Stranded Moroccans Plead for Repatriation from Maldives Amid COVID-19 Crisis

After more than two months of waiting in the hope of a repatriation, the 35 Moroccans, spread across four small islands, separated by hundreds of kilometers, no longer know which door to knock on, reports Médias24. While they were all waiting for a solution from the head of the Moroccan government, last Monday in front of the House of Representatives, they lost all hope after the (voluntary) omission of their case in El Othmani’s speech to parliament. Four Moroccans among the 35 stranded in the Maldives recount the hell they live in on a daily basis. Khawla, Sara, Oussama and Badr are united by this common fate, even though they live tens of kilometers apart.

Khawla, 28, is from Safi. She has been a receptionist in a hotel located on a 1.5 km2 island for 2 years. Sara, 26, for her part, works in customer relations in another Resort. A graduate in Risk Management from the Faculty of Ain Sbaâ in Casablanca, she arrived in the Maldives in August last year. Badr is the Sales & Marketing Director of a hotel establishment and manages the Europe region for his company, from Agadir where he lives with his wife and 2-year-old daughter. On a business trip to the Maldives for meetings with the management team on March 13, two days before Morocco’s decision to close its borders to the rest of the world, he has not returned.

As for Oussama, 25, he is a graduate in Building Design from OFPPT. After several international experiences, he landed in the Maldives in November 2019 to work in events.

They are now alone on the island with Sri Lankans, Indians and a few Bangladeshi citizens who have not been able to leave the archipelago. Condemned to stay despite the leave granted to all staff due to covid-19, the four Moroccans continue to live in the hotels where they work, housed in the rooms reserved for the staff and not the luxurious ones reserved for the very wealthy clientele of the island state, they say. They feel they have been abandoned by their country, while Nepal, a poor country, has recently chartered a military plane to repatriate all its citizens.

"Egyptians, Tunisians, Germans, French, Japanese, Chinese, Malaysians... All our colleagues have had special flights to return home. But not us. I felt humiliated by this situation. A feeling of shame. I couldn’t explain to my boss why Morocco didn’t want to repatriate us. He didn’t understand. He was as shocked as I was," laments Khawla. They are forced to suffer the pangs of hunger and live without a minimum of sanitary care. "Since the closure of hotels and their kitchens, small canteens have been improvised to feed the few dozen people left on site. On the menu every day: omelets, curry rice or white rice and tuna. This is what we eat every day. It’s insipid. Especially for the Ramadan f’tur. I would give everything I have for a harira..." says the desperate Sara.

Tired of waiting so long, they appealed to the Moroccan embassy in India. It had proposed a solution that did not materialize: to gather the group in a hotel in India. "I called our contact at the embassy one day to beg him to just send us food. Because we’re not eating anything. I was in tears. But there was no solution either," Sara recounts... We can’t go on living like this. It’s hell," she continues. For Sara, the announcement of the extension of the lockdown until June 10 has discouraged them even more. "3 more weeks of lockdown in Morocco, that’s at least 3 more months of additional exile for us," the saddened Sara confides.