Videos document baby’s traumatic birth in an Algerian detention centre

Issued on: 21/07/2023 – 15:51

5 min

The videos show a traumatic scene – a young mother is giving birth on the floor, without any medical support. She’s surrounded by other women, who are crying and screaming. A witness filmed the scene using a cellphone that she miraculously managed to hide from security forces at the migrant detention centre in Dely Ibrahim, near Algiers. 

The footage shows several women using a bottle of water to wash the baby, who is still attached to his mother via the umbilical cord. A woman wearing a blue T-shirt wraps the newborn up and then sets him on his mother’s chest.  

In the second video, the mother and baby are no longer there. The footage shows blood on the floor and a number of people speak, sounding frantic. 

“Did the baby fall? Where is the baby?” asks the person filming, over and over again. 

Eventually, they turn the camera towards a barred window. Outside, there is an ambulance and men wearing the uniforms of the Algerian Civil Defence – essentially emergency workers. 

Our team decided to publish screengrabs from the video and not the video itself, in order to protect the identity of the mother, baby and women detained at the centre. 

Our team spoke to a diplomatic source, who said that the young mother is from Niger. She and her baby were taken to the hospital and, the next day, her country’s ambassador visited her there.

‘We pissed and slept on the floor and the smells were suffocating’

The two videos were filmed by a woman from Cameroon, who sent the videos to her friend and countryman, Paul (not his real name). Paul is the person who shared the videos with our team. He knows the Dely Ibrahim detention centre well – he told us he was also detained there before being deported to Niger in recent weeks. 

I spent a week in the centre. The conditions there are terrible. I didn’t have water or food. We pissed and we slept on the floor and the smell was suffocating. The centre isn’t big – there are only about six rooms. And yet there are 500 to 1,000 people locked up there. 

The Algerian police confiscated our phones, because they were worried that would would leak images of the terrible conditions there. 

Deportations to the desert 

Our team asked the Algerian interior ministry what would happen to the mother and child once they left the hospital. They didn’t respond to our query. 

If they are indeed deported to Niger, then the road will be long and dangerous for the vulnerable pair. Paul told our team that migrants are transported from the detention centre to Tamarasset, about 2,000 kilometres to the south of the capital:

We left the centre by bus – women on one side, men on another. They gave us stale bread and a few pieces of cheese, that was it. 

There were police in the bus with us – armed with guns and truncheons. When people spoke up about the way that we were being treated, the police responded with insults: “You n*******, we don’t need a Black in Algeria, go home.”

After the bus journey to Tamarasset, the migrants are then taken by truck to the border with Niger and left in the middle of the desert at a place known as “Point Zero”. Then, they have to make their own way to the Nigerien town of Assamaka, which is about a dozen kilometres away. 

‘There are often women with babies and sometimes pregnant women’

It’s not rare for very vulnerable people to be deported in this manner, says Moctar Dan Yaye, a member of ’“Alarm Phone Sahara”, a project that documents the deportations to Niger. 

When the Algerian authorities round up people from sub-Saharan Africa, they will take anyone. There are often women with babies and sometimes pregnant women who get deported to the desert. I remember seeing a woman back in February arrive with her eight-month-old baby. They were both in terrible condition. 

In the desert, it is either extremely hot or extremely cold and dry. Some people die there – we’ve found bodies. But because we don’t have contact with the Algerian authorities, it is hard to know how many people lose their lives. 

Other than an agreement signed back in 2014 relating to migrants from Niger, there are no laws against the “unofficial” deportations that Algeria has been carrying out since 2018. Human rights groups and NGOs have spoken out against the way that migrants and asylum seekers from sub-Saharan Africa are treated in Algeria, emphasising that there is a real lack of oversight. In some cases, people with legal status have been deported in this way. 

More than 9,000 people have been deported from Algeria to Niger since the start of the year alone, according to the International Organisation for Migration.