Pato Crepin had walked for three days through the desert and could not take it any more. Twice, he and his family tried to cross the border from Libya into Tunisia; twice, they had been pushed back. Crepin, who was recovering from an infection and had not had a drink for 24 hours, found he could not get up. In the blistering heat of the mid-July desert, his legs had given up.
His wife and six-year-old daughter, however, seemed stronger. Crepin, an asylum seeker from Cameroon, believed that if they left him behind they might yet make it to Tunisia and, from there, perhaps, on to Europe. He did not want to slow them down. “Go,” he told them. “I’ll catch up with you in Tunisia.”
It was the last time he saw them. A week later, a photo of a woman and a child lying dead face down in the desert at the border went viral worldwide. Crepin could not believe it. He could see it was Fati Dosso, his wife, and Marie, their daughter, but he hoped they were resting.
“But no, they were dead,” he told the Guardian in a telephone interview. “I should have been there in their place.”
On 16 July, the day Crepin, 29, became separated from his family, the European Union signed a €1bn deal with Tunisia’s autocratic president, Kais Saied, to help stem irregular migration.
Brussels knew it had a willing ally: not only had Saied made clear his distaste for immigration in a racist speech that stigmatised and terrified black Africans in the country, but Tunisia was in dire economic straits. In return for the EU’s money, the country committed to clamp down on the number of boats leaving its shores.
By the end of July, the Guardian has been told, the number of people taken by Tunisian authorities to remote areas on the borders with Libya and Algeria exceeded 4,000.
According to an official with an intergovernmental organisation, who was speaking on condition of anonymity, at least seven people died of thirst. An NGO that collates reports from the Libyan authorities as well as testimonies of refugees says the true toll is higher. Tunisia denies any wrongdoing.
For Crepin, all that matters is that the two people most dear to him have gone. “I’m trying to forget. It’s a torment. I can’t sleep,” he said. “I’m trying to keep my spirits up. But it’s painful. We lived our story together until the last minute, until the desert.”
Like many refugees traversing north Africa, Crepin and Dosso’s love story began not in a bar or a club or a friend’s party, but in a detention centre in Libya, which for years was the primary gateway for migrants and refugees seeking a better life in Europe.
Both had already travelled huge distances to get there: Dosso from her home in Ivory Coast, Crepin from a part of Cameroon where conflict simmers between anglophone separatists and the government. What began a few years ago as a simple request for English to be used in the courtrooms and public schools of the country’s two anglophone regions gradually escalated into a crisis in which dozens of people have died, hundreds have been imprisoned, and thousands have escaped across the border to Nigeria.
“They burnt down the house and killed my older sister,” says Crepin, who was born and raised in the Buea, the capital of the Southwest region. “She was my only sister.”
Crepin had no choice but to move to Nigeria, where he found work as a mechanic in a village on the border with Cameroon.
“I worked to earn a bit of money,” he said. “There were migrants there; they said there were jobs in the Maghreb area. A smuggler took me to Algeria and then to Libya. That’s where I arrived and met my wife, Fati.”
Born in Gbèka, Touba, in western Ivory Coast, on 20 January 1993, Dosso grew up an orphan with no siblings. The only people who cared for her in Ivory Coast were an aunt and a cousin with whom she kept in touch.
It was in Libya, a country then racked by violence and civil strife, that Dosso at last found her family. After first meeting at the detention centre in Gasr Garabulli, a town in the Tripoli district, she and Crepin managed to keep their relationship going despite repeated physical separations.
At least four times, the couple tried to leave Libya for Europe, and on each occasion they were intercepted and sent by Libyan authorities to different detention centres, splitting them up for months at a time.
“Once I was in the Ben Salid detention centre and she was in a prison in Sabratha,” Crepin recalled. Despite the countless difficulties, the couple managed to stay together. Moreover, after almost seven years in Libya, they were still alive. On 12 March 2017, their daughter, Marie, was born. The couple’s drive to reach Europe – to find peace and decent work – became all the more pressing.
Desperate attempt to reach Europe
By late 2022, when Crepin, Dosso and Marie were still in Libya, another north African country had taken over as the principal departure hub for people trying to reach Europe from Africa.
By mid-August of this year, the number of migrants arriving on Italian shores from Tunisia was reported to be nearly 7,000 more than the total arriving from Libya. According to data from the Italian interior ministry, a record 20,000 people left Tunisia in July alone. Many did not make it.
But the horrors of the journey and the reports of thousands going missing at sea were not enough to put people off – neither those trying to cross the Mediterranean nor those trying to get into Tunisia. On 13 July, Crepin, Dosso and Marie, by now six, decided to embark on the arduous journey from Libya, through the desert, to the Tunisian town of Ben Gardane.
“We walked all night on the 13th before we could see Tunisia not far from us,” said Crepin. “We had run out of water. So we decided to head for the Tunisian coast towards the Tunisian border in the hope of finding some water but we were met by three Tunisian soldiers. They beat us and pushed us back into the desert.”
But the family was determined. They tried again to cross the border, this time successfully, and on 15 July were not far from Ben Gardane, about 20 miles from the Libyan border. They were given water by a Tunisian woman but then their luck ran out once again.
“My wife was experiencing painful periods, so she we tried to see a doctor in Ben Gardane hospital. But we didn’t have the money to see a doctor,” said Crepin. “And that’s when the police arrived. They took us to what looked like a police checkpoint. The next day, Sunday the 16th, we were forced into a van and pushed back into the desert.”
Dosso and her daughter were devastated. They cried in despair. They wanted to try again and tried to persuade Crepin to get up, to carry on. But he felt his body rebelling. He asked another group of asylum seekers if Dosso and Marie could join them and, to his relief, they said yes. Every minute was precious; if his wife and daughter did not reach Tunisia soon, they would die of thirst. They had one last chance, he thought. He didn’t.
“I told her [Dosso] to go and that I would catch up with them in Tunisia,” Crepin said. “And that was the last time I saw them.”
‘Persistent challenges and extreme difficulties’
Crepin still dreams of one day reaching Europe but he does not have enough money to make the journey. Contrary to his fears, he managed to save himself, thanks to a group of Sudanese passersby who offered water and helped him walk to Tunis. But Crepin was soon pushed back by the Tunisian authorities to Libya again, and when he spoke to the Guardian he was still there, in the north-western Tripoli district.
Crepin has little information about his wife and daughter’s deaths beyond what Refugees in Libya, an NGO managed by refugees and asylum seekers, has managed to ascertain. They believe Dosso and Marie most likely died of thirst in the Libyan desert near an area called Al Assa on 18 July.
“Unfortunately, I don’t have any [official] testimonies that have told me about my wife, how she died,” Crepin said. “Perhaps they were dehydrated, tired, and with the beating we had received from the Tunisian authorities, they were exhausted. I imagine it was all of that that killed them, and perhaps also the psychological state they were in because they knew the state I was in, and they were devastated. They knew I could die behind them. I guess that’s it.”
It was Refugees in Libya, working with a network of refugees and migrants in the region, that managed to identify Dosso and Marie and tell their story to the wider world. “We wanted to dismiss the misconception of what is happening in the deserts and at sea where people die and they are regarded as numbers,” said a spokesperson.
Their story demonstrated not only the “persistent challenges and extreme difficulties” faced by refugees and migrants in north Africa, but also their resilience, they said. “Both Pato and Fati, as migrants, endured daily hardships, various forms of torture, and severe stress resulting from the lack of recognition and protection of their rights.
“Nevertheless, they forged a strong bond, and their daughter, Marie, was born amid these trying circumstances. For six years, they shielded young Marie from insurmountable conditions. Their story underscores the immense sacrifices parents make for their children.”
Refugees in Libya estimates between 50 and 70 people have died of thirst in the desert because of the pushbacks by Tunisian authorities. “I had the courage to come forward and speak,” Crepin said. “But there are other people who probably fear being arrested if they speak about their relatives and friends who died in the desert.”
Found together in the sand, the girl nuzzling her mother’s side, the bodies of Marie and Dosso were buried in the Jumayl cemetery, not far from Tripoli. Crepin attended the brief ceremony. “I just hope that my story can prevent these deaths from happening again,” he said. “I appeal to the Tunisian authorities, to my fellow travellers in the desert. I don’t want anyone to go through what I’m going through.”
