The tragedy at Ceuta and Melilla

Every week, hundreds of Africans try to scramble over the high fences that encircle Ceuta and Melilla, two Spanish-ruled enclaves on the northern tip of Morocco. Countless migrants are injured as the Moroccan military, on one side, and a few hundred Spanish police on the other, block Africans seeking to cross into the two tiny territories -- barely 12 square miles (30 square kilometres) of land between them. Nearly 4,700 undocumented migrants have infiltrated Melilla thus far this year, the interior ministry said -- up from 3,000 in 2013. The Spanish government says nearly 20,000 migrants have tried to storm the six-metre (23-foot), triple layer fence at Melilla this year alone.

Ceuta sits in a strategic spot 15 miles from Gibraltar across the mouth of the Mediterranean, with Melilla 140 miles to the east. To guard their fences, 600 Civil Guards are stationed in each of the territories. "You have to be strong and very fit. You have to be a lion!" said AbouDiarrisso, a lean 22-year-old from Ivory Coast who clambered over into Melilla. "There were 200 of us to start with. I was the only one to get over the fences." Some migrants sit atop the fence for hours before falling off exhausted, getting dragged down by Spanish guards or knocked off by blows from their batons. A video filmed by rights group Prodein in October showed Spanish guards beating a migrant on the fence and carrying him apparently unconscious back to the Moroccan side. The Spanish government has since announced a reform that would formally authorise border guards to drive migrants off who try to climb the fence. Commissioner Nils Muiznieks of the Council of Europe, the continent's top human rights authority, branded that plan "unjust and illegal under international law".

Breaking into freedom

Ten years ago Spain spent more than 30 million euros building up the barriers around Melilla and Ceuta, its two enclaves surrounded by Morocco on the northern coast of Africa, which offer the only land borders between the promise of Europe and the despair of Africa. Military vehicles rumble down the roads near the fence around Melilla, and helicopters hover above, on constant patrol. And for a while the investment seemed to work.

But in the past year, large groups of sub-Saharan immigrants have been charging the rows of seven-yard-high chain-link fences here with increasing frequency, or trying to swim around them, believing with good reason that if they can just get past they will ultimately end up in Europe.  In the past few weeks, the assaults have continued on a regular basis, the men sometimes wearing homemade gloves to protect their hands. But many of the attempts fail. For most, the assaults on fences represent the final push to get to Europe after more than two years of traveling or living in the hills behind Melilla, on the outskirts of the Moroccan city of Nador, in desperate conditions.

In the latest incident more than 200 migrants from sub-Saharan Africa  brok into Melilla by scaling the border fence. The migrants, many of whom said they were from Cameroon and Guinea,  are likely to be expelled.   The reception centre is already overcrowded - built for 480, it now houses 1,300 people. 

Israeli Racism

Recently we have witnessed the shameful rounding up and deportation of Africans from Saudi Arabia.  In 2011 in Tel Aviv, a thousand Israelis ran rampant through the streets, smashing and looting African-operated businesses and physically assaulting any dark-skinned person they came across.

The rioters were encouraged by the likes of lawmaker Miri Regev, who announced that African migrants are "a cancer in the body" of the nation.  Regev "apologised” after the violence, not to African asylum seekers, but to Israeli cancer victims, for comparing them to Africans and was appointed by PM Benjamin Netanyahu to head the Knesset Interior Committee, the very body that decides the fate of those asylum seekers.  Netanyahu has pledged to rid the country of its "tens of thousands of infiltrators" from Africa.

The persecution suffered by  Africans often occurs in the countries from which they have fled and to which Israel has no qualms about illegally deporting them.  Israeli-Canadian journalist David Sheen, who reports relentlessly on the hazards to African existence in the Jewish state,  remarks: "When Israel rounds up and deports African refugees, it makes a mockery of the millions of Jews who died during World War II because no one would grant them shelter." Since Israel took over responsibility for reviewing refugee status requests from UNHCR, out of the 60,000 non-Jewish African asylum seekers living in Israel, Israel has approved only one single solitary application. And that one African woman that the State of Israel… has deigned to bequeath refugee status upon - is an albino.

Although the fundamental reason for restricting African access to Israel is to prevent a tipping of the demographic balance in favour of non-Jews, the circumstances facing Ethiopian Jewish immigrants indicate that religion only gets you so far. Lest the target national colour scheme be irreparably disrupted as well, Israel has been known to forcibly inject Ethiopian females with contraceptives.

Former Knesset member Michael Ben-Ari declares: "We are waging a war against the phenomenon of assimilation."

No Person Is Illegal - Break Down Borders And End Capitalism

Club Dead: EU immigration laws turning Mediterranean into Graveyard- Malta PM

Posted on 10/13/2013 by Juan Cole here

Malta’s prime minister Joseph Muscat said Saturday that the European Union’s inaction on immigration reform is turning the Mediterranean into a graveyard.
UPI quotes him as saying:

“I don’t know how many more people need to die at sea before something gets done … rules need to change, whether they are tighter or looser is not the issue, the fact is that this thing is broken and it needs to be fixed… As things stand we are building a cemetery within our Mediterranean Sea.”

On October 11, a ship carrying migrants capsized off Malta, spilling 200 persons into the water. Some 33 drowned but the Italian coastguard rescued the others.


The week before, 319 migrants died when their vessel capsized near Italy.
In the past 15 years, some 14,000 migrants have died in the Mediterranean trying to reach Europe. That is nearly 1000 a year
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees says that 32,000 migrants have reached southern Italy and Malta so far in 2013, and about two thirds of them have applied for asylum.
Many are from Eritrea, Somalia and Ethiopia, though Syrians have joined the risky trek in some numbers recently.
CSM quotes sources saying Europe needs to attack human trafficking networks to stop the carnage.

 A solution requires a thorough understanding of the cause of the problem. The EU is more interested in diverting attention away from the situation in the Mediterranean Sea than from preventing any more deaths. Tougher laws on asylum seekers? Track down and prosecute the traffickers who benefit monetarily? Open more 'off-shore' detention centres?
These are not solutions. While ever goods and services, outsourcing and capital can flow freely across borders around the world but people remain restricted by the self-same borders this migration of 'illegals' will continue by land, sea and air whatever the cost to the vulnerable.

One world. One people. No borders. No capitalism. 
There IS an alternative - and that is socialism.
JS