Mariam Soumah is a 23-year-old migrant from Guinea. It has been nine months since she last saw her baby daughter Sabina, to whom she gave birth in Belarus. That’s because Mariam was deported from Belarus, but without her baby. She’s fighting to be reunited with her.
Mariam Soumah is 23 years old. On the day she talks to the news agency Agence France Presse (AFP) from Guinea’s capital Conakry, she is wearing black. In August last year, Soumah was forcibly deported from Belarus, and her baby daughter Sabina, who turned one in November, is reportedly being held in an orphanage in Belarus, against her will. Now Soumah is fighting to try and get her baby back.
"I begged them not to do it," Soumah told AFP. Soumah had traveled to Belarus on a student visa in a bid to escape the poverty from which she came. Soumah is an orphan, and her hope was that she could travel from Belarus into the EU.
"I didn’t want to go to Europe [by sea,]" explains Soumah to AFP. "I looked on a map and saw Belarus was surrounded by Schengen countries."
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Emergency birth and intensive care
It is unclear exactly how long Soumah was in Belarus for, but at some point during her stay there, she fell pregnant by a Guinean man, who then left to try and get to the EU. In November 2024, Soumah went into labor two months earlier than her due date.
According to AFP, Sabina weighed just 600 grams when she was born and was rushed into intensive care. Soumah was left in hospital to recover from an emergency Caesarean section. The separation between mother and daughter, says Soumah, began then.
Soumah discovered that she wasn’t in the same hospital as her baby. After ten days, she walked through Minsk "looking from morning to night" to try and locate where her baby might be. Soumah did find Sabina and began visiting her daily. But then, when Sabina was finally discharged from intensive care, she was moved again.
At that point, says Soumah, the Belarusian authorities presented Soumah with a bill of around 33,000 dollars (around 28,000 euros) for her and her baby’s medical care, a bill she could not pay. "I raised my hands in the air," upon seeing the bill, Soumah told AFP.
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Restricted from seeing her daughter
The authorities said that if she didn’t pay the bills, she would be restricted from seeing her daughter. Soumah said she asked every day how her baby was, but said they told her the baby was "sick and tired."
"I kept coming and they kept saying she was sleeping…or out with the nurses," says Soumah. Then, last summer, Soumah says a woman in the hospital told her her baby had been moved to an orphanage.
Although Soumah says she tried to renew her student visa, by signing up for more studies, she was refused. In July, she was imprisoned for breaking immigration rules, reports AFP. Without a valid visa, Soumah could no longer stay in Belarus.
Human Constanta, an exiled human rights organization which monitors migrants' rights in Belarus, has criticized this action. Enira Bonitskaya from Human Constanta told AFP she thought the process was "manipulative. They simply did not care and separated the mother and child."
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Forcibly deported
Bronitskaya underlines that "threatening not to give her her child is, of course illegal." Human Constanta said there had been no official action to strip Soumah of her parental rights. Once in prison, Soumah says she was told by immigration officials that she should try and get a family member to fund her ticket home. But, an orphan herself, Soumah says that no one could afford that, and she also did not want to leave without her baby.
But, in August, Soumah ceased to have a choice. She told AFP that the authorities arrived, handcuffed her and drove her to the airport, where they put her on a flight to Istanbul. She was told not to try and return to Belarus.
Soumah called the woman who raised her from the airport in Istanbul, she told AFP. In tears, she told her: "I am coming, but I have nothing, not even my child."
This article is based on a feature from Agence France Presse (AFP)
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