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African Migrants Find Uneasy EU Shelter After Rough Journey

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In this June 13, 2015 photo Jean Paul Apetey , left, and a fellow asylum seeker walk through the northern German village of Otter. Apetey enjoyed a well-organized, warm arrival in the north German state of Lower Saxony. (AP Photo/Dalton Bennett)

In this June 13, 2015 photo Jean Paul Apetey , left, and a fellow asylum seeker walk through the northern German village of Otter. Apetey enjoyed a well-organized, warm arrival in the north German state of Lower Saxony. (AP Photo/Dalton Bennett)

DALTON BENNETT, Associated Press
SHAWN POGATCHNIK, Associated Press

CREIL, France (AP) — Against the odds, Hamed Kouyate has achieved his childhood dream of escaping African poverty and reaching the wealthy heart of Europe. But like many fellow migrants who endured a clandestine odyssey marked by toil and terror, the teenager now questions whether he’s just gambled his life on a cruel illusion.

“Europe has no gold or diamonds for me. I’ve had to sleep rough and go without food for days since arriving in France. Nothing has been as I thought it would be,” the 18-year-old says as he walks along the riverbank in the Parisian suburb of Creil, three years of travel and more than 5,000 meandering miles (8,000 kilometers) from his Ivory Coast home. “I regret leaving Africa. I would not recommend this route even to my worst enemy.”

Since January, The Associated Press has followed a 45-member group of West Africans as they traveled by foot and cramped smugglers’ vehicles from Greece to Hungary via the Balkans. The route, accessed from a Turkey clogged with refugees fleeing Islamic State barbarism, is already the second-most popular way to gain illegal entry to the 28-nation European Union and its two biggest destinations: Germany and France. Unprecedented waves of Asian, Arab and African migrants are taking the slow, grueling route in preference to a sea crossing from North Africa, the quicker but reckless path to Italy. Thousands making that journey have drowned in the Mediterranean over the past year.

Kouyate and several other migrants interviewed by the AP have documented the Balkans’ own risks: deadly night trains that crush trekkers trapped on ridges, bridges and inside tunnels; robberies by criminal gangs and corrupt police lingering like vultures along the route; smugglers who hold their own clients hostage, raping women and beating men, until distant relatives wire extra cash; staggering hunger and thirst as hikes expected to take days stretch into weeks.

That trauma was all supposed to be worth it, the travelers kept telling themselves with each brutal setback. By April they finally reached Hungary, from which they could travel by jitney cabs and public transport links within the largely passport-free EU to Germany and France. The vast majority of the West Africans reached their destinations by May, having paid a series of Asian and African smugglers more than 5,000 euros ($5,500) to cover every link in the chain from Turkey to the EU’s eastern frontier.

While Germany has proven to be comparatively generous to arrivals, France is posing a tougher test. Neither permits the asylum-seekers to work while their cases are under review, but Germany gives the newcomers often high-quality housing in bucolic suburban settings along with monthly payments in the low three figures. Kouyate, by contrast, says he has received a single 40 euro ($45) payment in France, where he has bounced from sofa to bedsit to park bench and back again.

Germany received 202,834 asylum-seekers in 2014 — nearly a third of the EU total — and expects to double that figure to reach another record high this year. Chancellor Angela Merkel has publicly committed to doubling federal government spending on asylum-seeker support and pledged an extra 1 billion euros this month to state and local authorities to ensure all newcomers have housing and can pursue German language education, mandatory for achieving residency.

It’s a starkly different picture in France, which already has accepted more than 250,000 foreigners as refugees — many of them French speakers from former colonial possessions such as Ivory Coast — and last year received another 101,895 asylum applicants, second-most in the EU, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The French Office for Protection of Refugees and Expatriates is able to house only a third of new applicants directly, while many sleep outdoors, in train stations or tent shantytowns.

The waiting for state accommodation can typically last a year — by which time migrants already have lost their court cases and exhausted their right to stay.

France’s immigration tribunals now are accepting less than a fifth of applicants. They favor candidates from active war zones such as Syria, not economic migrants from impoverished but relatively peaceful Ivory Coast, where a decade of bloody coups and civil war has abated since 2011.

The prospect of rejection has yet to sink in for Kouyate. He handed himself twice to police before getting a referral to child protection authorities, who helped him secure a state-funded spot in a youth hostel. He now hopes to win a job as a professional soccer player, a seemingly pie-in-the-sky ambition given that he failed to achieve this goal in less-competitive Turkey. He’s already been rebuffed by a few French clubs who said they couldn’t consider giving him a trial without proper residency documentation.

Kouyate, undaunted, appears to be disenchanted with everything about France except the football.

“Soccer is my passion. It’s because of soccer that I’m in Europe. In September I’m going to train with a team,” he said, noting he currently lacks studded soccer boots.

“The hostel will buy me soccer boots and they’ll register me with a team,” he insisted.

Around 500 miles (800 kilometers) to the northeast, his Ivorian travel mates Jean Paul Apetey and Hilarion Charlemagne have enjoyed a well-organized, warm arrival in the north German state of Lower Saxony. Unlike Kouyate, they are much happier with their state-provided surroundings in farming towns south of Hamburg, where fields of strawberries and white asparagus dominate the landscape. Both are focused on learning enough German quickly to demonstrate their earnestness and impress their hosts, to win residency and start to earn cash that they can wire home to their children.

Charlemagne held up the crumbling pair of shoes he has worn since Greece, including on more than two weeks of police-interrupted hikes through Macedonia. “I won’t be needing these shoes much longer,” said the 45-year-old teacher.

German authorities have placed him and three other West African migrants in a newly refurbished, two-apartment residence in the town of Brietlingen, population 3,400. The neighbors, an elderly German couple, don’t speak French or know where Ivory Coast is. Charlemagne calls the 70-something woman “Oma,” German for grandma.

The woman, who didn’t want to be named, said her family fled their native Poland in 1945 as the Russians closed in, so she relates to the Africans’ “feeling of the unknown” as newcomers.

Charlemagne and Apetey, a 34-year-old former Ivorian soldier, each receive around 140 euros ($157) a month to cover expenses, and those benefits could rise next month to more than 300 euros ($335) monthly.

Apetey has been placed in a refurbished former hotel in the center of Otter, a village of barely 1,500 residents, some of whom had never seen an African face in the flesh before. The college dorm-style facility opened just three months ago and already houses more than 40 migrants from across Africa and the Middle East.

He shares a room with another Ivorian and two Bosnians, whom he freely admits to distrusting, chiefly because they cannot talk to each other. He suspects a neighboring Libyan of stealing a 20-euro note from his room, but he cannot confront him directly because he doesn’t speak Arabic. Most annoying, he says, is the amateur Arab keyboardist down the hall. “He’s awful,” Apetey declared with a laugh.

Relations with locals are better. In an expression of solidarity, about 20 villagers organized a welcome party in the refugees’ new home, bringing cupcakes and board games and rebranding the residence’s sprawling living room the “international cafe” for the night.

“You can really never know what they have been through, but I can imagine and I can be compassionate about it,” said Maduria Roeper, a 59-year-old lifestyle consultant, Apetey smiling uncomprehendingly at her side. “They definitely must have gone through hard times … some sort of trauma.”

Roeper said some villagers opposed sheltering the foreigners in Otter, but most are determined “to make a bridge for the asylum seekers, to reduce the fear, the barriers … and really show them from our heart we want to integrate them.”

Apetey says he appreciates German hospitality, particularly the informative and friendly approach of police, which he contrasts with every other EU force he’s experienced from Greece to Austria. But he fears that his respite from homelessness could be short-lived, that German authorities could dismiss his case for refugee status. This already has happened to Ivorian friends pursuing appeals against deportation orders. He notes that his temporary residence card has an expiry date of just three months.

“I know people who went on the same journey as me, who got the card and three months later, they received a letter saying they have to leave Germany,” he said. “We are asylum seekers. We don’t have anything! I don’t have any contacts. I appeal to whom? With what money? You get a lawyer, that’s money.”

In France, Kouyate suggests that part of him wouldn’t mind going back home. He says Africans enjoy a happier environment and greater social solidarity, and contrasts that with the many times he’s seen Europeans walk callously past street beggars.

But Kouyate says he must remain resolute and make a European success of himself, because his parents have sacrificed many thousands in cash payments to smugglers and soccer agents. He doesn’t want their investment to be in vain.

“It’s not a debt exactly. It’s about pride,” he said. “When parents spend so much to send their child to Europe, it’s rare that the child shies from the challenge … so I can’t just go back.”

___

Pogatchnik reported from Dublin. Associated Press reporters Raphael Satter in Istanbul and Kirsten Grieshaber in Berlin contributed to this report.

Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Bay Area

Nigerian Bank Chief Killed in Helicopter Crash on Way to Superbowl XVIII

According to the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Dept., the crash occurred near Nipton, on the edge of the Mojave Desert Preserve. The poor weather conditions — rain, wind and snow showers—may have contributed to the accident, although the investigation is not complete. All six aboard were killed. Herbert Wigwe, 57, founded Access Bank in 1989, and it became the country’s largest competitor, Diamond Bank in 2018.

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Herbert Wigwe with his wife, Chizoba Wigwe, left, and Abimbola Ogunbanjo, right. ENigeria Newspaper image.
Herbert Wigwe with his wife, Chizoba Wigwe, left, and Abimbola Ogunbanjo, right. ENigeria Newspaper image.

By Post Staff

The co-founder of one of Nigeria’s largest banks died with his wife, son and three others when the helicopter transporting them from Palm Springs, Ca., to Boulder City, Nev. to attend the fifty-eighth SuperBowl at the stadium outside Las Vegas crashed on Feb. 9.

According to the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Dept., the crash occurred near Nipton, on the edge of the Mojave Desert Preserve. The poor weather conditions — rain, wind and snow showers—may have contributed to the accident, although the investigation is not complete. All six aboard were killed

Herbert Wigwe, 57, founded Access Bank in 1989, and it became the country’s largest competitor, Diamond Bank in 2018.

More recently, Wigwe was planning to open a banking service in Asia this year after making successful expansions to other parts of Africa, including South Africa, Kenya, and Botswana.

Nigerian President Bola Tinubu described Wigwe’s death as an ‘overwhelming tragedy.”

Oakland resident and Nigerian immigrant Kayode Gbadebo agrees with Tinubu. He met Wigwe in Nigeria but crossed paths with him in London in 2006. Wigwe, he said, “took risks.”

He was young and people thought he couldn’t do what he intended, which was not so much about money but community.

“He was more like Jesus in washing the feet of the poor– Wigwe was culturizing community,” Gbadebo said.

“There will never be another like him. This is a deep, deep loss” and he hopes everyone will eventually “be comforted.”

He was also disappointed that a replacement has already been named even before Wigwe is buried. “It is not reasonable. You don’t want a vacuum, but it’s” not fair to the family, Gbadebo observed.

Wigwe had also been working to solve the migration issues from African countries, believing that “investing in higher education was key to controlling mass migration, which “is destabilising countries across the world,” BBC News reported.

“We need to take a holistic approach to address global migration, starting with our traditional framework for international development,” Wigwe wrote.

To that end, according to BBC News, Wigwe was preparing to open Wigwe University in Niger, where he was from.

“The best place to limit migration is not in the middle of the Mediterranean or the English Channel or the Rio Grande. It is in the home countries that so many migrants are so desperate to leave,” he wrote, saying his university was an opportunity for him “to give back to society.”

Besides Wigwe and his wife, Chizoba Nwuba Wigwe, and one son, two crew members and Bimbo Ogunbanjo, former group chairman of the Nigerian Exchange Group Plc, were also killed in the crash.

According to Wikipedia, three other children survive Wigwe.

In his statement reported in People magazine, Tinubu described Wigwe as “a distinguished banker, humanitarian, and entrepreneur.”

“I pray for the peaceful repose of the departed and ask God Almighty to comfort the multitude of Nigerians who are grieving and the families of the deceased at this deeply agonizing moment,” the president said.

He added, “Their passing is an overwhelming tragedy that is shocking beyond comprehension.”

Besides feeling the tremendous loss, Gbadebo fears the disorder and greed that will follow. “It’s a mess,” he said.

People magazine, BBC News and Wikipedia were the sources for this report.

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Activism

No Valid Reason for Failing to Condemn Hamas’ Act of Terrorism

On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists crossed the Israel-Gaza border and indiscriminately slaughtered Israeli civilians in their homes. They killed nearly 300 young people at a music festival and took at least 200 hostages including 30 children. The atrocities they committed included massacres of families, abduction of the elderly and children, burning of babies and rapes of women.

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iStock image.
iStock image.

By Joe W. Bowers Jr.

California Black Media

OPINION

On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists crossed the Israel-Gaza border and indiscriminately slaughtered Israeli civilians in their homes.

They killed nearly 300 young people at a music festival and took at least 200 hostages including 30 children. The atrocities they committed included massacres of families, abduction of the elderly and children, burning of babies and rapes of women.

The horrific surprise attack deserves universal and unequivocal condemnation. President Joe Biden called what Hamas did “an act of sheer evil” and pledged to defend the lives of Israelis and Jewish Americans.

He said, “Let there be no doubt. The United States has Israel’s back. We’ll make sure the Jewish and democratic state of Israel can defend itself today, tomorrow, as we always have.”

Hamas killed approximately 1,400 people including 32 Americans. Citizens from 40 different countries including the United Kingdom, France, Mexico, and Thailand were killed or reported missing.

Hamas fighters breached Israel’s border defenses on the final day of Sukkot while soldiers were away due to the holiday and launched attacks on 22 towns outside the Gaza Strip. This security lapse has been described as a catastrophic failure of Israel’s intelligence agencies..

Hamas is an extremist Islamist militant organization that has governed the Gaza Strip since 2007. It is recognized as an Iranian-backed terrorist group by the U.S. and the European Union and has a long history of violence against Jews and Palestinians, the latter of whom they often use as human shields.

While there have been plenty of groups who have unequivocally condemned the massacres, there are a number who haven’t, including organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Black Alliance for Peace, Red Nation, and independent Black Lives Matter (BLM) chapters (excluding the national Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation).

The DSA San Francisco chapter put out a statement on Oct. 9 that said, “Socialists support the Palestinian people’s, and all people’s, right to resist and fight for their own liberation. This weekend’s events are no different.”

Student organizations at a number of universities and colleges in California signed a solidarity statement titled “Resistance Uprising in Gaza” from Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). The statement attributes the violence of the Hamas attack to what it refers to as Israeli apartheid and occupation.

The SJP statement written by Bears for Palestine at UC Berkeley says, “We support the resistance, we support the liberation movement, and we indisputably support the Uprising.”  Essentially, these students are indirectly associating themselves with Hamas’ barbaric acts under the guise of “resistance.”

Signing the statement were 51 student organizations including those from Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC Davis, UC San Diego, CSU Sacramento, and USC.

A statement signed by 34 Harvard student organizations said, “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”

Many university leaders, where these students are enrolled, have been guilty of failing to unequivocally condemn Hamas and for inadequately addressing their students’ expressed support for Hamas.

Several Stanford faculty members, including three Nobel laureates, condemned Stanford’s administrators’ weak response to acts of terrorism and the expression of pro-Hamas sentiments by students on campus.

Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005. It dismantled 21 Israeli settlements in the territory and handed them over to the Palestinian Authority.

The assault by Hamas on Oct. 7 was not an ordinary clash with Israel. Hamas’ actions resulted in the deadliest single day for Jews since the Holocaust.

While there are valid reasons for protesting Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and a real reckoning with the Israeli government on its policies is long overdue, nothing justifies Hamas’ attack.

Israelis who were killed largely had nothing to do with the conditions of Palestinians in Gaza. Some of the victims weren’t even Israeli — they were just tourists.

The students blaming Israel for the atrocities committed by Hamas have faced criticism. Some groups have withdrawn their endorsements because of the backlash aimed at them. Others have doubled down on their activism. SJP held a “National Day of Resistance” on several campuses.

Several CEOs have asked Harvard to disclose a list of members from the organizations assigning responsibility to Israel to insure they do not hire any of their members. A Berkeley law professor has also urged firms not to hire his students who have publicly blamed Israel for the war.

This California Black Media report was supported in whole or in part by funding provided by the State of California, administered by the California State Library.

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Activism

Oakland Deputy Mayor Kimberly Mayfield Meets Legislators in France

Dr. Kimberly Mayfield, deputy mayor of the City of Oakland, met with elected officials in France, including two members of the French National Assembly, and visited several educational programs, where she spoke with educators and students. Dr. Mayfield was able to visit France after a visit to London with the Hidden Genius Project and Oakland Natives Give Back to participate in Black History Month, which takes place in October in England. No public money was spent.

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Attending the meeting at the French National Assembly were (L to R): Kimberly Mayfield, Danièle Obono, Nadège Abomangoli, and Robyn Wilkes. Photo courtesy of Kimberly Mayfield.
Attending the meeting at the French National Assembly were (L to R): Kimberly Mayfield, Danièle Obono, Nadège Abomangoli, and Robyn Wilkes. Photo courtesy of Kimberly Mayfield.

By Ken Epstein

Dr. Kimberly Mayfield, deputy mayor of the City of Oakland, last week met with elected officials in France, including two members of the French National Assembly, and visited several educational programs, where she spoke with educators and students.

She met with Danièle Obono and Nadège Abomangoli, both members of the French Parliament, where they discussed many issues, including policymaking, racism, and immigration.

Dr. Mayfield was able to visit France after a visit to London with the Hidden Genius Project and Oakland Natives Give Back to participate in Black History Month, which takes place in October in England. No public money was spent.

Obono, has represented the 17th constituency of Paris in the National Assembly since 2017. A member of La France Insoumise (FI), she was reelected in the first round of the 2022 legislative election.

Abomangoli, also a member of La France Insoumise, was elected to Parliament for Seine-Saint-Denis’s 10th constituency in the 2022 French legislative election. She was born in Brazzaville, Republic of the Congo.

The two leaders had lots of questions about current conditions in the U.S., Dr. Mayfield told the Oakland Post. “They wanted to know what it means for Oakland to be a sanctuary city, what my thoughts were on the upcoming presidential elections, and what I thought the prospects were for Biden and Trump,” she said.

They also wanted to find out about Black fraternities and sororities in the U.S., and what people did to mobilize the vote, so that voter suppression would not be able to determine the outcome of elections.

They pointed out that, as in the U.S., people in France are dealing with police brutality, and the handful of Black members of Parliament sometimes face hostility when they speak out.

With an extensive background as an education professor and administrator, as well as a public-school teacher, Mayfield said she was excited to have the opportunity to visit a primary and a middle school and had a wide-ranging conversation with young people at Réseau Etudiant, an after-school study program.

She also met with residents and elected officials from Gennevilliers, a small port city close to Paris, which is similar to Oakland in demographics and politics.

Zahir Meliani, a resident of Gennevilliers, made arrangements for Mayfield’s meetings at the Parliament and her visit to his city.

She was welcomed by Mayor Patrice Leclerc and one of his deputies, Celine Lanoiselée, and they toured areas of the town. They discussed some differences in city governance structures between France and the U.S. and explored the potential for exchange visits between young people in the two countries.

“I am excited to work on improving our cities and contributing to peace in the world by using the potential for online and in-person visits to learn from each other,” said Mayfield.

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