Ceuta & Mellila: Pain in Spain (feature)
01 September 1998
Few Europeans are even aware that the European Union has a land border with Morocco. Yet it does. The consequence of two left-over crumbs of Empire - the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla - joining the EU with the rest of Spain in 1986. Now they are both increasingly acting as poles of attraction for economic refugees from sub-Saharan Africa, primarily from Sierra Leone, Liberia and Congo, and asylum-seekers from Algeria seeking a route to mainland Europe that avoids the perils of the deadly maritime passage across the treacherous Straits of Gibraltar that kills thousands every year. Over two thousand bodies were washed up on southern Spanish beaches in the last eighteen months.
Ceuta is basically a garrison town directly across the Straits from Gibraltar with a population of some eighty thousand people. Melilla is larger in area, but with a population twenty thousand less than its counterpart, but tinged with the same military traditions, and only a hundred kilometres from the Algerian border.
The economies of both live a lie. They are duty-free zones with unemployment running at above 25% and with tens of thousands of Morrocans entering every day to buy "white-goods", alcohol and tobacco to either smuggle back into Morroco, or to take back through the borders where a little cash turns the full glare of the temporarily blind customs officials upon the donors. Thirty-five percent of Ceuta's trade ends up in Morroco, while in the case of Melilla its over 75%. The response reflects this difference. Ceuta has a new shiny border going from coast to coast. Two chainlink fences separated by a tarmac roadway that has buried beneath its electronic detection systems. In contrast in Melilla the border is best described as informal. At one point it consists of a roll of barbed wire over the top of someone's garage.
[...]and borders don't work, no matter what level of sophistication they demonstrate. While Spain to Morroco leaks spirits, tobacco and video recorders, Morroco to Spain will continue to leak soft drugs, economic refugees and asylum seekers. Many of the Algerians enter by borrowing passports from the tens of thousands of Morrocans from the region who cross the border everyday [...] The goods stop flowing out just as quickly as the people stop coming in and the local economy starts to hurt bad. The Morrocans are of no help. At best they say it's none of their business, while at worst they deliberately exacerbate the situation, as part of their disjointed campaign for the 'return' of the two towns to Morrocan sovereignty.
So the refugees and asylum seekers continue their flow. In Ceuta they end up forlorn in a mess of ex-army tents, ragged self-constructed huts and an old sports hall generously described as the Calamorano Centre. In Melilla there is a purpose built camp, La Granja, next to the Airport, occupied by the sub-Saharan Africans with the Algerians squatting in the desolation of the abandoned outbuildings of a Technical College long since closed. In the two camps the black Africans separate into English and French speaking blocks. In both towns they compete with the local unemployed for what limited casual work is available, supplemented by money raised from other activities on the edge of the law or just beyond it.
The result is growing local resentment made worse by a traditional colonialist mentality and a geography of isolation from the mother country, cornered, as the residents are, between the hostile inhabitants of the Rif to the South and the walls of the cruel sea to the North. It was from Melilla that Franco launched the rebellion that took three years of fighting before Spanish democracy was put on hold for forty years. Today Melilla's seafront proudly displays the only extant public statue of the man who gave the world the first war crime from the air, the terror bombing of Guernica. Worse many of Franco's first soldiers were North African. After the Spanish Civil War t