Taken to court for helping find migrant rafts
The rafts arrive daily now, in fair weather or foul, dozens of migrants crammed on to small, inflatable dinghies more suitable for a pleasure lake than the open sea. Most do not have enough fuel for the crossing; others use oars, not motors.
Along Spain’s southern coastline, locals have been horrified by bodies washed up from sunken rafts: among them, a boy of six or seven found on a Cádiz beach last January, and another, aged between eight and 10, in a national park in Almería in June.
In July, 49 sub-saharan Africans died when their raft sank near the island of Alborán, a rocky outpost halfway between Morocco and Spain that has become the country’s equivalent of Italy’s Lampedusa.
Arrivals to Spain by sea almost tripled in 2017, making the so-called Western Mediterranean route from Morocco the fastest-growing gateway to Europe, as the EU clamps down on entries elsewhere.
The arrivals have left Spain’s holding centres overflowing. In November, more than 500 mostly Algerian migrants who arrived in Murcia on 49 rafts in a single weekend were detained in an unfinished prison – Malaga 2 – despite the facility lacking drinking water, heating or health care. On Saturday, protests broke out outside the jail after a 36-year-old man was found hanged in his cell, with demonstrators demanding an investigation into alleged mistreatment and violence towards detainees.
Arantxa Triguero, the president of the refugee group Malaga Welcomes, told The Daily Telegraph the EU needs to provide more resources, claiming that Spain and other Mediterranean countries had been left to deal with the crisis alone.
But unlike elsewhere, the story of maritime migration to Spain is not, principally, one of death. Some 210 migrants have perished at sea attempting to reach the country this year – a figure that represents less than one per cent of those making the voyage – according to the International Organisation for Migration.
The rescue team in Almería is rightly proud of the survival rate, which they attribute to two factors. First, the Western Mediterranean route is an old one, meaning they are experienced hands.
The other factor, they say, is a prominent Spanish refugee activist, Helena Maleno Garzón, who since 2012 has worked with migrants through her Tangier-based NGO, Walking Borders. The Spanish coastguards work so closely with Ms Maleno that she has become their primary alert system for departing boats. She has, they say, saved “thousands” of lives.
Ms Maleno is able to give them precise and reliable information on the place and time that rafts have left the Moroccan coast – invaluable, they say, in the attempt to pinpoint their location and deploy rescue teams.
Embarrassed and under pressure, Moroccan authorities have set their sights on Ms Maleno. Next week, amid outrage from human rights groups, she will appear in court in Morocco to face allegations that she is collaborating with people traffickers. At the heart of the case are her calls to the Spanish coastguards – calls that Moroccan prosecutors say are made on behalf of organised criminal gangs.
In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Ms Maleno emphatically dismissed such claims, insisting she was informed of departing rafts – or vessels in trouble – by witnesses or the migrants themselves. “Saving lives is not a crime,” she said.
The case, she said, stems from a Spanish investigation begun in 2012, which was shelved by the National Court in April after it found the alerts did not constitute a crime. Now, her lawyers say, the dossier compiled by Spanish police appears to have been passed on to Moroccan authorities in the hope of securing a conviction.
Ms Maleno claimed that authorities in Europe and Morocco want to silence her, not only to prevent rescues but to quell her complaints of abusive practices on Europe’s frontiers. They were seeking to “make an example” of her, she told The Telegraph.
At the Maritime Rescue centre in Almería, Captain Miguel Zea told The Telegraph that the “brutal rise” in arrivals put the agency “to the test” in 2017. This year, he fears, will almost certainly be worse. By December 20, 21,468 people had arrived in Spain on migrant boats, compared with 7,490 in 2016 and 4,408 in 2015.
Captain Zea said the crackdown on migration via Libya was fuelling the surge. The EU brokered deals with Libyan authorities and groups in control on the ground in the largely lawless country, persuading them to impede departures.
It has worked, in a fashion: arrivals on the Central Mediterranean route to Italy have dropped by more than a third this year, from 181,436 in 2016 to 118,914.
But it has come at a heavy price. Reports abound of abuses including torture, rape, murder, and even the selling of migrants into slavery.
The coastguards are “indignant” over the Moroccan court case against Ms Maleno.
If she is jailed, it will be an enormous blow to Spanish rescue operations, Captain Zea said. He warned: “More people are going to die.”
‘Saving lives is not a crime’