They’re survivors, not immigrants
Who are these refugees fleeing to Europe? Here are two of their stories
‘This is the beginning. My life begins today,” says Mohammed Shyiah, flashing an ear-to-ear grin. The lanky 20-year-old is speaking a couple of hours after setting foot in this tiny Spanish enclave in North Africa.
And he has reason to be ecstatic. Although still geographically in Africa, thanks to a quirk of colonial history he is on Spanish soil — and that means he has also reached the European Union. This is where he hopes to permanently escape his home in war-torn Damascus.
In 2014 alone, 59.5 million people fled war or poverty, according to a report released this week by the United Nations. Almost four million of those displaced are Syrians.
Many seek asylum in Europe. Most get there through the Italian and Greek archipelagos, but more are making the long detour west to Melilla. An increasing number of those refugees are Syrian as well, about 55 per cent last year, with most of the rest from sub-Saharan Africa.
It took Shyiah 22 months to get to this European speck on North Africa’s Mediterranean coast. He had been given the chance to cross the sea as human cargo in a rickety smuggler’s boat, but after a friend, and thousands of other migrants, drowned on such transits he opted to try his luck on a circuitous land route to Europe — through Lebanon, Algeria, Morocco and Melilla — because “it seemed safer.” Although Shyiah provided few details about the last leg of his odyssey, he almost certainly carried a “rented” Moroccan passport, Spanish officials say, and got into the enclave by mixing with the 35,000 Moroccans who cross into Melilla every day to work and to shop.
Khalid Kourouma’s trek from Guinea to Melilla was even more arduous and dangerous. Kourouma was “15 years and three months old” when he left the capital, Conakry, nine months ago, escaping a country where the World Bank reports more than half the population lives below its poverty line.
The teenager navigated Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Algeria and Morocco, dishing out 1,200 euros in bribes along the way. Because of his black skin he was unable to disguise himself as a Moroccan when he got close to the Spanish enclave. His only way across the border was to climb over a series of three- and six-metre fences.
About 20,000 Africans tried this literal jump into Melilla last year. But with Moroccan authorities on one side and Spanish Guardia Civil on the other, only 2,300 successfully made the leap into the city — in some cases after dramatic high-wire acts that involved as many as 500 men storming the fence in carefully planned nighttime assaults captured on video.
“It seems like a movie but it is real life,” says Sub-Lt. Juan Antonio Martín Rivera, who has been posted with the Guardia in Melilla for 23 years. “It sometimes feels like the weight of all of Europe is on our shoulders.”
The Guardia has two seemingly contradictory responsibilities. It is charged with keeping the migrants from getting over the fences or across the seven-kilometre beachfront into Melilla — but also making sure that if they do succeed in entering the well-scrubbed territory, whose 80,000 residents benefit from generous subsidies from Madrid, that they are treated well.
Col. Ambrosio Villasenor, who commands the Guardia in Melilla, says the city’s problem with the influx of refugees is “like having a patient with terminal cancer and all we can do is apply a Band-Aid ... The people who come here are not immigrants. They are victims.”
The travellers are vulnerable to Moroccan and Spanish mafias who traffic in humans. “It has become a trade where people get very rich,” Villasenor says.
Meanwhile, many of the migrants, especially the women and children, suffer terribly, as Isabel Torrente has discovered through her work with the ACOGE charity. It welcomes arrivals and counsels them on their legal rights as well as on practical matters such as hygiene and access to medical care.
“Most of the women have been raped along the way and exchanged like property,” she says. “The women have had no control over their own bodies or of the diseases they may carry. All the resulting psychological problems create a barrier and we cannot really see inside.”
Her charity runs group activities such as hairdressing and applying makeup to help the women become comfortable with “contact with people of other cultures” without fear, says Torrente. “Otherwise they don’t mix. They stay within their own small cultural groups.”
But so much more must be done, she says. Thousands more Africans are known to be gathering in Morocco before pushing on toward Melilla, Torrente notes. The difficulties posed by this crush of immigrants have “to be looked at globally,” rather than locally or through a Spanish or European lens.
For now, refugees who arrive in Melilla will eventually reach the Spanish mainland and the EU. Few are turned back. However, to get papers and a ferry ticket usually takes three to five months. A few migrants who have problems documenting who they are or where they are from can end up in limbo for years, living in Melilla’s clean but spartan government-run temporary shelter for refugees about 200 metres from the border.
None of this dims the hopes of Shyiah and Kourouma. Now that they have their foot in Europe’s door, they intend to make the most of the opportunity.
Shyiah plans to study business in Spain. Kourouma wants to get a job when he arrives in Europe proper. Both are aware many Europeans are not eager to see more newcomers in their midst. They shrug and say nothing will deter them.