Reportage
Fun news: my story about Kilkilu Ana, a comedy evening in Juba has been nominated for a Gouden Freelancer Award by Bureau Wibaut! The prize is sponsored by the Dutch NVJ. Find a short interview I did with Vera Spaans on their website. The award ceremony is held in Amsterdam’s Volkshotel on November 1st.
After hundreds of kilometers of vast arid flats, Ethiopian migrants encounter a point where the Djiboutian desert meets the sea. On the other side, just 30 kilometres away, the mountains of Yemen pop up. This is the Bab-el-Mandab, Arabic for the ‘Gate of Tears’, where the African continent almost meets the Arabian Peninsula.
An unknown number of migrants die in these waters; IOM doctor Youssouf Moussa (white kufi, 4rd picture) showed me pictures of drowned women and children, swollen by the sea and eaten by the fish. He and his team buried the bodies in makeshift graves on the beach, under piles of black stones.
Last year, over 123,000 people came into Djibouti, to make the dangerous journey into war-torn Yemen; many want to reach Saudi Arabia to work there. But for all the optimistic migrants who traveled with smugglers to the coast, we also met large groups of disillusioned migrants turning back.
Suicidal, traumatised people, who as “failed migrants” fear to go home empty handed. In Yemen, women have been raped by smugglers, men were tortured. Videos of the beatings were sent to relatives in Ethiopia, so they would pay ransom for their loved ones to be released.
Those who still made it through, told us how the smugglers dropped them at the Saudi border, where they “had to run like Usain Bolt” while the border police used them as “target practice”.
iPhone snaps from the weekly at the Kilkilu Comedy Show at the Nyakuron Cultural Center in Juba, the capital of South Sudan.
To forget that the war in neighbouring Sudan is pushing the South Sudanese economy over the edge, hundreds of young South Sudanese watch the performers here “as a form of therapy”. Meanwhile, inflation in Juba is surging.
Read our reportage, with pictures by Guy Peterson, on the website of de Volkskrant. This story was nominated for a Dutch Golden Freelancer Award. Find out more about the award and nomination here.
Since this week, The Netherlands has been in command of the European Aspides operation to protect ships against attacks by Houthis in the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea - a crucial trade route. “We must guarantee the basic principle of freedom of navigation.”
For our report, we traveled to Djibouti to board the Karel Doorman, the largest ship of the Dutch navy fleet.
“We are facing a strong armed force,” says Aspides force commander George Pastoor. He says that each day, several Houthi attacks on cargo ships occur. Ships are also fired upon several times along the route. “The Houthis are a learning organization, just like we are. The threat posed by them has definitely increased since November.”
Eight iPhone snapshots from a long trip through South Africa. Photographer Sven Torfinn and I traveled from Mthatha to Cape Town - from Cape to Cape - to find out why so many disillusioned South Africans are turning their backs to the ANC.
Many believe that Nelson Mandela’s party isn’t keeping the promises they made over 30 years ago, when they came to power after apartheid was abolished and free elections were finally held. For many, the high hopes for a free and equal ‘rainbow nation’ have evaporated as unemployment, crime and corruption are soaring.
A constant water and electricity supply is only there for the rich. The voters have punished the ANC, that has been ruling South Africa since 1994; during last week’s elections, the party got just over 40 percent of the votes, meaning they will lose majority in parliament.
On assignment for de Volkskrant; read our story here.
The Hope Hostel in Kigali (first four pictures), operational through British funding, has been empty for two years and is now preparing to receive the asylum seekers London plans to deport, despite criticism of the Rwandan regime by human rights organizations.
In the UK, parliament approved a controversial law Tuesday that would allow asylum seekers who have come illegally to the United Kingdom to be sent to Rwanda. The lighter their claim for asylum, the greater the chance that the refugees (initially mainly solo-travelling males) will be deported to Rwanda.
The U.K. intends to deter would-be migrants. The Conservative government, led by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, has pledged to put an end to boats carrying migrants crossing the Channel illegally from France. Since 2018, almost 120,000 people have crossed to the U.K. via that route.
Hope Hostel is Rwanda’s first “transit center,” with capacity for 100 people. Maintenance of the site has been covered with British funds for years, through a €433 million ($462.7 million) agreement signed by the two countries in 2022.
Human rights activists and members of the opposition accuse the repressive regime of Rwandan President Paul Kagame of human rights violations and consider that the migration agreement with the U.K. is simply a way to whitewash the reputation of the head of state and his government.
The Brits were inspired to do business with Rwanda in 2021 because Kigali had previously shown its willingness to receive refugees and migrants from the Libyan Civil War. After images spread around the world of migrants in Libya being abused, tortured, and sold into slavery, UNHCR called on countries to help evacuate the stranded migrants. The first flights arrived in Rwanda in 2019.
Since then, more than 2,000 refugees have arrived in Rwanda, where they will be relocated to a safe country through the UNHCR. They are housed just outside the village of Gashora, 40 miles south of Kigali. When we visited the facility, a small group of Eritreans departed for resettlement in Canada and the United States.
Read the whole reportage, for De Volkskrant, here. The story in Spanish can be found here, in English here. More about my picture and story can be viewed in this Buitenhof TV sequence.
Exactly 30 years ago, a genocide commenced in the Central African country Rwanda. In just a hundred days, over 800 thousand Tutsis and moderate Hutus were murdered. For de Volkskrant newspaper, photographer Sven Torfinn and I made a tour through the country to find out: is there reconciliation? What does the discovery of a mass grave do to a community? And why is the government so strict when it comes to who can and cannot be remembered during the annual Kwibuka commemoration? The answers to these questions can be found by tapping on this link. Or listen to the Elke Dag podcast.
“Your parents fought against apartheid,” a young woman wearing a Palestinian flag for a headscarf shouted at a long wall of police officers, “and now you are doing the opposite! This is exactly how it was like during apartheid!” On a field alongside Cape Town’s Seepunt promenade, thousands of demonstrators wearing Arafat scarves and Palestinian flags faced hundreds of police officers equipped with large plexiglass shields and bulletproof vests.
That same morning, an ‘interreligious prayer session’ had been scheduled to be held right here, in front of the stately apartment complexes of the predominantly Jewish seaside district. The Jewish organizer of the event wanted to show that Israel can also count on the support of South Africa. “For Zion’s sake we will not be silent,” could be read on their flyers, which were distributed via WhatsApp in recent days.
But as soon as those messages reached Cape Town’s large pro-Palestinian movement, thousands of demonstrators carrying Palestinian flags marched to Seepunt. Even before the prayer session could start, the handful of pro-Israel demonstrators were escorted from the field by the present police officers, who were fearing a violent confrontation. And so, buses full of pro-Israel demonstrators were forced to turn around.
Since the outbreak of the war between Israel and Hamas, demonstrations have been taking place almost daily in several parts of South Africa, while the government has also remained anything but aloof. “As a people and as an organization who have fought against an oppressive apartheid regime, we pledge solidarity with the Palestinian people,” President Cyril Ramaphosa said in a speech on October 15. Later, they filed an official charge against Israel for genocide at the ICJ in The Hague.
Through their own past of oppression, many people here stand firmly with the Palestinians. But there is also a large Jewish community in the country, and its members are increasingly fearing escalation.
Read the whole piece, written for De Volkskrant, here.
With every gust of wind that rushes through Nugget Street, 53-year-old Nonzuzo Mthembu falls silent for a moment. It’s pointless to continue talking, the loudly flapping pieces of brown plastic that hang in front of the gaping hole in her room make so much noise. One day, a few years ago, all the windows suddenly broke. “Nobody knows why,” says Mthembu. “The building is probably slowly collapsing.” She sighs. “Everything here is breaking down.”
Together with her three children and six grandchildren, Mthembu has been living without electricity, gas and water for more than a decade. Cooking here is done on an open fire, the walls and ceilings are blackened. Toilets haven’t worked for years. The elevator shafts function as a dumping ground and are filled up to the third floor with a mountain of rotting waste. The steel fire escapes have been sawn away and sold for scrap, long streams of urine flow from the stairwell into the dark corridors.
Remington House, as the building is called, is one of Johannesburg’s most notorious buildings - it has been ‘hijacked’ by criminals. Passers-by are regularly dragged into the building with a knife to their throat and robbed. Several women were raped in the structure. And when criminals disappear into the building with the police on their heels, the officers abandon their pursuit, fearing a possible ambush. Only during large-scale police operations do officers dare to enter the premises.
The heart of wealthy Johannesburg, once the cradle of Nelson Mandela’s struggle for a new South Africa, is in decline. With the elections around the corner, the rest of the country is wondering: is this our future? Read the whole story here.
When he’s talking about his father, 17-year-old Ousainou Sandeng stares at his feet. His younger brothers, who were just frolicking around him under the termite-eaten mango tree, quickly went inside when the topic of conversation came.
“He was slaughtered,” says the quiet boy after a deep sigh. His father left on April 14, 2016 to demonstrate. “He demanded electoral reforms,” says Sandeng, “and took to the streets. He was arrested and taken to the headquarters of President Jammeh’s secret service, where he was tortured until he died.”
The Gambia was at the mercy of dictator Jammeh for more than twenty years. Only now, years after his flight, are the painful stories given a place in memorial centers and schools. But it remains difficult to talk about him, and few have hope of his prosecution.
About three hundred kilometers upstream on the Gambia River, near the river island Janjanbureh, Jalamang Danso guides tourists by boat and car past villages, islands and extensive baobab forests. “Most tourists come to Gambia for the three S’s,” he says as a motorboat slowly chugs along the river, “sun, sea and sex.” He scans the coastline for any activity. “While Gambia has so much more to offer.”
The tourism season in Gambia is in full swing; many Dutch people like to flee the cold, Dutch winter for some time in the sun. But they come not only for sun and sea, but also for paid sex. A growing number of Gambians say that this type of ‘sex tourism’ is exploitative and needs to stop. To attract ‘quality tourists’, tourism alternatives aiming for young travelers are slowly coming of the ground.
Read the whole story here.
The French army is reluctantly withdrawing further and further from the Sahel. Anti-French sentiment is also on the rise in Chad, the last partner of France in the region. “They support a dictatorial regime that kills its own people.”
Executions of tied up young men, children murdered with axes and mass attacks on groups of fleeing civilians - these are just some of the terrible stories that Darfuris refugees told us in eastern Chad.
Hundreds of thousands have crossed the border in recent months. The vast majority of people moved to the camp that emerged next to Adré, a sleepy border village that has since been transformed into a gigantic humanitarian hub.
But the humanitarian support in the camp is still inadequate: the rest of the world is busy with other crises, the situation in Adré is dire. Although malnourished children are helped to regain their strength, they run the risk of becoming malnourished again when they are discharged from the clinic. There is simply not enough of everything in the camp.
Our report on the violence in Darfur, which is strongly reminiscent of the ethnic cleansing of 20 years ago, is on the front page of the Volkskrant today, with beautiful images by photographer Sven Torfinn.
