Queer necropolitics of asylum: Senegalese refugees facing HIV in Mauritania

ABSTRACT

Since 2008, homosexuality has been the subject of recurrent public controversies in Senegal, sometimes accompanied by police arrests and popular violence. In this context, a migration route has opened up to Mauritania, where some are granted refugee status by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Among them, a few are selected for ‘resettlement’ in a host country in North America or Europe. Many of these Senegalese gay men residing in Mauritania are infected with HIV. In recent years, some of them have returned to Senegal in a very deteriorated condition, leading in several cases to death; others have died in exile in Nouakchott. This article reports on the living conditions and access to health care of Senegalese gay men who went to Mauritania hoping for resettlement to the Global North by the UNHCR. It is based on semi-directed interviews with Senegalese gay asylum seekers as well as members of NGOs, health structures and institutions (including the UNHCR) in Nouakchott and Dakar. It shows that, despite the UNHCR's demonstrated commitment to refugee protection, the asylum (and specifically resettlement) system exposes those who rely on it to increased, sometimes fatal, health risks.

KEYWORDS:

• Asylum
• queer
• HIV
• necropolitics
• Senegal
• Mauritania

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Most of our research participants were Senegalese men who had sex and/or romances with men (the situation of the few women among our research participants is beyond the scope of this paper). They used a range of terms to define their sexual practices and gender identity when speaking among them. When addressing foreigners, they often had recourse to the label ‘gay’ (‘homosexuel’ in French, which does not have the derogatory meaning that the word ‘homosexual’ has in English), which we therefore retained for this article. We use other appellations in accordance with other research participants’ own expressions, such as ‘men who have sex with men (MSM)’ in the context of Senegalese and Mauritanian NGOs, ‘LGBT’ in the context of the UNHCR, etc. We use ‘queer’ as a conceptual term in conversation with queer migration scholarship, as will be detailed in the theoretical section.

2 The total number of UNHCR ‘beneficiaries’ (asylum seekers and refugees) in Mauritania exceeds 2000, according to their office in Nouakchott (Interview with protection officer, February 15, 2018).

3 The first round of fieldwork was carried out as part of a doctoral thesis funded by the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology.

4 Supported by the ANRS site in Senegal and the IRD; one of them was also funded by the SCAC/Ambassade de France in Senegal. We thank Khaly Diaw for his participation in the research in Dakar.

5 As opposed to migrants who were suspected of crossing Mauritania to reach Europe.

6 The UN agency first published a ‘guidance note’ in 2008 (UNHCR, 2008) followed by ‘guidelines’ (UNHCR, 2012) that include sexual and gender minorities among the populations ‘of concern’ to the UNHCR. In 2014–2015, ‘almost two thirds of participating offices indicated having implemented reception or registration measures specifically targeting LGBTI persons of concern to UNHCR’ (UNHCR, 2015, p. 3). In Senegal itself, the UNHCR country office receives requests from displaced gay men, notably from The Gambia (Menetrier, 2019), but Senegalese nationals are not eligible in their own country of origin.

Apart from UNHCR, various countries have also opened their asylum systems to sexual and gender minorities, for example in Europe (Fassin & Salcedo, 2015; Giametta, 2017; Raboin, 2017) or North America (Murray, 2015). For a discussion of this opening, see OHCHR, 2011.

7 Once refugees are engaged in a resettlement procedure with a third country, it is very difficult to remove these cases from the ‘pipeline’ to submit them to another resettlement country, as a UNHCR agent in Mauritania explained (February 2018).

8 The term is used by the UNHCR, their partner organisations and representatives of Senegalese refugees to the UNHCR.

9 In some cases, when new evidence on one's past or present situation can be presented, one can request that the file be reopened.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany: [Grant Number none]; IRD, Dakar, Senegal: [Grant Number none]; CRCF, Dakar, Senegal: [Grant Number none]; SCAC/French embassy, Senegal: [Grant Number none].