Migrants accuse Eu-funded Moroccan police of widespread sexual abuse and extortion
Moroccan security forces funded by the European Union are systematically abusing the migrants they are being paid to stop reaching Europe, The Daily Telegraph has uncovered. Morocco and the north African coastal states of Libya, Algeria and Tunisia have quietly become the EU’S new front line in the battle to stop “irregular migration” to Europe.
But numerical success has come at considerable cost, with human rights organisations reporting abuses across the region.
The EU is investigating complaints about the widespread sexual abuse and extortion of migrants at the hands of the Moroccan police – first-hand accounts of which were obtained by The Telegraph from victims in Morocco last week. The Foreign Office in London is also aware of allegations.
Angel N’zopkou, a softly spoken 33-year-old hairdresser from Cameroon, knew the journey to join her husband in France would be long and arduous. But she had never imagined it would end by being raped at knifepoint by a Moroccan policeman whose salary and equipment are part funded by EU money.
Mrs N’zopkou had travelled nearly 4,000 miles from her home, crossing the Sahara via Nigeria, Niger and Algeria before arriving in Tangiers. The journey took over a month and cost €1,350 (£1,200), her life’s savings.
Waking up in one of the city-port’s many hostels she could see Spain, just eight miles (13km) away across the Strait of Gibraltar. She was then driven to a “safe house” in the pine forest that hugs the coast – a smugglers’ holding place for migrants set to make the sea crossing to Spain.
More than 55,000 have crossed from Morocco to Spain this year alone – more than have reached Italy or Greece combined
“The smugglers put the women in one room and the men in another,” Mrs N’zopkou told The Telegraph. “[But] then the police arrived. The policemen started taking each woman from the house into the forest.
“They were armed with swords and dogs. A policeman began to caress me and I told him to stop the stupidity.
“He brought out the sword he was carrying and said if I did not accept his advances he would hurt me.
“I couldn’t do anything else more, I had to let him have sex with me.”
Following the rape, Mrs N’zopkou says she was allowed to board the boat, but that it was then seized a short distance from the coast.
Fatim Condé, 28, from Guinea was on the same boat that night and was also raped. “Out of [all] the women on the boat, 60 per cent had sex with the police,” she estimated.
By pumping hundreds of millions of euros into governments and in some cases, militias, in the region, the EU has effectively contracted out the management of migration to the African side of the Mediterranean.
The strategy has seen the numbers making the Mediterranean crossing fall from a peak of over one million in 2015 to 170,000 last year, according to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR).
But human rights organisations say the strategy has not been without human cost and the allegations of abuse could not come at a worse time for Morocco or its EU funders. Early next month the country will host the Intergovernmental Conference to Adopt the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, under the auspices of the UN.
The sexual abuse of migrants in Morocco has been documented by the country’s two main human rights organisations, the Association Marocaine des Droits Humains (AMDH) and Groupe Antiraciste d’accompagnement et de Défense des Etrangers et Migrants (Gadem). The pattern of abuse, in which police demand sexual favours of women in return for allowing them to pass borders and checkpoints, is reflected in the first-hand accounts of migrants reported to The Telegraph. N’diaye Diouf, 31, from Senegal said she was raped by two Moroccan policemen at a border crossing near the town of Guerguerat when she was unable to pay a €300 bribe to enter the country.
Akissi Konate, 25, from the Ivory Coast, alleged that the Moroccan military stripped her naked near the town of Bir Lehlou, in Western Sahara, touching her inappropriately, as they searched her and stole her money.
Male migrants are also being extorted. In July and August this year, Gadem reported the Moroccan government illegally detained and internally deported 7,700 migrants – a figure it believes is a tiny fraction of the real numbers involved.
Migrants told The Telegraph that the “lucky ones”, who had money to bribe the police, were dropped off in towns in central Morocco such as Marrakesh or Rabat, while the rest faced deportation to Algeria or to the desert in South Sahara.
“It has been happening since 2015 but since June of this year it has increased in regularity,” said Camille Denis, the general coordinator of Gadem.
“It always has the same goal, to have the migrant as far as possible from the borders with Spain.”
Increasingly, sub-saharan migrants are also being returned to their countries of origin against their will.
Gadem documented a case in which a Cameroonian migrant, who refused to be flown home from Tangiers, was put in a “freezer” until he changed his mind.
Debora Del Pistoia, a campaigner for Algeria and Morocco at Amnesty International, told The Telegraph that her organisation considers the detainment and deportation of migrants to be unlawful.
“The containment of migration flows keeps being the priority of the increased financial support of the European Union to Morocco, in spite of the respect of the rights of all people on the move,” she said.
The Moroccan government is a significant beneficiary of European Union funding with €107million allocated for cooperation on migration. A further €807million was provided in “bilateral assistance” to the country between 2014 and 2017.
“Migration is a joint challenge and it is in our shared interest to tackle it together with our partner countries, including Morocco,” an EU spokesman told The Telegraph.
He added that the EU had been “substantially supporting” the
‘A policeman said if I did not accept his advances he would hurt me… I had to let him have sex with me’
implementation of Morocco’s National Strategy on migration and asylum since 2013 via its Stratégie National d’immigration et d’asile.
When the allegations of sexual abuse were put to the EU, a spokesman said it was aware of the claims and was investigating. Were it to find the rights of migrants was not being respected, the EU may suspend the activities of those involved, he said.
Such pledges are cold comfort to women such as Blessing Okonkwo, 19, from Nigeria. When she crossed from Algeria into Morocco near Oujda she was arrested with eight other women. “Three to five men had each woman and they took my virginity,” she said. “They had us for almost a week, then when they were satisfied they sent us straight to Tiznit.”
None of her group have approached the police out of fear of reprisals and judgment from family and friends at home.
In Oujda, Jawad Tlimcani, the head of AMDH there, shakes his head: “We see that Morocco has always played the role of the European Union’s policeman and it is always faithful to this role… in return for huge funding.”