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| WORLD SOCIALISM |
In the middle of the mountains behind the border fence of
Ceuta, the Spanish enclave in Morocco, and eight kilometres from the nearest
Moroccan village of Fnideq, an uncertain number of migrants live in the woods.
No one knows exactly how many they are but charity workers in Melilla, Spain’s
other enclave in Morocco, say they could be in their thousands. In the past,
those waiting in the mountains for their turn to try to reach Spain had been
able to build something resembling a normal life. They put up tents and at
least were able to sleep relatively peacefully at night. Today, the migrants
are forced to remain mostly hidden in small groups among the trees or in small
caverns, and they know that all attempts to pass the Spanish border are almost
certain to fail and end up with arrest by the Moroccan authorities. That all
ended after 2012, when the Moroccan police started to burn down the camps and
periodically sweep the mountainside, arresting any migrants they found, charged
with having illegally entered the country.
Ceuta is one of the main (and few) ‘doors’ leading from
northern Africa to the territory of the European Union, and is a ’door’ that
has been closed since the end of the 1990s, when the Spanish authorities
started to build a triple six-metre fence topped with barbed wire that
surrounds the whole enclave, as in Melilla. Spain asked Morocco to control
migration flows.
The most tragic raid so far by the Moroccan police took
place last year on Gurugu Mountain which looks down on Melilla. Five migrants
were killed, 40 wounded and 400 removed to a desert area on the border with
Algeria. According to the migrants, the wounded were not treated and were left
to their fate. Today, the migrants are forced to remain mostly hidden in small
groups among the trees or in small caverns, and they know that all attempts to
pass the Spanish border are almost certain to fail and end up with arrest by
the Moroccan authorities. They live, in their words, “like animals” and when
speaking with outsiders are clearly ashamed by their condition, apologising for
being dirty and badly-dressed.
The first thing many of them tell you in French is that they
are students and that before having to leave their countries they were studying
mathematics, economics or engineering at university. Many of them are from
Guinea, one of the countries most seriously affected by the Ebola epidemic,
others come from Cote d’Ivoire, Gambia, Mali, Burkina Faso, all countries
characterised by political turmoil of various types. All of them have been
forced to live in these woods for months or even years, waiting for their
chance to pass the border fence.\\
Some of them will certainly die in their attempts to reach
Spain – either on the heavily fortified fences which encircle the enclaves or
out at sea in a small boat or trying to swim to a Spanish beach. Some of them
will finally make it to Spain, perhaps after five or six failed attempts. Some will
still face the possibility of forced deportation, particularly if they come from
countries with which Spain has a repatriation agreement. Many of them, however,
will finally give up and decide to remain somewhere in Morocco, destined to a
life of continuous uncertainty due to their irregular position in the country.
You can meet them and listen to their stories in the main Moroccan cities,
especially in the north. In most cases, they had escaped death in their
attempts to reach Spain and do not want to risk their lives any longer.
The Spanish Commission for Refugees (CEAR) denounces how
sub-Saharan migrants are dissuaded from seeking asylum in Spain, even if coming
from countries in conflict such as Mali, Democratic Republic of Congo or
Somalia, once they realise that they are likely to be forced to remain for
months in a Centre for Temporary Residence of Immigrants (CETI) in Ceuta or
Melilla. In Melilla, for example, those who apply for asylum cannot leave the
enclave until a decision has been taken on their application. Unlike Syrian
refugees whose application takes no more than two months, CEAR said the average
time to reach a decision for sub-Saharan Africans is one and a half years.
The main criticism has been the Security Law (Ley de
Seguridad Ciudadana) passed this year by the Spanish Parliament with only the
votes of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s Popular Party. The aim was to give
legal cover to the so called devoluciones en caliente, the “push-back
operations” against migrants carried out by the Spanish frontier authorities in
Ceuta and Melilla in violation of international and European law. On the
Spanish mainland, said the CEAR report, migrant’s right of asylum is seriously
undermined by the bureaucratic lengths of application procedures and the
political choices of the Spanish authorities. Calls from CEAR and other NGOs to
end “push-back operations” seem very unlikely to be taken into consideration
soon by the Spanish government and Parliament, in view of the general elections
later this year.
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