Would-be immigrants are still dying at the gateway to Europe, as a powerful documentary presented here by Mediapart bears witness. On March 16th a team of aid workers in North Africa accompanied by an Italian filmmaker, Sara Creta, came across Clément, a young man from Cameroon. Like many others, Clément had left his family in December 2012 in search of a better life, and had headed north towards Europe.
After a journey of some 2,000 miles, or 3,700 kilometres, across West Africa and the Sahel, he and others had arrived outside Melilla, a tiny Spanish enclave sandwiched between the Mediterranean coast and Morocco that is heavily guarded by the Spanish Guardia Civil and protected by three layers of barbed wire fencing three to six metres (11- 20 feet) high. This enclave marks the land border between Africa and Europe and it was here that the tragic events took place that were to lead to Clément's death.
As the young Cameroonian and others tried to cross into Melilla on March 11th, Clément was arrested by the police, severely beaten and taken to hospital in the nearby Moroccan port city of Nador, according to eye-witness accounts collected by several humanitarian aid associations. He had head wounds and was also thought to have suffered a broken arm and leg. He was still very weak when the hospital released him.
Clément then returned to the forest on Gourougou Mountain, where African migrants have set up makeshift refugee camps in which they eke out a clandestine existence before trying their luck again.
The aid team and Creta went to these camps to interview the wounded and collect accounts of the physical abuse meted out by the Spanish Guardia Civil and the Moroccan auxiliary forces, which are made up of security agents with military status and fall under the aegis of Rabat's interior ministry. Creta let her camera roll as Clémént was dying of his injuries. Officially he is said to have died in hospital on March 18th, but the evidence of the camera, of witnesses present and the first-hand account of Creta herself all make clear that he died in the forest two days earlier on March 16th.
Describing the scene that day Creta says: “We saw people seriouly wounded, and Clément was in the process of dying. We called the ambulance several times, we waited a long time.” Eventually the police arrived before the ambulance. “The migrants had picked up the body again, refusing to let the police take him through fear they would dispose of him. They also wanted to pay a last tribute, to mourn him. Because he was already dead. It was around 4pm,” says Creta.
The 15-minute documentary she produced, proof of the level of violence used against these migrants, can be seen in its entirety at the bottom of this page, with English subtitles. It very nearly never got made. Creta says that when the migrants were waiting with Clément for the ambulance she and her Cameroonian helper Sylvin had stayed hidden in the woods. “Because finally we had the proof that police violence is such that it can lead to death,” she explains. But local residents unhappy at their presence called the police who came and asked them to hand over any tapes they had. “It lasted at least two to three hours, but I kept the tapes,” explains the filmmaker. “In their place I gave them an empty memory card.”
Creta called the film 'n°9' in a reference to the football shirt Clément was wearing – the number nine shirt. Below are two shorter extracts. The documentary was screened in Rabat on June 28th during a news conference to launch a campaign by associations defending foreigners' rights in Morocco.
Thousands of exiles from sub-Saharan Africa end up in Gourougou forest – Spanish Melilla is even tantalisingly visible through the branches of its trees. The day Clément was beaten, somewhere between 100 and 150 migrants had tried to get into Melilla at about 5 a.m. after the morning prayer. They had come from Gabon, Cameroon, Mali, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Chad and Senegal, according to those interviewed at the time.
Several made it, but of those who did not, 25 are thought to have been seriously injured when they were intercepted between one of Melilla's three fences. Because they were taken to hospital, they avoided being forcibly taken to the Algerian border.
'It was a real massacre'
In the documentary, these escapees face the camera and relate what happened to them. They are haggard, and even before Clément's death they seem disturbed, with a worried, vacant look in their eyes. They display their injuries – on their heads, feet, arms and hands – and their makeshift bandages, the places where the skin has been scraped off or cut open.
They say the Moroccan police harass them every day in the forest, hitting them with iron bars, clubs or stones if they are caught. But most of their indignation is reserved for the way the law and their rights are ignored.
If they make it into Melilla, they hope to reach the “campo”, the temporary holding centre from which they would be transferred to the European continent to await an administrative decision on their cases. But over the past few months the Spanish police have increasingly simply handed them over to their Moroccan counterparts, supposedly under an old readmission agreement that in the past was hardly ever applied. According to several witnesses this is done in exchange for cash, and the migrants are not given time to apply for asylum, as the Geneva Convention says they should.
The migrants say the Spanish police also beat them and then send them back to the other side of the border where the Moroccan officers continue their physical toprment. “Before throwing us out they massacred us. There, it was... there, it was a real massacre,” says one of them. Another adds: “Frankly, the Moroccans are torturing us.”
The Moroccan humanitarian associations (1) hope that with the broadcast of this documentary, the message they have been trying to put across for months will finally be heard. Their campaign aims to denounce “the systematic daily repression endured by the migrants from the Moroccan authorities and the implication of the Spanish authorities in the exactions committed against them at the border of Melilla”. They call on the Moroccan government to “end the violations of human rights in the north of Morocco”, whether it be physical or psychological violence, destruction or theft of personal possession or confiscation of identity papers.
The campaign also wants an official inquiry opened into the circumstances of Clément's death and the deaths of other migrants in similar circumstances. For example, the associations say just a few weeks ago another man from Cameroon called Grand Papy died during a round up by Moroccan security forces. He had been chased and is thought to have been badly beaten before he fell into a ravine some 40 metres, or about 130 feet, deep.
The route is a well-established one for migration to Europe, and there have already been other tragedies. During the night of September 28th to 29th, 2005, several hundred migrants from sub-Saharan Africa tried to get into Ceuta, a second Spanish enclave in Morocco across the narrow straits from Gibraltar. Several were killed by police bullets, but no inquiry was ever opened. The route was subsequently abandoned as it was deemed too dangerous. But now it is being used once again.
The associations defending foreigners' rights have been trying since the end of 2011 to alert public opinion over the renewed violence, which is taking place particularly when migrants are intercepted at the border and during round-ups of migrants in north Morocco, as well as during “measures to remove them”.
Their worries are not over. The European Union has just signed a “joint declaration establishing a mobility partnership” with Morocco. Dated June 7th, 2013, the text is a step towards a formal agreement that would allow the EU to send migrants who have passed through Morocco back to the kingdom. Moroccan and European migrant associations accuse Brussels of seeking to sub-contract management of migration to its southern neighbours.
But even death is not a deterrent for these migrants, who are prepared to risk everything to improve the conditions of their lives. About 300 tried to get through just recently, on June 26th.
The Spanish authorities employed their standard response, using wartime terminology to describe the event, which they said was a “massive assault”. And they blamed the African migrants for being instigators of the violence, claiming they had thrown stones at the Moroccan forces. According to the latest figures from Fortress Europe, a blog by Gabriele Del Grande, at least 18,567 migrants have died at Europe's borders since 1988.
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1. The Moroccan associations that launched the campaign are: Association Lumière sur l’Émigration Clandestine au Maghreb (Alecma), Groupe Antiraciste d’Accompagnement et de Défense des Étrangers et Migrants (Gadem), Forum des Alternatives Maroc (FMAS) and Association Marocaine des Droits de l’Homme (AMDH).
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English version by Sue Landau
Editing by Michael Streeter