MELILLA JOURNAL
African migrants camp out in the hills of Morocco near the Spanish enclave of Melilla.
SAMUEL ARANDA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
By SUZANNE DALEY
MELILLA, Spain — It is easy to pick out the new arrivals at the shelter for immigrants here on this tiny patch of Spain in North Africa. One man limps by on crutches with a plaster cast on his ankle. Another has a bandaged arm in a sling. Abbdol Cisse, 19, had stitches on his face.
“The police in Morocco were throwing stones at us, at our heads,” Mr. Cisse said recently, explaining his injuries. “They had metal bars, and they hit our legs while we were climbing.”
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. 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. They often end up injured, not just from falls and the newly laid concertina wire, but at the hands of the Moroccan and Spanish authorities trying to stop them.
Slide Show | Battered and Broke, Africans Surge to Europe’s Door Sub-Saharan migrants have been scaling a barrier to reach a better life via Spain, but their numbers, and the official response, are raising alarms.
This month the Spanish military police in Ceuta, facing about 250 immigrants climbing the fences or swimming near the shoreline, fired rubber bullets into the water, drawing outrage from European Union officials and human rights activists.
It is not yet clear whether the officers of the Guardia Civil hit the immigrants or whether they drowned in the melee. But so far, 15 bodies have been recovered from the water.
At first Spanish officials denied there had been any shooting. But since then, they have admitted that bullets were fired, raising questions about just what actions are appropriate in dealing with immigrants who do not represent an immediate threat and prompting Cecilia Malmstrom, the European Union’s commissioner for home affairs, to demand clarifications from the Spanish authorities.
It is a question that has hounded Europe for years, as immigrants fleeing wars or simply wanting a better future have tried to break through its borders, sometimes dying in tiny boats headed for the Canary Islands, part of Spain, or the Italian island of Lampedusa, sometimes trying to walk from Turkey to Greece or Bulgaria. Or, as they are doing now, charging the fences of these enclaves, seeking out even the smallest doorways to Europe.
Spanish officials, who have not sounded particularly repentant about actions at the border, have now appealed to the European Union for help, including financial, saying the burden of protecting Spain’s borders should not be theirs alone. They are also considering changes in the immigration laws to make it easier to immediately eject immigrants who do make it over the fences.
“The law is not designed for events such as the stampedes in Ceuta and Melilla,” Interior Minister Jorge Fernández Díaz said last week.
These days military vehicles rumble down the roads near the fence around Melilla, and helicopters hover above, on constant patrol. The shelter here is so overcrowded that men like Mr. Cisse sleep in triple bunks, 15 of them in a space no bigger than a college dorm room.
Even so, their excitement is hard to miss because they are well on their way to getting what they hoped for. Most have had brutal journeys and now will probably spend a year or more in the immigration center as their applications for asylum are processed. Few will get such status. But most will end up transferred to the mainland before being handed an order to leave Spain.
Most cannot be deported because Spain does not have treaties with many of the countries they come from. So in the twist that has confounded Europe’s efforts to secure its borders for decades now, many of those who make it to Melilla and Ceuta will be largely free to remain in Spain or other European nations that offer them the prospect of better lives.
Nobody knows exactly why, after nearly a decade of relative quiet, the pressure on Ceuta and Melilla has started again, but Spain’s economic crisis may have something to do with it. Spanish officials here acknowledge that Spain has lately had to cut back on aid to Morocco, which has in recent years kept sub-Saharan Africans from getting too close to the enclaves.
The central Spanish government delegate to Melilla, Abdelmalik el Barkani, said he doubted the loss of aid had much to do with it. The recent surge probably had more to do with human traffickers, he said.
“A lot of people,” he said, “are moved by clandestine forces.”
In announcing that Spain would install concertina wire on top of the border fences last fall, the Spanish government said that the number of immigrants trying to scale the fences had increased by about 50 percent in early 2013. Recent figures confirm that. Last year 4,235 immigrants arrived by land, compared with 2,841 the year before, government officials said. In the past few weeks, the assaults have continued on a regular basis, the men sometimes wearing homemade gloves to protect their hands.
On Monday, another group, armed with sticks and stones, stormed the Melilla fences, 100 people successfully. But many of the attempts fail. For instance, Moroccan forces arrested 96 of those who tried to climb over on Monday, 14 of whom were hospitalized.
Accusations abound that Spanish forces are actually returning the immigrants to Morocco even when they do arrive successfully on Spanish soil and are entitled to apply for asylum.
“We hear that all the time,” said Isabel Torrente, the head of Asociación Melilla Acoge, an immigrant advocacy group. “The immigrants used to hide when they came over the fence. But now they are desperate to be visible. They climb a lamppost even so that people see them and they can’t be sent back.”
Getting over the fences is not the only route into the enclaves. Experts say sub-Saharan women tend to come by boat. More recently, the enclaves have also attracted growing numbers of Syrians, who, because they look more like local Moroccans and often have some money, are able to buy or rent Moroccan passports and simply walk quietly across the border with other day workers.
Once here, however, they have been anything but quiet. Recently, more than 100 Syrians, including small children, camped in the park in front of Melilla’s City Hall, unwilling to be herded into the overcrowded shelter tucked in an isolated area of this enclave, about a fifth the size of Manhattan.
After a while, the Syrians were offered shelter beside a mosque and Muslim cemetery here, where they continued to camp out, despite the daunting winds that sweep across this region in the winter. Many were middle class before war broke out in Syria. Many had wandered for nearly two years, trying to get into Europe.
Eventually, Spain agreed to move a group of about 125 Syrians to the mainland far more quickly than other immigrants. The night before they boarded a ferry to Spain at the end of January, some rented modest hotel rooms so they could take showers.
The sub-Saharan Africans could hardly afford such a luxury under any circumstance. For most of the men, 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 Moroccan woods, some of the men sleep in caves or under sheets of plastic, searching for food in the garbage cans of Nador. On a recent visit, five of the men appeared to have broken legs, and three had broken arms from encounters with the Moroccan police, they said. They asked for visits from the Red Cross.
But few had any idea of going home. “I have spent two years traveling by land from Cameroon to here, and almost two years more hiding here in the woods,” said Musa Bankura, 36. “My family has spent all their savings. I can’t go back home now with nothing.”
