FREAK ANIMALS // article

on europe’s southern borders, where spain meets northern africa, the reality of “fortress europe” is stark. the lines between rich and poor are not rhetorical here; they are fortified with concrete and barbed wire, protected by electronic movement sensors, watched by 24-hour camera surveillance and patrolled by spanish and moroccan soldiers.
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on the night of the 28th to the 29th september 2005, while the spanish and moroccan governments met in cordoba and sevilla to discuss strategies for strengthening these lines, hundreds of people - refugees from cameroon, ivory coast and congo - attacked the borders. first at melilla and then ceuta they began to break through. and they were met by the spanish guardia civil.

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“we were a number, the cops were looking for us: it's a fight, a struggle, as it uses to be. but the struggle is unfair, they have gases that asphyxiate us, they have plastic bullets. they have real bullets too, and sometimes you can hear them at night. we have our hands and our feet, and the idea not to react. what is important is the collective, and it is the hope that sustained us along the way to europe from our origin countries. two, three years we were on this way.

the cops have long truncheons too, falling hardly and quickly on our bodies, breaking our bones and our hope. some of these truncheon are electrified, and you can feel your body trembling, you cannot breath anymore, and you feel that you are dying.

this day was as many other. this time there were no moroccan cops, it was us and the spanish guardia civil. many of us went through the gate, we were in melilla, the guardia civil opened the little door and sent us back to morocco. the cops sent back the wounded, the healthy. and they sent back two dead bodies.”

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at least six people were killed in recent days trying to get over the fences, and many many more injured. but many others made it across. and when people have risked their lives over and again just to get this far: travelling across africa for years, running from famine and war to reach europe’s doorstep, then the borders are there to be broken. they are strong people.

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“we, the illegal as they call us, the one that have no voice, swear by our dignity (because, although they kill us we still have our dignity as human beings) that we witnessed how our comrades have been hit untill death, that the Spanish cops opened up the little door and threw the two corpses away towards morocco as if they were dogs.

and we know that we will return to the wire. many of us are escaping from hunger and war, but we are not afraid: although all the officials leave us here alone, we know that we are human beings and that we did not do anything, that the murderers are not among us, and that at least god knows all this.”

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now, after the massive attempts to cross the border, thousands of people have been arrested by morroccan authorities and deported. they are sweeping the streets for black people, rounding them up and driving them into the sahara desert. here they are abandoned, without food or water.
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“they put us in busses. i thought they would take us to the border at oujda like always…. but they took us south. maybe six hundred kilometers from oujda. then the busses stopped and military trucks arrived. they seperated us into small groups and took us into the desert. they left us there without food or water. in the distance there were lights. the moroccans said they were in algeria. we walked all night towards the lights… it was an algerian military base. the soldiers gave us food and water. our companions did not stop arriving. but others did not arrive. i swear the ones that did not arrive must be dead.”

“people have been deported wounded, with broken legs. they can’t walk and they are in the desert. we are not thinking of ourselves, we are okay, but we think of those that are in the desert. go and look for them with helicopters, please: the hours count.”

“i remember the dead and i die too inside”.

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support workers in tangier say that it is impossible to count "…but we know that from saturday to wednesday (09.10. – 12.10.2005) around sixty busses carrying between forty and sixty people have been taken into the desert. that means more than two thousand four hundred people… different groups have reported thirty six dead and an indeterminate number of disappeared.”

as i write this, ten busses are being driven across the western sahara towards the moroccan border not with algeria but with mauritania. this is an area where on average four in ten people who enter there do not survive. my hands shake to think of those people out there, right now, in the dark ….

.... and it is important to know that these stories are not unual. there is death all along the borders that protect european priviledge. broken boats and broken bodies litter the beaches in the south of spain, testament to the thousands who die trying to cross the straits of gibraltar.
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it is so close. you can see the hills of andalucia from the coast of morocco, across a stretch of water only eleven kilometers across in some places. every night, under cover of darkness, dozens of tiny boats – “pateras” - set out.

it is not an easy journey. the currents between the pillars of hercules, where the atlantic meets the mediterranean, are treacherous. the boats are fragile and overloaded, packed to bursting by mafias who trade and profit from the transport of undocumented (i won’t say “illegal”) migrants. many disappear in the dark waters and do not live to tell their story.
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"the indifference of the west": enjoying the sun on a spanish beach.
the drowned body of an african man lies in the background..

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the united nations say two thousand bodies were found between 1991 and 2004, but this is only half the story. people who die before they reach spanish waters or who wash up dead on morroccan beaches are not recorded. if their small boats do not make it to the imaginary line in the water that is officially “spain” then, dead or alive, they do not exist. the spanish coastguard refuses to rescue people whose boats sink before reaching spanish waters. on 6th july 1998 a boat carrying 38 people went down. all 38 died as the spanish coastguard stood by, ignoring distress calls and arguing that it was an “internal moroccan affair”. the association of moroccan migrant workers estimates that around five people a night die trying to cross the straits, most between 16 and 30 years old. exact numbers are impossible to know.

for those that do make it to land the danger does not end. surveillance is being tightened along the coast with mobile radar detectors linked to rapid response police boats. the spanish police say around 18,000 people were arrested entering spain by sea in 2001. many are immediately re-patriated, to risk their lives and try again. others are taken to detention camps where they face rape, torture and death at the hands of the post-fascist spanish police. amnesty international say sexual assault of migrant women is common, and, fearing deportation more than rape they don’t press charges. even if they did the, spanish judicial system protects its own.

different versions of the same horror story can be found everywhere europe meets the poor countries. the overland route across the greek-turkish border was mined following the turkish invasion of northern cyprus in 1974, and the landmines have been left to stop people coming in. more than 70 people have died trying to cross this killing field since 1994. hundreds more suffocate and die in the back of trucks or under trains as they try to get across the mediterranean or the english channel.

statistics don’t tell it: each number is a person’s life, and after a while you stop feeling it. writing this article has made me cry and it has made me angry. the european union is rich countries united to separate themselves from the poor. walls, all along the edges of our comfortable lives. repression, hunger, desperation and death; lagers, detention camps and deportations: keeping the others out.
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“power’s fence of war closes in on the rebels, for whom humanity is always grateful. but fences are broken. the rebels, whom history repeatedly has given the length of its long trajectory, struggle and the fence is broken. the rebels search each other out. they walk toward one another. they find each other and together break other fences.” . (subcomandante insurgente marcos)
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up against the walls of fortress europe people are being broken, trying to break in.
now we must walk towards them and start trying to break out.