for a grant of about $850 — a quarter of the budget she requested, but exciting nonetheless. A year after approval, however, Ly hadn’t seen a single franc of that funding.

In Senegal overall, BAOS has received a total $10 million from the EU to fund such grants. But the Tambacounda branch got only $100,000, according to Abdoul Aziz Tandia, director of the local office of the Regional Development Agency — enough to fund just 84 businesses in a region of more than half a million people, and nowhere near enough to address the scale of its needs.

A European Commission spokesperson said that grant distribution finally began this April, and Ly received a printer and laminating machine, but no computer to use them with. ​“It’s good to have this funding,” Ly says, ​“but waiting so long changes all my business plans.”

Tandia admits that BAOS isn’t meeting the demand. Partly that’s because of bureaucracy, he says: Dakar must approve all projects and the intermediaries are foreign NGOs and agencies, meaning local authorities and beneficiaries alike have no control over the funds they best know how to use. But also, Tandia acknowledges, with many regions outside the capital lacking access to clean water, electricity and medical facilities, micro-grants alone aren’t sufficient to keep people from migrating.

“For the medium- and long-term, these investments don’t make sense,” Tandia says.

Few of the EU’s migration projects seem responsive to local realities. But saying so out loud carries substantial risk, as migration researcher Boubacar Sèye knows better than most.

Born in Senegal but now living in Spain, Sèye himself is a migrant. He left Ivory Coast, where he was working as a math teacher, when violence erupted after its 2000 presidential election. After brief stints in France and Italy, he arrived in Spain, where he ultimately obtained citizenship and started a family with his Spanish wife. But the heavy death toll that came with the 2006 migrant surge to the Canary Islands prompted Sèye to start an organization, Horizons Sans Frontières, to help integrate African migrants in Spain. Today, Sèye conducts research and advocates for the rights of people on the move more broadly, with a focus on Africa and Senegal.

In 2019, Sèye obtained a document detailing EU migration spending in Senegal and was shocked to see how much money was being invested to stop migration, while thousands of asylum-seekers drown every year along some of the deadliest migration routes in the world. In press interviews and at public events, Sèye began demanding more transparency from Senegal about where the hundreds of millions of dollars in EU funding had gone, calling the programs a ​“failure.”

Author: Matt Rota

In early 2021, Sèye was detained at the airport in Dakar on charges of ​“disseminating fake news.” He spent two weeks in prison, and his health deteriorated quickly under the stress, culminating in a non-fatal heart attack.

“It was inhumane, it was humiliating and it gave me health issues I have to this day,” Sèye says. ​“I just asked: ​‘Where is the money?’”

Sèye’s instincts weren’t wrong. EU migration funding is notoriously opaque and difficult to track. Freedom of Information requests are delayed for months or years, while interview requests to the EU delegation in Senegal, the European Commission and Senegalese authorities are often declined or ignored, as I’ve seen myself. The DNLT and border police, the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and Senegalese Living Abroad — all of which have received EU migration funds — did not respond to repeated interview requests for this story made in writing, by phone and in person.

EU evaluation reports also fail to give a full view of the programs’ impact, perhaps by design. Several consultants who have worked on unpublished impact assessment reports for EUTF projects, speaking anonymously because of nondisclosure agreements, warned that little attention is given to the unforeseen effects some EUTF projects have.

In Niger, for instance, the EU helped draft a law that criminalized virtually all movement in the north of the country, effectively making regional mobility illegal. While the number of irregular crossings on specific migration routes decreased, the policy also made all routes more dangerous, increased prices for smugglers and criminalized local bus drivers and transport companies, with the result that many lost their jobs overnight.

The inability to assess this sort of impact mainly stems from methodological and resource constraints, but also because the EU hasn’t bothered to look.

One consultant who works with an EU-funded monitoring and evaluation company explained it this way: ​“What is the impact? What are the unintended consequences? We don’t have time and space to report on that. [We are] just monitoring projects through reports from the implementing organizations, but our consultancy doesn’t do truly independent evaluations.”

An internal report I obtained noted that ​“very few projects collected the data needed to track progress towards the EUTF overall objectives (to promote stability and limit forced displacement and irregular migration).”

There is also a sense, one consultant said, that only rosy reports are welcome: ​“It’s implied in our monitoring that we need to be positive about the projects so we get future funding.”

In 2018, the European Court of Auditors, an independent EU institution, criticized the EUTF, charging that its process for selecting projects was inconsistent and unclear. A study commissioned by the European Parliament similarly called the process ​“quite opaque.”

“Parliamentary oversight is unfortunately very limited, which is a huge issue when it comes to accountability,” German MEP Cornelia Ernst says. ​“Even as someone very familiar with EU policies, it is almost impossible to understand where exactly the money is going and for what.”

In one case, an EUTF project to create elite border police units in six West African countries, meant to fight jihadist groups and trafficking, is now being investigated for fraud after allegedly misappropriating more than $13 million.

In 2020, two other EUTF projects, meant to modernize the civil registries of Senegal and Ivory Coast, sparked significant public concern after revelations that they aimed to create national biometric databases; privacy advocates feared the projects would collect and store fingerprints and facial scans of both countries’ citizens. When Ilia Siatitsa, of Privacy International, requested documentation from the European Commission, she discovered the Commission had conducted no human rights impact assessment of these projects — a shocking omission, considering their scale and the fact that no European countries maintain databases with this level of biometric information.

A Commission spokesperson claimed the EUTF had never funded a biometric civil registry and that the projects in Senegal and Ivory Coast were always limited to just digitizing documents and preventing fraud. But the EUTF documents Siatitsa obtained clearly outline the biometric dimension in the diagnostic phase, specifying the aim to create ​“a biometric identification database for the population, connected to a reliable civil status system.”

Siatitsa later deduced that both projects’ true purpose seemed to be facilitating the deportation of African migrants from Europe; documents about the Ivory Coast initiative explicitly stated the database would be used to identify and return Ivorians illegally residing in Europe, with one explaining the objective of the project was to make it ​“easier to identify people who are truly Ivorian nationals and to organize their return more easily.”

When Senegalese privacy activist Cheikh Fall learned about the database proposed for his country in 2021, he reached out to the country’s data privacy authority, which, by law, should have been the one to approve such a project. Fall learned that the office had only been informed about the project after the government had already approved it.

In November 2021, Siatitsa filed a complaint with the EU’s ombudsman, which, after an independent investigation, ruled last December that the Commission had failed to consider the potential negative impact on privacy rights that this and other EU-funded migration projects could have in Africa.

Based on conversations with several sources and an internal presentation from the project’s steering committee that I obtained, it appears the project has since scrapped its biometric component. But Siatitsa says the case nonetheless illustrates how technologies forbidden in Europe can be used as experiments in Africa.

In late February, the day after their visit to the Rosso border crossing, MEPs Cornelia Ernst and Tineke Strik drove two hours southwest to meet a contingent of community leaders in the coastal town of Saint-Louis. Most likely named for the canonized 13th-century French King Louis IX, the city was once the capital of France’s West African empire. Today, it’s the epicenter of Senegal’s migration debate.

In a conference room at a local hotel, Ernst and Strik’s EU delegation gathered before leaders of the local fishing community to talk about the proposed deployment of Frontex and migration dynamics in the area. On one side sat the MEPs and their aides; on the other, the locals. On the wall behind the Senegalese contingent hung a painting of a white colonizer in a pith helmet sitting in a boat on a Senegalese river, lecturing the two African men who rowed it. The irony was thick, the atmosphere tense.

Author: Matt Rota

For dozens of generations, Saint-Louis’ local economy has relied on the ocean. The catch from artisanal fishing represents 95% of the national market and the core of the local diet. The fishermen, the women processing the catch for sale, the boat builders, the painters and the local distributors all rely on fishing as it’s been practiced in Senegal for hundreds of years. But a 2014 agreement between the EU and Senegal’s government, allowing European vessels to fish off the West African coast, has decimated the area’s once plentiful bounty and threatens to collapse its economy.

Since European industrial boats threw their first nets, Saint-Louis’ local fishermen have been forced farther and farther offshore. Now, as Chinese trawlers also compete in their waters, they regularly travel 60 miles out to sea.

There’s also a new BP gas platform offshore, which has enticed European leaders as a means of reducing dependence on Russian energy, but which also represents another area Senegalese fishermen can’t go. Locals charge that the coast guard, which primarily used to conduct search and rescue missions for fishermen in distress, now focuses on guarding the foreign rig.

“The people earning money from the exploitation of gas will be at the expense of the blood of the fishermen,” said Moustapha Dieng, the secretary general of the national fishing union.

As the situation has deteriorated, many locals lost their only source of income and were forced to consider migration instead.

After several hours of heated complaints, Strik acknowledged this irony, which was becoming painfully apparent. ​“It is very clear,” she said, ​“that the EU trade policy and its fishing agreement is creating migration towards Europe.”

The month after Ernst and Strik returned from Senegal, the European Parliament’s human rights committee held a hearing about the impact EU migration policy is having on human rights in West Africa. Cire Sall, from Boza Fii, together with a Human Rights Watch researcher working in Mauritania and an NGO staffer from Mali, all voiced their concerns that the EU’s policies in the region don’t address local needs but undermine sovereignty and human rights.

The Commission’s representatives brushed away these complaints, as well as Strik’s call for a monitoring system to suspend EU participation if human rights are violated. There was no need for a human rights assessment, one representative said, seeming to downplay a major announcement, because Senegal’s government had signaled it wasn’t open to Frontex moving in.

In the hearing room and in Senegal, the news brought a sense of relief. Strik saw it as a sign that the ​“EU is losing influence in Senegal because of frustration about the unequal relationship.”

But that relief shouldn’t last. While Frontex’s deployment has been (at least temporarily) blocked in Senegal, it appears on track for Mauritania, and likely other countries soon. The European Commission has committed to funding international partnerships in Africa until at least 2027, including through another, recently launched fund, the Neighbourhood, Development and International Cooperation Instrument, which is dedicating nearly $9 billion for what are essentially anti-migration projects worldwide.

All of it means that one of the wealthiest regions on earth will continue redirecting sorely needed development aid toward stopping the flow of migrants instead, under the pretext of addressing migration’s root causes. But as the experience in Senegal makes clear, the real root causes  —  the ones that serve European interests  —  are here to stay.

Credits:

Kathryn Joyce – Investigative Editor, In These Times
Jessica Stites – Editorial Director, In These Times
Rachel Dooley – Creative Director, In These Times
Matt Rota – Illustrator
Anna Sylvester-Trainer – Editor in Chief, Le Monde Afrique
Mady Camara – Local journalist and translator
Hannah Bowlus – Fact checker, In These Times
Ivonne Ortiz – Fact checker, In These Times
Valentine Morizot – English-French Translator, Le Monde