Migrants looking down from the mountain behind the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in Morocco. Credit: Andrea Pettrachin/IPS

By Andrea Pettrachin
CEUTA, Sep 4 2015 (IPS)

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.

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 tripe six-metre fence topped with barbed wire that surrounds the whole enclave, as in Melilla.

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.

These actions were the result of agreements between the Moroccan and Spanish governments, after Spain had 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 cured and were left to their own destiny.

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.

The statistics show that 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. In that case they will have overcome the first hurdle, escaping the “push-back operations” by the Spanish Guardia Civil, but they will still face the possibility of forced repatriation, 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.

Meanwhile a report on ‘Refugee Persons in Spain and Europe” published at the end of May by the non-governmental 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 CEAR report is only one of a long list of recent criticisms of the Spanish government’s migration policies from numerous NGOs and international organisations.

The main target of these criticisms 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.

Edited by Phil Harris   

Spanish radar works silently and ceaselessly from the top of Mount Hacho overlooking Ceuta, identifying migrants trying to reach the enclave, but many of the inhabitants of the area will tell you that they have never seen the enormous fences that stand in the middle of the hills just four or five kilometres away from the city centre. Credit: Andrea Pettrachin/IPS

By Andrea Pettrachin
CEUTA, Spain, Jun 3 2015 (IPS)

A few kilometres before the border between the Spanish enclave of Ceuta and Morocco, a sign informs passers-by that this outpost of Spain on African soil stands in a privileged position for those who wish to observe the annual migration of birds across the Strait of Gibraltar, their shortest route from Africa to Europe.

At the border itself, huge fences have been erected to block the daily attempts of human migrants seeking to escape hunger, despair and often conflict, a phenomenon that the people of Ceuta are less proud to advertise and about which they prefer silence.

That silence was dramatically broken at the beginning of May when a border control X-ray machine detected Abou, an eight-year-old boy from Cote d’Ivoire, inside a suitcase being carried into the Spanish enclave.

That was only the most recent of a number of (more or less ingenious) strategies used by migrants amassed in the Moroccan woods next to the Spanish border to try to enter the so-called ‘Fortress Europe’.“What strikes the visitor most about Ceuta is its incredible contradictions. The city, with its population of just over 80,000 people living in 18.6 square kilometres and proudly Spanish since 1668, gives the idea of wanting to live as if the migrants and their attempts to reach the enclave do not exist”

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 two six-metre fences topped with barbed wire – complete with watch posts and a road running between them to accommodate police patrols in case of need – that surrounds the whole enclave (as in the other Spanish enclave in Africa of Melilla).

Even if they do not catch the attention of the media as in the case of Abou, every day Ceuta is the scene of young African migrants, almost all aged between 15 and 30, trying to reach Spanish territory in ways that are as, if not more, dangerous than the one chosen by Abou’s father.

The vast majority of them attempt to do so by sea, mainly in dinghies or hidden under the inflatable boats usually used by children on the beach. In February 2014, 15 Africans died  trying to swim around the fence, when border guards fired rubber bullets at them in the water. Others attempt the border crossing hidden in secret compartments under cars, and some even try scaling the fences.

What strikes the visitor most about Ceuta is its incredible contradictions. The city, with its population of just over 80,000 people living in 18.6 square kilometres and proudly Spanish since 1668, gives the idea of wanting to live as if the migrants and their attempts to reach the enclave do not exist.

On one of the days that Abou was capturing the headlines of media around the world, the main news reported on the website of one of the enclave’s two newspapers was the results of an opinion poll on upcoming administrative elections.

The “Centre for Temporal Stay of Immigrants”, where all migrants that manage to enter the enclave are accommodated, is an enormous structure which is incredibly hidden and impossible to be seen from any point in the city and from the hills behind it.

Spanish radar works silently and ceaselessly from the top of Mount Hacho overlooking Ceuta, identifying migrants trying to reach the enclave, but many of the inhabitants of the area will tell you that they have never seen the enormous fences that stand in the middle of the hills just four or five kilometres away from the city centre.

The enclave, described by the Lonely Planet travel guide as looking like a “grand social experiment concocted by rival political systems” and a sort of “cultural island”, is unique from a demographical point of view in that 50 percent of the population is Moroccan or of Moroccan origin.

The city is divided into a sort of well-established and quite rigid “caste system”.

The first and richest group is that of the Spanish, generally very conservative, very religious and devoted to traditions. The Popular Party has governed the city for decades and mostly opposes any change in the status quo – thus, for example, the Arabic language is not taught in schools.

The second group is that of the “Moroccan Ceutans”, sometimes Spanish citizens with Moroccan origin, in other cases Moroccan citizens with regular residence and work permits. Many of them have adopted the Spanish lifestyle and speak Spanish better than Moroccan Arabic but most of them respecting the religious precepts of their fathers.

Some of these “Moroccan Ceutans” have accumulated huge amounts of money thanks to the flourishing illegal smuggling of goods across the border and live in the most elegant and beautiful houses of the city, while others – many others – live in the degraded district of El Principe, where friction with the Spanish population is sometimes serious.

This latter sub-group contains a small but significant number of stateless children, born in the Spanish enclave of Moroccan parents who, mainly as a consequence of expiry of their residence permits having left them in an illegal position in Spanish territory, have never had the possibility to register the births of their children in Morocco.

None of these children have access to school, even if Spanish law has established the right to education for all the children in Spanish territory, irrespective of their nationality or legal position.

The third group is that of the so-called transfronterizos, Moroccan citizens residing mainly in the nearby Moroccan village of Fnideq who cross the border every day to work in the enclave city or, more often, to buy and sell goods in the black market.

They can be seen every day in the Poligono area next to the border post, carrying enormous packs of goods on their shoulders to be sold on the other side of the border. Police on both sides observe this continuous movement of people in silence – under an agreement signed by the Moroccan and Spanish governments in the 1960s, goods that a person is able to carry on the shoulders are exempt from customs duties.

A fourth group is that of the “black people”, the “caste” that the city tries to ignore and hide, not considering that they are the source of its major wealth – the funds that are assigned to the local authorities by the Spanish state and the European Union every year – and that their presence in fact provides many jobs in the public and security sectors.

Ceuta has always been and continues to be above all a military outpost. The number of police, guardia civil and soldiers patrolling or simply passing through the few roads of the enclave is impressive, as is the number of military training exercises that take place in the enclave, but just a few hundred meters beyond the border post and the Poligono is what appears to be part of another world.

The tiny village of Benzù sums up the contradictions of the whole enclave. Situated at the end of the beautiful coastal road in the western part of the enclave, it is the last Spanish establishment before the northern frontier post, and has been closed to the passage of people for many years.

With its beautiful sea and coloured houses facing the Spanish coast on the other side of the Strait of Gibraltar, the village would not be out of place on a Greek holiday island. However, two hundred metres beyond the village, the presence of the last pillars of Ceuta’s border fences contaminate the crystalline water of the bay of Beliones.

The sea is discretely but constantly patrolled by the rubber boats of the army and police of both Spain and Morocco. The distance between the last Spanish houses and the first houses of the Moroccan village of Beliones is only of a few metres, divided by the iron and steel of the two fences covered with the barbed wire. You bump into them walking along the small road of the village, between a bakery and a small shop.

Nobody is outside, the silence all around is deafening. Groups of midges cross the border undisturbed without having to show passports to the border authorities. Three metres beyond, the beginning of another country, another time zone, another culture.

Looming over the landscape is Jebel Musa, the so-called Mujer Muerta (Dead Woman), a spectacular rocky mountain constantly covered by clouds that are constantly scurrying as if to compensate the slowness of the human movements blocked by the fences. Here, the spectre of death, the death that many people have met trying to cross this border, lingers even in the name of the mountain.

The Moroccan woods behind the village of Beliones are populated by groups of monkeys which, before construction of the border fences, periodically reached the hills of the Spanish enclave. A small group of monkeys still lives, however, in Ceuta’s “San Amaro” park not far from the city centre – closed in a cage.

Edited by Phil Harris   

Demonstrators with torches and placards reading “No more deaths on the borders” in Malaga on Feb. 12, to call for an investigation into the deaths of 15 immigrants six days earlier in Ceuta, a Spanish enclave in northern Africa. Credit: Inés Benítez/IPS

By Inés Benítez
MALAGA, Spain, Mar 10 2014 (IPS)

“Who will speak for them now? Who will tell their stories to their families in Cameroon or Ivory Coast?” asked Edmund Okeke, a Nigerian, about the 15 migrants who died while trying to swim to the shore of the Spanish city of Ceuta from Morocco.

The victims were driven back with rubber bullets fired by the Spanish Guardia Civil (militarised police) from the beach of this Spanish enclave in north Africa, on Feb. 6.“The nights were terrible. The waves were like mountains." -- Gora Ndiaye

“These are people living in unbearable conditions of poverty and who are seeking a better life. Why else would they want to leave their country and embark on such a long and dangerous journey?” said Okeke, the president of the Palma-Palmilla Immigrants Association in the southern Spanish city of Malaga.

Okeke has lived here for 14 years and he believes that the actions of the Spanish border authorities “cannot be justified.”

That is why, he told IPS, he is calling on the government of rightwing Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy for a “proper” investigation and the prosecution and trial of “those responsible for giving the order to fire” on people “who were neither aggressive, nor represented a danger to anyone.”

The 15 migrants drowned when dozens jumped into the sea to try to reach Ceuta by swimming around the breakwater separating Moroccan and Spanish waters.

The Interior minister, Jorge Fernández Díaz, admitted on Feb. 13 when he appeared before parliament that the authorities had fired rubber bullets and tear gas from the land to the water.

“But not at the people,” he emphasised in his description of the facts being investigated by the attorney general’s office, following a complaint lodged by a score of non-governmental organisations.

Fernández Díaz visited Ceuta and Melilla, the other autonomous Spanish city in northern Africa, on Mar. 5 and 6. There he announced that the fences separating the enclaves from Morocco would be reinforced with special wire mesh to make them even harder for immigrants to scale.

Every year thousands of Africans, mostly from the sub-Saharan region, try to get into the European Union by climbing the three rows of fences lined with razor wire that separate Moroccan territory from Ceuta and Melilla, or by crossing the border in small boats from Morocco or their home countries.

But swimming across was an even more desperate option.

Tina Adrasubi, a 34-year-old Nigerian, left her home in Benin 13 years ago to come to Spain in order to help her family.

“I went to Mali by car with a friend, and then on foot to Morocco to cross to Ceuta,” she told IPS, rocking her two-month-old daughter, Gloria. Many sub-Saharan Africans take years to reach Morocco.

Each of the young men who drowned has his own story, and perhaps a mother who is waiting for a phone call that never comes, but “it seems that does not matter at all when you are poor,” complained Okeke to IPS.

The five bodies recovered on the Spanish side of the border fence lie in anonymous graves in a Ceutan graveyard. The others were taken to Moroccan morgues.

The governing People’s Party rejected a move in Congress to open a commission of enquiry into the tragedy.

Cecilia Malmström, European Commissioner for Home Affairs, suggested in a letter to minister Fernández Díaz that “the rubber bullets could have provoked panic among the group of immigrants” attempting to swim ashore, contributing to the deaths.

Some 80,000 immigrants, 40,000 in Morocco and another 40,000 in Mauritania, are waiting their chance to enter the EU through Ceuta and Melilla, the minister said on Mar. 4, according to figures provided by Morocco and corroborated by his office.

Union leader Gerardo Cova, who between 2001 and 2007 was head of the Information Centre for Foreign Workers in the resort of Marbella, told IPS: “the government wants to create social alarm and is criminalising immigrants in order to justify its actions and make cutbacks on foreigners’ rights.”

In 2013, a total of about 100,000 immigrants were intercepted trying to cross maritime and land borders into the 28 member countries of the EU.

Spain is the fourth most frequent route of irregular entry, according to the December 2013 figures from the European Agency for the Management of External Borders (Frontex), quoted by its assistant director, Gil Arias.

“Instead of rescuing them, they were treated like animals,” Christiana Nwokeji, the president of the Malaga Union of Nigerian Women, complained to IPS in her home.

While she was talking, a video on the television showed several survivors who managed to swim to shore in Ceuta, only to be immediately sent back to Morocco.

Nwokeji remarked that Spaniards, too, are emigrating because of the extremely high unemployment rate, due to the economic crisis and the new regulations that make it easier to fire workers. “Everyone in the world emigrates when they face a lack of opportunities,” she said.

“I was born in a crisis. We have always lived in crises,” Gora Ndiaye, a 28-year-old Senegalese man, told IPS. He said he felt “very afraid and very cold” in the small boat in which he and 45 of his fellow countrymen spent a week, travelling from Dakar to the Spanish municipality of Hoya Fría on Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands.

Ndiaye, who has a wife and a six-month-old son in Senegal, said “people here have to help Africa,” and he justified migration “because we have no food, we must send money to our families. We cannot live on nothing.”

“The nights were terrible. The waves were like mountains. I felt stabbing pains in my arms and legs,” said Ndiaye, who cannot swim, and who paid about 500 euros (693 dollars) for the crossing in a flimsy boat. “I am lucky to have lived to tell the tale,” he said.

According to Balance Migratorio en la Frontera Sur de 2013” (Migration Balance on the Southern Border 2013), a report presented in February by the Andalusian Human Rights Association (APDHA), 7,550 immigrants were intercepted reaching Spain by boat or through Ceuta and Melilla.

The number of people who died or disappeared in the attempt were 130 in 2013.

The study reported that 45.25 percent of African immigrants, over half of them from sub-Saharan Africa, arrived in boats and 27.4 percent on inflatable rafts. Some 15.75 percent scaled the fences at Ceuta and Melilla.

On Feb. 28, 200 immigrants climbed the fences at Melilla and their celebration of their arrival with hugs and laughter was shown on television.

Yvette Edere, from Ivory Coast, told IPS she felt “very sad” about what happened in Ceuta, and said she “had to struggle very hard” to get legal residence in Spain, where she arrived with a visa 20 years ago.

“Many white people from Europe and the United States come to Africa,” said Okeke. He is presently helping some Spaniards who want to go to work in Nigeria.

“They exploit its gold and its oil, and no one fires on them. There are no barriers or documents required. They are treated like kings,” he concluded.

There are conflicts old and new crying for solution and reconciliation, not violence, with reasonable, realistic ways out.

Take the South Sudan conflict between the Nuer and the Dinka. We know the story of the borders drawn by the colonial powers, confirmed in Berlin in 1884. Change a border by splitting a country – referendum or not – and what do you expect opening Pandora’s box? More Pandora.

There is a solution: not drawing borders, making them irrelevant. The former Sudan could have become a federation with much autonomy, keeping some apart and others together in confederations-communities, also across borders. Much to learn from Switzerland, EU and ASEAN.

Johan Galtung, rector of the TRANSCEND Peace University. Credit: IPS

Take the Maghreb-Mali+ complex: a road to peace runs through Tuareg high autonomy and confederations of the autonomies, in addition to the state system. Proceeds from natural resources – oil, uranium, gold, metals – should benefit the owners, not former colonisers. The United Nations’ task is to make the West comply with socioeconomic human rights.

Take what is called the last colony (well, Ulster? Palestine?): Sahrawi, Spain’s shame for not having decolonised; the United Nations Charter Article 73 formula is not perfect but differential treatment is unacceptable.

Take Ceuta and Melilla, “Spanish” enclaves in Morocco, and Gibraltar, an “English” enclave in Spain: use the Hong Kong formula with sovereignty for the owners, flag and garrison, and leave the system as it is.

Geography and history matter; sovereignty for one, system for the other. Not a bad formula for the Falkland/Malvinas islands or Northern Ireland, with a reborn Republic of Ireland in a Confederation of British Isles.

Back to Berlin 1884, institutionalising the outrageous sociocide, with genocide and ecocide, perpetrated on Africans on top of centuries of Arab-West slavery. But do not forget the Congress of Berlin six years earlier, in 1878, doing the same to the Balkans, with the infamous Article 25 giving the Dual Monarchy, Austria-Hungary, the right to occupy and administer Bosnia-Herzegovina temporarily.

On Oct. 6, 1908 they did exactly that, Turkey and Russia both being weak. What do you expect when annexing someone’s land? A resistance movement of course, and ultimately, on Jun. 28, 1914, the sacred date to the Serbs, having been defeated by the Turks 525 years earlier: Two shots rang out in Sarajevo.

One century later “historians” (who pay their salaries, states?) see the shots as the cause of World War I, not what caused the shots; like seeing the terrorists, not what causes terrorism.

Then as now the same two stories, nations made prisoners of states, and states-peoples made prisoners of empires. Sarajevo used against terrorism.

U.S. President Woodrow Wilson used self-determination to dismantle the beaten Prussian, Habsburg and Ottoman empires; but not the victors’ empires as a young Vietnamese in Paris experiences, chased away from the U.S. Embassy: Ho Chi Minh, claiming the same for his people.

And the U.S. Versailles delegation rejected that claim by Sudeten Germans against Czechoslovakia; accepted by England, not to “appease” Adolf Hitler, but to rectify a wrong.

What a fantastic chance for German-Austrian foreign policy!

Start this 2014 centenary year preparing 150 anniversary conferences, in 2028 and 2034, apologising for 1914, undoing some harm, letting Africans be Africans and Balkans be Balkans of various kinds, stop blaming their victims for being unruly, restless, terrorist and so on. The peaceful century 1815-1914: some peace! Don’t miss the chance.

But they were not alone. In 1905 the U.S.-Japan, Taft-Katsura (later president and prime minister, respectively) agreed to U.S. rule in the Philippines and Japanese rule in Korea, in the interest of “peace in East Asia” – their peace, meaning rule. A good century later the Obama-Abe (president and prime minister, respectively) uneasy agreement on Japan’s aggressive policy.

The solution to the Korean Peninsula conflict is a peace treaty and normalisation with North Korea, a Korean nuclear free zone and work on the open border-confederation-federation-unitary state continuum.

If the U.S. fails to go along, why not go ahead, also multilaterally and via United Nations.

But they were not alone: in 1917 Balfour Jewish homeland followed the Sykes-Picot treason with four disastrous colonies. With a major difference, however: the Jews had been there before; some title to some land, but not to an ever-expanding Jewish state (just one word away from “only Jewish”).

The road to peace must pass through a pre-1967 Israel with Jewish characteristics, Palestine recognised, a Middle East Community of Israel with border countries, an Organisation for Cooperation and Security in West Asia, with Syria (an upper chamber for the many nations with cultural autonomy – Ottoman millet), Iraq (maybe confederation, with no U.S. bases), the Kurds (autonomy in the four countries for some land, a confederation of autonomies), Iran (an end to Benjamin Netanyahu extremism), a moderate Israel, and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspection.

Afghanistan? Full U.S.-NATO withdrawal, an end to foreign bases, coalition government, Swiss-style constitution with much autonomy for villages and nations, and gender parity. But let Afghans be Afghans.

China’s claims on sea and air space? Too much, but the Chinese had been there before, 500-1500; some title to some sea, some air.

And U.S.-China: direct cooperation for mutual benefit, make it more equal; the U.S. is cheating itself, building warehouses, not factories.

U.S. spying on the world: the point is not clemency for Edward Snowden but to drop the NSA and punish those, also allies, who violated human rights.

The West tries to claim the moral high ground by changing discourse to something they think they have and others do not: democracy. Running a huge colonial-imperial system against the will of others? Some democracy.
(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)