LAAYOUNE (Western Sahara): The last sight Mercy Stewin had of her native Africa she was standing knee-deep in water, keeping herself steady against the Atlantic waves as they rolled up the beach at Foum el Oued, where the Sahara desert meets the sea.

Here, not far from the beachfront Nagjir hotel and the mouth of the dried-out Sakia el Hamra river, she levered herself over the side of a small, green fishing boat with Arabic lettering painted on the bow.

Nineteen other people from all over Africa were packed into the boat beside her. A young Moroccan fixed a small outboard motor to the stern, settled his human cargo evenly, jerked the engine into life and, taking out a rudimentary compass, set off on a course just west of north. As they pulled off into the night, a second boat, also packed with black Africans, slipped into their wake.

For Mercy, 25 years old and eight months pregnant, it was the final stage in a 14-month journey from her market stall in Jenin City, Nigeria. At night the following day, after hours of praying, vomiting and bailing water, Mercy and her companions could pick out a thin pinprick of light blinking in the distance.

Mercy was looking at the Entallada lighthouse on Fuerteventura, the nearest of Spain’s Canary Islands to the African coast, and the welcome-sign on what is now the main illegal immigrant route into Europe from Africa. A few hours later a Spanish civil guard patrol boat steamed into sight to intercept them. As it came alongside, the immigrants scrambled aboard and were delivered on to European soil at the small port of Gran Tarajal. Within hours Mercy was lying in a bed in the hospital at Puerto del Rosario, the island’s capital. Two days later, her son was born. She called him Blessed.

As Britain demands the closure of the Sangatte refugee camp in northern France and Tony Blair considers using the British Navy in the eastern Mediterranean, the Canaries route highlights the shifting nature of illegal immigration as desperate Africans, now blocked from crossing the Mediterranean from northern Morocco, turn to new, risky ways to get through Europe’s frontiers.

An investigation by the London-based Guardian newspaper into the route followed by Mercy and thousands more sub-Saharan immigrants to Fuerteventura and neighbouring Lanzarote has revealed how the long, arduous journey across Africa leads to a series of secret, movable desert camps near Laayoune, capital of the disputed Western Sahara.

On Sunday, after a week of heavy seas, hundreds of sub-Saharan Africans were thought to be waiting in these tented camps for the weather to change. Thousands more were at staging posts along a roundabout route via Niger, Algeria and northern Morocco. As soon as the weather changes, Spanish police expect a fresh wave of boats. As the high season starts, police fear they will receive up to 8,000 illegal immigrants this year. At current soaring growth rates, that figure would double or treble in 2003.

Laayoune is a windswept desert town that lies 12 miles from the sea. Those who know the trafficking routes say that in among the rolling dunes to the north, immigrant transit camps are run by Saharan tribesmen working for paymasters in the Moroccan capital, Rabat.

All the immigrants the Guardian spoke to paid for or their trips in Rabat. There, in the Tukum shanty town, a shifting population of thousands of sub-Saharan Africans work or steal to raise 430 dollars for the trip to Fuerteventura.

They are driven the 900 miles south in fleets of Land Rovers, avoiding police. The trip usually ends short of Laayoune itself.

Local police are easily paid off. “If you give them 4,000 dirhams (350 dollars) not to patrol one night, that is two and a half months’ pay for them,” explained one Laayoune source.

Guerraoui’s police have expelled 300 immigrants in recent months, and 14 traffickers were jailed recently for up to 10 years. But he has other things to worry about — poverty being his main concern. “If they want us to do something they must send the means to do it,” he said.

Many of those expelled by his police will find a way back to Laayoune and try again. For Mercy Stewin the drama of taking the new illegal migrant route into Europe is over. Blessed, born on Spanish soil, is her passport to legal residency. “All I want to do is work,” she said.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.