At quarter to six on the morning of February 6, in a wood on the Moroccan side of the border with the Spanish north African enclave Ceuta, about 300 asylum seekers met to try to cross the six-metre high razor-wire fence seperating the two countries.
At 7.35am, they tried to cross this barrier but failed. Some then jumped into the sea, and swum towards a sea wall and adjoining El Tarajal beach that forms part of the border. Then, according to the Civil Guard, the militarised Spanish police force charged with patrolling the frontier, 23 made it ashore (still in Moroccan territory) but “some” drowned.
The numbers said to have drowned eventually totaled 15, with 10 corpses found in Moroccan waters and five in Spanish.
A group of Ceuta NGOs, acting on the evidence of survivors, denounced the Civil Guard to the local public prosecutor. Survivors said the Civil Guard fired rubber bullets at them while they swam and tear-gassed those reaching dry land.
The head of the Civil Guard denied the use of rubber bullets and insisted none of the asylum seekers had reached Spanish territory.
Video evidence
However, video camera footage soon emerged of civil guards firing towards the swimmers from the shore and their motor launches. After a week of evasions, interior minister Jorge Fernandez Diaz admitted the Civil Guard had used rubber bullets and blank cartridges to create a “screen of dissuasion”.
But he insisted this action did not caused the drownings. However, when the Civil Guard released more video footage, it showed civil guards ignoring the plight of drowning asylum seekers.
The second Civil Guard fairy tale ― that none of the swimmers had made it to Spanish soil ― was also exposed by the video footage. Fernandez Diaz was forced to admit that the 23 had actually made it onto Spanish soil. They were then immediately expelled to Morocco.
That was illegal, the NGOs and parliamentary opposition said, citing the European Union law that any asylum-seeker reaching member state territory has a right to have an application for asylum properly processed.
The interior minister had a ready answer: the swimmers who had reached land had entered Spanish territory “geographically” but not “juridically”. This was based on their failure to get past the line of civil guards on the sea wall and El Tarajal beach.
The interior ministry has since issued orders that anti-riot devices like rubber bullets not be used in similar situations. Spanish authorities have promised ― while still dragging their feet in practice ― to collaborate with European Union requests for a full report on the tragedy.
That “full report” will in all likelihood be shelved, just like the report on last year’s Lampedusa tragedy off the coast of Italy, when 200 hundred asylum-seekers drowned. The EU, however, has to go through the motions of seeming to observe standards.
But that is as far as it goes. No one has been sacked or shifted sideways in the Civil Guard hierarchy. No one has apologised. There’ll be no inquiry into what happened besides the coroner’s investigation into the deaths of the five drownings in Spanish waters.
A mild request from the national Ombudswoman that Spanish law and practice comply with the United Nations refugee convention has been met with silence.
At the same time, Fernandez Diaz is pursuing a new agreement with Morocco, hopefully with the support of Portugal and France, that would allow anyone who enters these EU countries “irregularly” from the north African state to be immediately sent back.
Refugee-bashing
What is becoming increasingly obvious is that the Ceuta tragedy is becoming a litmus test of the state of Spanish public opinion on the refugee and asylum-seeker issue.
The reactions of the national Popular Party government ― and of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) parliamentary opposition ― show this clearly.
Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy is sinking in the polls and creating more enemies than friends on all the hot issues of national Spanish politics ― health and education cuts, the Catalan right to self-determination, abortion, the right to protest, gutting of the powers of councils and much more. The thought of a playing the card of racism and xenophobia must be tempting.
That is particularly so when the move might win back a mass of disillusioned ex-PP voters.
Elements within the PP, symbolised by PP mayor of the large Catalan working-class city of Badalona Xabier Garcia Albiol, are pushing for the party to take a harder line on “illegals”. He wants the PP to follow his success in scapegoating “migrant gangs” as the root of social decay in working-class neighbourhoods.
Garcia Albiol has managed to win Badalona for the PP with a xenophobic message targeted at “gypsies” ― Romanian and home-grown ― and “Moors”. In a city that was once a left stronghold, the politically key neighbourhood associations, originally set up by the United Socialist Party of Catalonia to organise the local struggle against the Franco dictatorship, are now run by PPers.
In his Bilbao visit Albiol called for a “much more restrictive immigration policy”. His host, the PP spokesperson on Bilbao council, said: “If the neighbours want to confront us with problems that they attribute to the reality of immigration in their streets, then let’s talks about it, about problems of immigration and delinquency.”
PSOE role
The reaction of the PSOE has been wildly varying, torn as it is with doubt as to whether “outrage” against the PP over immigration policy will really win it many votes.
One PSOE spokesperson made the correct point that if the 15 victims of Ceuta had been white, the Civil Guard head would have been sacked immediately. But in the parliamentary vote on a United Left motion demanding Fernandez Diaz’s resignation the PSOE abstained.
The tricky problem for both PP and PSOE is that it is still unclear how much mileage there would be in a national refugee-bashing election of the Tony Abbott-type.
Racist attitudes are present in all parts of Spanish society, including parts of the working class and in the poorer neighbourhoods. But would they be a determining factor in people’s vote?
The reaction of the mass of Spanish people to the 2004 Madrid bombing, the work of Al Qaeda sympathisers, would make the PP think twice about an immigrant- and refugee-bashing campaign.
The attempt of the PP administration of the day to pin that horror on Basque Homeland and Freedom (ETA) cost it the election. Millions saw through a blatant attempt to manipulate a horrible crime.
An equivalent attempt to pin unemployment and the dwindling economic prospects of young people in Spain on the “raids” on the razor-wire fence of Ceuta by desperate African economic refugees could well meet a similar fate.
Certainly, the attendance at commemorative rallies around Spain for the 15 dead asylum seekers showed that many ordinary people stand in solidarity with the victims of European and Spanish institutional xenophobia ― and want a humane immigration and refugee policy.
[Dick Nichols is Green Left Weekly’s European correspondent, based in Barcelona.]
