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People fleeing conflict and the climate crisis reach the Spanish border only to find a militarised, hostile environment where even children are forced to sleep in the open air. Conor Patrick Faulkner reports
In August, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez welcomed Afghans at a refugee reception centre on the outskirts of Madrid. Standing on the runway of Torrejón de Ardoz air base, he said that Spain’s response to the Taliban takeover of Kabul represented “the best values of the European Union”.
He was joined by European bigwigs including the Presidents of the European Council and the European Commission, Charles Michel and Ursula von der Leyen, who described how “in times of need, Spain has shown humanity,” and is an “example for the European soul at its best”.
Less than a month later, and almost 700 km away in Ceuta – one of two Spanish territories in North Africa – Arif rubs his beard and stares out across the Strait of Gibraltar towards the mainland, a brown brushstroke through the low hanging haze.
He sits atop a makeshift camp made among the concrete tide breakers where 50 or more people at various stages of the asylum seeking process shelter next to Ceuta’s port. Below him is a labyrinth of nooks and alcoves crammed full with washing lines and shopping trolleys, mattresses and rags protruding up through the rocks.
Children sleep inches from pools of seawater that rise without warning, and the tide slaps in and out of the camp around them. “Look how we live,” Arif says. “We have no rights.”
Slowly, figures emerge from the crevices around him. They stretch, their eyes squint and adjust to daylight. Beyond Arif’s shoulder, eyes inch nervously above the rocks, concerned to hear Spanish spoken and paranoid about police.
Just two days before, the camp was raided in the morning rain. “They said, ‘get out of here you rats’,” Arif recalls. The plastic coverings he had rigged to protect them from the weather were removed and what little cooking utensils the people had were thrown away. He takes a shallow drag of his cigarette. “They said ‘if you don’t like it here, go back to your country’.”
Arif, 37, is one of an estimated 9,000 migrants that crossed the border from Morocco to Ceuta over a two-day period in May at the height of diplomatic tensions between Rabat and Madrid. Most were quickly returned but as many as a thousand remain in Ceuta’s streets in camps like the one Arif stays in on the beach, or communities hidden in the hills that overlook the territory. Many were forced into ramshackle migrant centres in the mountains or housed in industrial warehouses on the coast, but most preferred to take their chances on the streets – fearful of both deportation and violence from the authorities.
This included hundreds of unaccompanied minors, women, and children. “I have a friend who came with his wife and little daughter of four months,” Arif says.
A Militarised Border
Arriving in Ceuta is like entering a military base. The chopping swooshes of helicopters fill the air, circling the port overhead, and police vans crawl along the beachfront below.
Streams of police cars patrol the streets. Convoys of army vehicles pass by on their way up to the border at Benzú, and the distinctive dark green of the Guardia Civil appears and disappears down cobbled side streets. The cab driver slows and motions with his head towards an unmarked van waiting at the lights. “Guardia Civil,” he mouths in the rear-view mirror.
“There are more police than people in Ceuta,” quips one local sitting on a terrace. There’s a hotel down by the port just for the reinforcements rotated in from the mainland, adds another.
On the next table, a group of young men enjoy a few cañas. But they are not locals: the cropped haircuts and stiff shoulders give them away. The regimented gait and mainland accents, the arms lined with veins like copper wiring.
Many hundreds of police and Frontex guards, the EU’s own border force, have arrived in Ceuta from the mainland since the arrivals in May, bolstering efforts to militarise Europe’s external borders and quell political paranoia among member states about a migrant ‘crisis’.
Ceuta and Melilla, Spain’s other African territory westward down the coast towards Algeria, are Europe’s only land borders with Africa and have long been points of entry for refugees and migrants. This humanitarian crisis was precipitated by a diplomatic one born from contested sovereignty of territory in the Western Sahara – annexed by Morocco in 1976 – after Spain treated Brahim Ghali, a Saharian sepretarist leader, in a Ceuta hospital.
Ceuta has historically been an entry point for migrants from sub-Saharan African countries, but since the Coronavirus pandemic border closure last year, many more Moroccans dependent on cross border commerce and employment have begun to enter by scaling the fence or swimming around the sea border.
“The economies of Ceuta and the northern Moroccan villages depend on each other,” Ricardo says, and the combination of the economic deprivation forcing people across the border, Moroccan diplomatic pressure, and its willingness to use its own people as pawns on the geopolitical chessboard, and Spain’s increasing militarisation of its borders is having a fatal effect.
Spain does not trust the Government in Rabat and feels that it allows its own citizens to risk their lives in order to apply diplomatic pressure over the territorial dispute. Madrid believes that Moroccan border guards left their posts in May and allowed people to enter as a crude negotiating tactic. Locals in Ceuta had heard the same. “There was an order: ‘let them pass’,” says local teacher Ricardo sitting on a terrace. He too believed events in May were political. “It was a measure of pressure to hurt Spain.”
In Ceuta, almost all of the migrants that spoke to Byline Times knew someone who had died trying to swim around the sea border. It is a notoriously dangerous route, described by Arif as “four hours swimming in the night”.
“Someone dies every week… Just last week, someone died, and two the month before.” He shakes his head, falling silent for a moment. “People die,” he finally says, lighting another cigarette. “It’s a shame,” he adds, his voice trailing off.
The United Nations’ migration agency reports that 250 people died on the route to the Spanish peninsula in the first half of 2021 alone, but Spanish migrant rights group Caminando Fronteras puts that number at more than 2,000.
In the same week that Sanchez and Von der Layen were arm-in-arm on the air base, 52 people reportedly died in a single day trying to make the voyage to the Canary Islands. The militarisation of borders in Ceuta and Melilla has forced more asylum seekers and migrants to attempt the perilous voyage across the Atlantic to the Canaries.
This militarisation is largely EU funded, and Ceuta’s border architecture is extensive. An 8 km long, 20 ft high land border starts on Tarajal beach in the east and snakes its way through the mountains to Benzú, where it juts out into the sea, and the peaks and troughs of the mountain ridge quiver away into the distance like the lines of a heart monitor.
Those that scale the land border are faced with another 2 m barbed wire fence and then a 10 ft fence with specially installed deportation doors manned by Guardia Civil that separate Spanish soil from a contested ‘neutral zone’.
Legally, there is no such thing as a neutral zone,” Hanaa Hakiki of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, who has challenged Spanish pushback policy at the European Court of Human Rights, told Byline Times.
A February 2020 ruling by the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights made clear that “neither Spain nor Morocco can create space in which no law applies,” she says.
Yet, a recent report by the Border Violence Network details testimony from migrants who were assaulted in, and illegally deported from, this border zone. According to the report, Spanish authorities employ a number of tactics to deter fence jumpers, including tear gas bombs and shooting plastic bullets at the head and hands in order to destabilise those on the fence. Any that land on the Spanish side are beaten and immediately returned through the deportation doors, and on Tarajal beach the Spanish military was deployed to prevent people swimming around the border and held them in the water for hours before being pushed back to Morocco.
“Once you are on Spanish territory, you are under the jurisdiction of Spain and all of the obligations of the state apply,” Hakiki says. The Spanish state, like many other EU states with external borders, “is creating a zone of unaccountability” on its border with the political and financial impetus from Brussels, she says.
The Children Seeking Asylum
Two boys of no older than 15 climb from the rocks. “They don’t want to go [to the centres] because of the mistreatment,” Arif says, pointing towards them with his cigarette. He leans over to show a video he took of a security guard beating a migrant in one of the temporary stay centres.
Hundreds of unaccompanied minors are housed in old warehouses where “they treat them like prisoners,” he says. “Like animals.” Not only are the boys fearful of the guards in the centres, and the squalid living conditions there, but also Spain’s collective pushback policy which deports groups of minors together – a practice already ruled illegal by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC).
It is these collective deportations of minors that have caused the most outrage among human rights groups. Both Spain and the EU already know they are illegal, and were halted briefly by a Ceuta judge for 72 hours in late August.
Collective deportations contravene Spain’s own immigration law passed in 2000, which requires individual assessments before the deportation of a minor can be made – a process bypassed entirely in group deportations. They also are in violation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Spain ratified in 1990.
The 2019 CRC case DD vs. Spain “made it very clear that, at borders, unaccompanied minors had to go through an initial procedure of identification – including age assessment – and protection needs assessment,” Hakiki says. “While this was going on they had to be provided for by the state, even when there are doubts as to them being minors. In any event, they could not be expelled without that happening individually.”
This, Hakiki says, “is what Spain is refusing to do”. The Ceuta Government says that it is impossible due to limited resources and is unwilling to move them to the mainland so “just want to make these bundled agreements for collective expulsions, with no individual assessment or guarantees”.