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Deaths at the borders continue the effect of EU policies in Morocco. Introduction by Yasha Maccanico and articles by Said Tbel and Jerome Valluy

01 January 2009

Two articles examining the role of UNHCR and the EU and the pressure on Morocco to follow the securitarian road leading to the exclusion, detention and expulsion of migrants.

The Fortresseurope blog has reported that 1,502 migrants and refugees died in their attempts to reach Europe in 2008. While somewhat lower than figures from the previous two years – 1,942 in 2007 and 2,088 in 2006 – the continuing high number of deaths illustrates the effects of EU immigration policy. These figures do not take into account many cases when neither migrants’ bodies nor the boats they were travelling in were found. Documented deaths in the Channel of Sicily, between Libya, Tunisia, Malta and Sicily have been rising in line with the increase in arrivals in Italy. 36,900 migrants were intercepted in 2008, up from 20,450 in 2007. While 302 people perished in 2006 and there were 556 deaths in 2007, in 2008 the number of fatalities was 642. Sixty more died en route from Algeria to Sardinia (five less than in 2007), 181 in the Aegean Sea (down from 257), 216 in the Strait of Gibraltar (up from 142) and 136 in the Canary Islands (decreasing considerably from 745 in the previous year, with arrivals also diminishing).

Whilst the vast majority (1,235) of migrant deaths occurred in the Mediterranean and off the coast of the French island of Mayotte in the Indian Ocean (27), many (240) also died during overland journeys – four in Calais, 32 were shot by police (25 of them in Egypt), four in Greek minefields in Evros, eight under lorries in Italian ports on the Adriatic coast and a further 75 hiding under lorries elsewhere. Twenty-seven people drowned in border rivers and 90 died of dehydration in the Sahara desert. Furthermore, apart from deaths reported in the European press, there is an increase in information arriving from north Africa. The Spanish newspaper El País reported on 21 January 2009 that the Algerian Navy provided a figure of 98 would-be migrants who drowned in Algerian waters in 2008 (up from 61 in 2007).

EU immigration policies continue to reap a bitter harvest in terms of an ever-increasing body count (estimated at 13,413 over the ten years since 1998). The effects in terms of human rights standards in neighbouring countries continues to belie one of the EU’s key foreign policy claims, namely to promote human rights worldwide. As 2009 began with another man shot dead (and others wounded) by the Moroccan security forces as he sought to cross the fences topped with barbed wire in Melilla, it is an appropriate time to look at the restrictive immigration regime imposed by the EU in the north African country.

Fortress Europe December 2008 report: http://fortresseurope.blogspot.com/2006/01/fortezza-europa-1502-migranti-e.html; and El Pais, 21.1.09; APDHA press statement, 4.1.09.

The first essay by Said Tbel of the Moroccan Human Rights Association (Association Marocaine des Droits Humains, AMDH) views the growing role played by the UNHCR in Morocco as a facilitator of the EU’s externalisation of its immigration and asylum policies. The second piece features translated extracts from an essay by Jerome Valluy on the imposition of EU policies on Morocco and their effects.

An international day violated in its essence
by Said Tbel

The process of introducing stricter legislation in the field of immigration and the right to be offered refuge in European countries combined with the implementation of policies to close the borders within a securitarian framework has made the situation worse. The war against migrants and refugees results in hundreds of repatriated people and dozens of deaths, leaving human tragedy in its wake. It increasingly involves the complicity of countries bordering on the Mediterranean. Morocco had briefly abstained from this approach, but now adheres to it. It accepted the guidelines of the new securitarian framework, forced to do so by its interest in improving relations with European countries. In 2003, the United Nations rapporteur on the rights of migrants described the vulnerable situation in which irregular migrants, as well as sub-Saharan people (migrants and refugees), who arrived in our countries after fleeing wars, famine and catastrophes in their countries, find themselves. She noted the absence of any specific assistance for these vulnerable people, particularly for women and children. In the same year, Morocco adopted a new law inspired by those of its European counterparts on the entry and residence of foreigners, particularly “illegal” migrants and asylum seekers.

Since then, Spanish-Moroccan securitarian campaigns on both sides of the Strait of Gibraltar are being conducted. This process accelerated in 2005 with the tragic events in Ceuta and Melilla in September and it has grown in intensity over the last three years. All these violations are far from being instances where things “got out of hand” as they are construed in official statements. Rather, they are the result of public policies masterminded by European countries in connivance with countries to the south of the Mediterranean.

Faced with this situation, what role does UNHCR play in the protection of the rights of asylum seekers or refugees?

For 50 years, since 7 November 1956 when the Kingdom of Morocco ratified the Geneva Convention on Refugees until the autumn of 2004, the representation of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Morocco was symbolic: a mere “honorary delegate” carrying out administrative information work for the international headquarters in Geneva and following the situation of the 272 refugees recognised by UNHCR in Morocco. In November 2004, UNHCR’s policy in Morocco, decided at its international headquarters in Geneva, changed abruptly and a new office was opened with assistance from the UN Development Programme (UNDP). In fact, as the UNHCR had not yet signed a “branch office agreement” (co-operation agreement) with the Moroccan state, it has only recently been possible for its work to be recognised by the Moroccan government. In spite of this, UNHCR’s activities have been boosted to a higher level than previously. Members of the UNHCR delegation in Morocco claim this situation results from an increase in the number of asylum seekers. They also stress that the UNHCR’s mission is to ensure a good application of the Geneva Convention on Refugees (1951). This situation poses questions about the reason for this shift from an “honorary delegation” to a fully functioning “delegation”. Why concern itself so much with raising awareness about the right to asylum in a country that, previously, was barely concerned by this subject? Why such a revival after half a century of passivity?

The answers to these questions are as follows. In November 2004, the European Union adopted the Hague Programme that framed the European Commission’s security policies in its relations with countries bordering the European Union. The Hague Programme, established for the 2004-2009 period, institutionalised the so-called “externalisation of asylum” policies initiated by Europe at the end of the 1990s. These policies gained notoriety after proposals by British prime minister Tony Blair, at the start of 2003, to create holding centres in countries neighbouring the European Union for migrants who had already arrived or sought to arrive in Europe. The Hague Programme re-formulated these proposals and set the guiding principles for a policing policy that was largely beyond the reach of national authorities and of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Foreign Relations (DG RelEx). This Programme explicitly linked the UNHCR to an approach by the European Union that aimed to develop the “reception capabilities” of neighbouring countries in order to reduce entries into European territory. In particular, it envisaged the preparation of “EU regional protection programmes in partnership with the third countries concerned and in strict consultation and co-operation with the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights”. Moreover, it is on this basis that Morocco adopted Law 02/03 on the arrival of emigrants.

UNHCR officials, as well as experts or academics who work for the externalisation of asylum, let it be understood that there was a greater need for the involvement of international organisations including UNHCR. This is an interpretation that preserves the image of the UNHCR as assisting exiles, which is how it portrays itself in its campaigns: enrolment in the externalisation of asylum policy would seek to put a brake on or divert this policy. To analyse this situation, one must look back at the history that has moulded the European Union’s current policies with regards to its neighbours, particularly Morocco, which is a key ally in the European fight against migration after being coerced into its securitarian logic. What remains to be identified is the specific role that the UNHCR had in the origins of these policies, particularly in the externalisation of asylum. This will allow us to follow the links that exist between the preparation of this policy in Europe and its implementation in Morocco. That is when we will better understand that the UNHCR has come to work in Morocco within the framework of an anti-migration struggle, far removed from the objective of protection that the Geneva Convention proclaims.

European policies for Morocco
by Jerome Valluy (Abridged translation)

“Protecting European Union countries from migratory invasion, by sending approaching refugees into camps, established, directly or indirectly, by the EU or one of its Member States in neighbouring countries just beyond the common European border.”

This is the wording used in 2003 to create a wider public awareness of European neighbourhood policy. After controversy over the word “camps”, it was removed from the official vocabulary the following year. European officials now only concern themselves with the development of “reception capabilities” in bordering countries, particularly those in the Maghreb. The implementation of this policy led to the strengthening of borders by the military and the police and the recruiting of neighbouring countries into this process for the repression of migrants.

On the humanitarian side of this policy, organisations concerned with the right to asylum and solidarity actions are politically and financially encouraged by the European Commission to improve reception conditions for sub-Saharan migrants in all the Maghreb countries. Their activities illustrate Bourdieu’s concept of the “left hand of the State” [1], which was adapted as the “left hand of the Empire” by Michel Agier [2], to describe the dependency of social-humanitarian logic in relation to the State’s forces and goal of a securitarian or repressive kind; the “right hand” refers to the repressive apparatus itself, particularly the police and its activities.

Each hand functions with its own logic and mode of action, but they stand side by side in the dynamics of domination by a state vis à vis its civil society, particularly the working classes, or in cases of intervention by a foreign power in a third country. The financing allocated by the European Union to Moroccan actors over the last few years has mainly benefited the “right hand” involved in policing and, only residually, the “left hand”, but the funding that passes through the UNHCR produces some important effects in Morocco and in assistance to refugees, where the financial capacity of NGOs is very weak.

The securitarian dimension: European pressure, Moroccan resistance and conversion

At first the Moroccan government resisted European injunctions, only to later adapt by negotiating its participation in the process. This co-operation, the terms of which were set in late 2004 after two and a half years of discussion (March 2003-November 2004), took the shape of a police campaign against migrants that began at the start of 2005. This intensified in the first eight months of the year until the paroxysmal phase of autumn 2005 involving arrests, police abuse and turning people away at the border.

[... The article now looks at the development of EU policies concerning Morocco since the 1996 association agreement between Morocco and the European Union. It stresses how Morocco was in a weak negotiating position in relation to Europe, on whose aid it is dependent. It was also the time when the EU implemented a “common area of free movement” which, for foreigners, is defined by the “hardening of common European borders”. In 1997 and 1998 the fences surrounding Ceuta and Melilla were built and the southern European border surveillance system established, notably in the Strait of Gibraltar. In spite of Morocco’s 2000-2001 rejection of the securitarian model (developed by the EU’s Austrian and Dutch presidencies in 1998-1999, based on a European world-view involving concentric circles, which was further developed through action plans drawn up by the High Level Group on Migration and Asylum in partnership with the UNHCR and the IOM, and which identifies Morocco as a key partner), a European-Moroccan agreement was signed in March 2002, with extensive funding (115 million Euros) for aspects including “circulation of people” and “border controls”....]

In June 2003, Morocco continued to adhere to European policies with the adoption of law 02-03 on the entry and residence of foreigners. This law was inspired by the French modified Ordinance of 2 November 1945 and was hostile towards immigration, creating “waiting zones” and “detention centres”. [...]

Until the late 1990s, this [Spanish] aid officially sought to improve the situation of Moroccans. From 2002-2003 its tone changed: Spanish documents explicitly refer to the subordination of this aid to Europe’s anti-migratory goals.[3]

Since November 2003, several Moroccan “repatriation” operations affecting a total of around 2,000 people were organised and immediately welcomed as “successes” by the European Commission. This progressive recruitment translated into the appearance of informal camps of migrants confined by repressive operations, particularly in the forests at Gourougou opposite the Spanish enclave of Melilla and in the Bel Younes forest opposite the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. Since 2003, Cimade has concerned itself with the emergence of these forest camps. In 2004, the association produced the first international testimony concerning the inhuman living conditions of these exiles next to the Spanish border.[4]

The policy adopted by the new prime minister, José Luis Zapatero, head of the Spanish government as of 2004, served to extend the Spanish-Moroccan normalisation that was embarked upon well before the election. Zapatero’s visit in April 2004, followed by intense activity by the two foreign affairs ministers, put the finishing touches to this normalisation whose achievements are in the realm of policing the fight against sub-Saharan exiles. An implicit give-and-take mechanism was implemented: on the one hand, increased repression against sub-Saharans in Morocco, and on the other, increased Spanish development aid and regularisation of sans-papiers, largely Moroccans living in Spain.

This give-and-take was made official in the text of the Hague Programme in November 2004:

Insofar as transit countries are concerned, the European Council underlines that it is necessary to intensify co-operation and the strengthening of capabilities at the southern and eastern borders of the EU, so as to allow said countries to better manage migrations and to offer adequate protection to refugees. The countries that demonstrate a genuine will to comply with the obligations that they are responsible for by virtue of the Geneva Convention concerning the status of refugees will be offered aid for the purpose of strengthening their national asylum and border control regimes, as well as wider co-operation in the field of migration. (§ 1.6.3).

In December 2004, co-operation between officers of the Moroccan Royal gendarmerie and the Spanish Guardia Civil began. This was the first step in the implementation of joint patrols in the strait. This joint police operation was developed in northern Morocco and the Canary islands. On 18 January 2005, the King of Spain officially thanked Morocco for its co-operation in the fight against illegal immigration. In February 2005, Morocco signed a branch office agreement with the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) authorising it to establish an office in Morocco. The goal of the agreement was to “provide an effective contribution to the management of migration issues in the Kingdom of Morocco”. The IOM representative is lodged in the offices of the Moroccan foreign affairs ministry. Its budget allocation allows it to fund aeroplane tickets for exiles wishing to return to their countries.

The long Spanish-Moroccan campaign of 2005

Thus, after pressure and with funding, Morocco was enlisted in the European repression of migrants. This reality was not visible to the wider public until the migrant deaths at Ceuta and Melilla in autumn 2005. The crisis that the mass media covered from 28 September 2005 was nothing other than a phase of the European-Spanish-Moroccan securitarian campaign that had been in preparation for several years. It gathered pace in early 2005 and grew rapidly in the six months that preceded the autumn’s killings. Well before the headlines, Moroccan police violence had reached such a level that the humanitarian organisation Médecins sans Frontières felt obliged to renounce its discretion (which allowed it to intervene in Morocco) to testify about the brutality, increasing evidence of which was found on the bodies of the exiles who they treated.[5]

An analysis of the media coverage of this phase of the policing/humanitarian crisis, in September and October 2005,[6] details the interaction between Spanish and Moroccan political authorities and their relation to the police efforts. On 10 September 2005, the announcement of the joint French-Spanish-Moroccan proposals in preparation for the Euro-Mediterranean Summit in Barcelona (scheduled for November 2005) was accompanied by rumours among the exiles about a probable heightening and doubling of the fences in Ceuta and Melilla, as well as the digging of a ditch in front of the fences. This information soon proved well-founded. It created a fear of the impossibility of getting through and, within a context of generalised repression, pushed the exiles to last chance coordinated attempts at entering. Many of these were filmed and broadcast by western television channels. Simultaneously, police pressure on migrants, both in the suburbs of Rabat and in the forest camps, reached unprecedented levels and served to increase the frequency with which attempts at entering occurred. On 27 September 2005 a vast police operation of round-ups and arrests in the neighbourhoods of Rabat and Casablanca set off a chain reaction of panic.

On 28 September, when the Spanish-Moroccan summit on migration policies started, co-ordinated attempts to cross into Ceuta and Melilla gave rise to unprecedented repression by Moroccan law enforcement forces, resulting in six deaths. This date also marked the beginning of hundreds of deportations to neighbouring countries. This campaign lasted until mid-October. A Moroccan “Auxiliary Forces” camp was established a few dozen metres from the Gourougou forest. During this phase of the crisis, the Spanish authorities stoked the tense climate through repeated announcements, particularly about raising the height of the fences around Ceuta and Melilla and about expulsions of sub-Saharan exiles towards Morocco. As shown by the combination of analyses and testimonies published by the Migreurop network in its “Black Book of Ceuta and Melilla”,[7] the deaths in autumn of 2005 in front of the Spanish enclaves were not mere excesses: they were a result of public policies; those undertaken by the European Union for years and later those of the Moroccan authorities that had converted to the repressive logic imposed by Europe.

A new policy of round-ups in Morocco (from December 2006)

The international press used the word “crisis” a lot to describe events in the autumn of 2005, without perceiving the geopolitical depth of the phenomenon. The impression of brevity was strengthened by a calming down following the murderous excesses.

The geographical settlement of sub-Saharan exiles in the north of the country and in the eastern region changed in 2006:[8] the autumn 2005 crisis drew strong media attention to the Gourougou and Bel Younes camps. The first was evacuated by the Moroccan gendarmerie, which set up a permanent outpost there and carried out regular patrols of the forest so as to prevent any lasting re-settlement of migrants. This “solution” resembled the one adopted in Sangatte by the French interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy. Similar to what happened after the closing of the Sangatte camp, the migrants now found themselves dispersed in the surrounding regions, that is, in Nador and Berkane near Melilla, and on the Castiago hill near the forest of Bel Younes near Ceuta. The same development could be observed near the border town of Oujda where the most famous camp remains, on the university campus, but where the exiles are disseminated around the extra-urban countryside (in woods and caves) and in the working class suburbs of Oujda (the Vietnamese neighbourhood). This dispersal makes it more difficult to undertake solidarity actions (providing food, sleeping materials and medical care) for these people.

The exiles and their associations acknowledge the existence of a relaxation in 2006. Another sign of this is that in mid-2006, after months of deadlock with the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, the Moroccan Red Crescent, which is dependent on the government, received the go-ahead to take action with regards to the condition of the sub-Saharans. On 18, 19 and 20 December 2006, it organised a presentation of its activities in Oujda [9] where it announced that a thousand blankets would be supplied to sub-Saharans sleeping in the open air in the freezing eastern Moroccan nights. However, shortly before their distribution this humanitarian action was abruptly stopped to be replaced by a securitarian intervention that struck at Morocco’s four corners on 23 and 30 December 2006. This was met with indifference by the media. It saw a vast campaign of round-ups and forced removals to the eastern border region of the country, towards the “closed” border with Algeria.

It was a large-scale operation involving different forces: the police, “security auxiliaries” (local police informers in neighbourhoods), the gendarmerie and the notorious “auxiliary forces” under the direct control of the interior ministry which joins ordinary police forces for operations involving “dirty work”.

These round-ups and forced removals affected the nationals of sub-Saharan African countries in a wide range of legal situations: sans-papiers, people in a regular situation (holding a passport and visa that had not expired), asylum seekers who had registered with UNHCR and refugees who were recognised by UNHCR. The indifference to the legal status of individuals conforms to the modus operandi of police actions: round-ups in apartments identified in the previous weeks by “security auxiliaries”, leading police to take away all the black people. Documents that were produced were confiscated or destroyed by the law enforcement agencies.

[... harrowing accounts by the victims of these removals to the border follow...]

Between Christmas 2006 and 6 January 2007, the closing date of my report to Migreurop [10], 479 people were rounded up (248 in Rabat, 60 in Nador and 171 in Laâyoune) who were victims of police brutality, injured by truncheon blows and humiliated. Pregnant women were rounded up and one, who was six-months pregnant, lost her child. Parents with young children were also detained and several cases of rape were confirmed medically. Transported in buses across Morocco, the victims were abandoned in groups of a few dozen, in different locations some kilometres away from each other, along the Moroccan-Algerian border. Threatened by shotgun rounds fired in the air, they were forced by the Moroccan security forces to advance towards Algeria, and they were then sent back by Algerian forces that also fired in the air. After a ten-hour stand-off between the two armies, most managed to return to Oujda or the camp on the edges of the forest and the university.

[...] Simply an occasional end-of-year operation? On Saturday 20 January 2007, new round-ups took place in Rabat: 103 people were transferred towards Oujda. The observations carried out a week later11 showed that it is a continuing policy. [...]

On Monday 22 January 2007, in Brussels, the Human Rights Commission of the European Parliament placed the subject on its agenda in the presence of the European Commission, UNHCR and the Moroccan ambassador, to hear my report. The ambassador was offended by what appeared to be a charge of institutional racism and sought to create a diplomatic incident, possibly to avoid the rest of the report which he did not reply to. He deplored his country’s situation, trapped between the hammer and the anvil. The European Commission’s representatives denied any responsibility, reaffirming their commitment to respect for human rights and rejected any criticism over what happened in third countries. To the question posed by the President: “Why do you push Morocco to act like this?” the DG RelEx representative stated that there is no European foreign policy in this field. The representative from DG JLS looked at his notes to avoid answering the question while the UNHCR spokesperson mumbled inaudibly.

Footnotes

1. Pierre Bourdieu, “La démission de l’État”, in P. Bourdieu (dir.), La misère du monde, Paris, Seuil, 1993, pp.337-349.

2. Michel Agier, “La main gauche de l’Empire: Ordre et désordres de l’humanitaire”, Multitudes, no.11, winter 2003 re-published by TERRA-Editions: http://terra.rezo.net/article344.html

3. On 25 and 26 September 2003, the annual study sessions of the Spanish Agency for International Co-operation on the theme “Co-development and immigration”.

4. CIMADE, “Gourougou, Bel Younes, Oujda: la situation alarmante des migrants subsahariens en transit au Maroc et les conséquences des politiques de l’Union Européenne”, Report by Anne-Sophie Wender with the co-operation of Marie-José Laflamme and d’Hicham Rachidi (AFVIC-PFM), Paris: Cimade-SSI, Oct. 2004, 50 p. Web:
http://listes.rezo.net/archives/migreurop/2005-10/pdfyxWOE6bv9q.pdf

5. MSF - Report, “Violence et immigration, Rapport sur l’immigration d’origine subsaharienne en situation irrégulière au Maroc”, 29 September 2005 (Note: this report was only made public on this date but was known in the network of associations since July and covers events previous to the summer of 2005) www.msf.fr/documents/base/2005-09-29-msfe.pdf

6. YATA Elias, “Le traitement médiatique de la crise des migrants subsahariens dans la presse marocaine (entre le 27 septembre et le 9 novembre 2005)”, Memorandum for the Masters’ in Political Sciences (First Year) of Paris 1 University, Dir. J.Valluy, 2006.

7. MIGREUROP, “Guerre aux migrants – Le Livre Noir de Ceuta et Melilla”, Paris, Migreurop, Sept. 2006, 100 p. Web: http://www.migreurop.org/IMG/pdf/livrenoir-ceuta.pdf

8. Observations made during a research mission that I conducted in this region from 4 to 11 November 2006.

9. J. Valluy, “Contraintes et dilemmes des actions de solidarité avec les exilés Subsahariens en transit au Maroc oriental dans le contexte créé par les politiques européennes d’externalisation de l’asile”, Communication to the study session “Le Maroc Oriental face à l’émigration subsaharienne”, organised by the Faculty of Law of Mohammed I University (Oujda, Morocco) in partnership with FISCRCR and the Moroccan Red Crescent, Monday 18 December 2006 http://terra.rezo.net/article432.html

10. J.Valluy, “Rafles de Subsahariens au Maroc à Noël 2006” - Report to the association Migreurop, 6 January 2007, Paris. Research as part of the ASILES Programme, http://terra.rezo.net/article432.html

11. J. Valluy, “Chronique de la banalisation des rafles d’exilés et de l’usure des solidarités au Maroc”, 3 February 2007, Research as part of the ASILES Programme, http://terra.rezo.net/article432.html