Africans, Battered and Broke, Surge to Europe’s Door

African migrants camp out in the hills of Morocco near the Spanish enclave of Melilla. Credit Samuel Aranda for The New York Times.

By SUZANNE DALEY, NYT
FEB. 27, 2014

MELILLA, Spain — It is easy to pick out the new arrivals at the shelter for immigrants here on this tiny patch of Spain in North Africa. One man limps by on crutches with a plaster cast on his ankle. Another has a bandaged arm in a sling. Abbdol Cisse, 19, had stitches on his face.

“The police in Morocco were throwing stones at us, at our heads,” Mr. Cisse said recently, explaining his injuries. “They had metal bars, and they hit our legs while we were climbing.”

Ten years ago Spain spent more than 30 million euros building up the barriers around Melilla and Ceuta, its two enclaves surrounded by Morocco on the northern coast of Africa, which offer the only land borders between the promise of Europe and the despair of Africa. And for a while the investment seemed to work.

But in the past year, large groups of sub-Saharan immigrants have been charging the rows of seven-yard-high chain-link fences here with increasing frequency, or trying to swim around them, believing with good reason that if they can just get past they will ultimately end up in Europe. They often end up injured, not just from falls and the newly laid concertina wire, but at the hands of the Moroccan and Spanish authorities trying to stop them.

(More here.)