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The
bird shot gave Chinois his scars. Perched on a Moroccan mountain lit
only by the full moon and orange glow from a tiny corner of Europe
below, he pulls up a trouser leg to show the holes pockmarking his
knee. The metal pellets he managed to dig out are kept in a grubby
handkerchief in his pocket. The others remain buried in the young
Cameroonian’s flesh, hobbling his walk.
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Coils
of razor wire caused the badly-healed gash on Rodrigue’s thigh. It
is surprising he does not have more: in the three years he has lived
on the mountain, he has faced the towering fences, razor wire, pepper
spray and pellet guns 13 times in an attempt to get into Melilla, a
patch of Spanish territory on the northern Moroccan coast. And 13
times he has failed, picked up by Moroccan police and dumped at the
Algerian border, only to trudge back to the slopes of Gurugu and wait
for the opportunity to make another dash over one of the few land
borders between Africa and Europe. “I will keep trying until I get
to Europe,” says the 32-year-old, who is also from Cameroon.
He
is one of tens of thousands of migrants and asylum-seekers massing at
the gates of Europe. Many are on an illegal quest to breach a border
for economic reasons. But joining them are increasing numbers of
Syrians, Egyptians, Tunisians and Malians fleeing turmoil at home
after the optimism of the Arab Spring turned into a reality of unrest
and repression.
In
the past month, at least 7,500 migrants and asylum-seekers have
arrived in southern Italy and Malta, taking the total so far this
year to 20,000 – well above the 10,000 who arrived in the whole of
2012. Officials from FRONTEX, the European
Union‘s
border agency, say numbers in the past few weeks are creeping back to
the levels seen at the height of the Arab Spring in 2011.
Most
are arriving in the poorer nations on the periphery of the EU, which
are ill-equipped to deal with the cost and burden of housing the
migrants as they grapple with their own economic crisis. Migrants
arriving in Greece, which is experiencing the harshest austerity
programme on the continent, have been crammed into detention centers
labelled “inhumane” by medical charities.
Bulgaria,
the poorest country in the EU, has reported 3,000 people illegally
crossing its borders so far this year, up from 2,000 in the whole of
2012. The nation’s interior minister, Tsvetlin Yovchev, told
Bloomberg on Tuesday that if the crisis in Syria
escalates, that number could reach between 6,000 and 10,000 by the
end of this year. “This exceeds our potential,” he said.
This
is creating a dilemma for Europe: do countries share the burden and
accept more refugees? Or do they simply build border fences even
higher, wary of the political realities in EU member states where
terms like “immigrants” and “asylum-seekers” are not met with
much sympathy by voters?
The
consequences of the latter approach are more deaths and injuries as
people seeking a better life take even higher risks to try and find
it. As countries increase security at their land borders, says Human
Rights Watch researcher Judith Sunderland, “you have people going
to the sea to try and avoid those borders, and it’s just more
dangerous.”
On
Aug. 10, the bodies of six dead migrants washed up on the beach
near the Sicilian town of Catania after an an 18-metre boat carrying
more than a hundred migrants ran aground. Last week, a woman gave
birth at sea in a boat crammed with 300 mostly Syrian refugees. Malta
last month refused to let a boat carrying 102 migrants dock, despite
reports that a five-month-old baby and four pregnant women were on
board. Malta’s Prime Minister Joseph Muscat has demanded more help
from the EU, accusing the bloc of being “quick in rescuing banks
but too slow in rescuing people.”
Michele
Cercone, spokesman for the EU home affairs commissioner, says the
bloc is doing everything within its powers to help, considering all
requests for emergency funds and appealing to other European nations
to accept more refugees. But, he adds: “This can only be done on a
voluntary basis… the appetite for re-location at this stage is not
high.”
The
Swedish government announced on Wednesday that they would grant
permanent residency to any Syrian refugees in the country. But for
the majority of new Syrian arrivals in Europe still waiting for their
asylum applications to be processed in holding facilities in Italy,
Malta, Greece, Spain and Bulgaria, that promise must seem very far
away.
In
the meantime, many European nations are simply reinforcing their
borders – whatever the human cost. Greece has followed Spain’s
example, building its own heavily-fortified fence along 10.5km of its
border with Turkey and launching Operation Xenios Zeus, a security
sweep which Human Rights Watch says has led to more abuses against
migrants and asylum-seekers.
As
security on both sides of the fence in Melilla has increased, life on
Gurugu has become “hell”, says Rodrigue. Hundreds of men and
women spend their days hiding among cacti as Moroccan police sweep
the mountain, only emerging at night to beg for food in a nearby
village. Those who are caught are beaten, loaded into trucks, and
dumped at the Algerian border, Rodrigue says.
No
one is denying EU nations the right to protect their borders, but
activists question whether people deserve the levels of violence they
face. The charity Medecins Sans Frontieres treated 1,100 migrants for
injures sustained in Morocco or on the fence in 2012. The Moroccan
and Spanish governments did not respond to requests for comment.
Those
who do make it across find their way to the CETI, a holding center in
Melilla. In the office of CETI’s director, Carlos Montero Diaz, the
camp’s children laugh as they dart under his desk looking for the
drawer filled with lollipops. But despite the smiles, the camp is
under strain and operating at double its capacity. Diaz too wants
more help from the EU, but he believes funds should also go towards
raising the quality of life in the sub-Saharan nations people flee.
The
fence, he says, simply cannot go much higher: “If people don’t
have money in their countries, don’t have a future, the immigration
situation will continue.”
