On the night of the Montgenèvre pass, the procession of migrants resumed on the snow-covered paths

By Juliette Bénézit

Posted today at 7:00 a.m., updated at 07:00 a.m.

Karim is marking the route on his cell phone. In a low voice, he slips a few hints to the others and glances worriedly out the window. They are a dozen in total – Moroccans, Tunisians, Algerians, an Egyptian and a Palestinian -, crammed into this tiny wooden shelter, in the middle of the snow-capped mountains. It is pitch black outside. The temperature is – 5 degrees.

Omar rolls his last cigarette. Rachid grabs the shopping bag in which he lugs a few things. That evening in March, to cross the Col de Montgenèvre (Hautes-Alpes), the physical border between France and Italy, you have to walk about ten kilometers, for five hours, at an altitude of over 1,800 meters. .

More or less voluntarily, Karim inherits the role of guide. In the half-light, his marked face appears. The 43-year-old Tunisian is anxious. A few hours earlier, during a first attempt, the group was unsuccessful. They ran into the police who immediately sent them back to Italy.

First break before resuming the road after an hour of walking.  The group of men agrees on the direction to take and begins an ascent by climbing the ski slopes of the Col de Montgenèvre, between Italy and France, on March 14.

Karim prefers to deviate from the official marked routes for hikers. “It’s less risky like that”, he wants to believe. On these ever narrower and winding paths, the group advances in single file, silent and heads bowed. We sink into the snow sometimes up to the hips, we slide, we contort ourselves to step over tree branches. After several hours of walking, fatigue is there. On a long uphill path, one of the group stops and looks up. He contemplates the raw nature that emerges in the night. “It reminds me of the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. My mother is from there ”, he whispers.

Older couples and infants

Earlier in the evening, the group saw an Afghan family setting out on these same paths. With them there was “An old lady with a cane”, Karim insists. At the Refuge Solidaire de Briançon, where exiles can take a break once they arrive in France, two Afghan couples have been welcomed in recent weeks. The first couple were 77 and 74 years old, the second 73 and 69 years old.

In the mountains, it has also become customary to see young children, sometimes infants. One of them was 12 days old. Another case moved MEP Damien Carême (Europe Ecologie-Les Verts, EELV), who accompanied marauders, in mid-February: that of a pregnant woman, also Afghan, ordered to turn back by the police French. She will give birth in Italy a few hours later.

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