# taz.de -- Migration policy in Morocco: A stable part of the EU border regime

	# taz.de -- Migration policy in Morocco: A stable part of the EU border regime

	> For a long while, Morocco played the role of border guard to Europe.
	> Liveable prospects for migrants emerged here temporarily. Since that
	> time, repression has again become the order of the day.

	Bild: A glove hangs from a broken barbed wireat the spanish exclave Ceuta in Mo…

	On 7 June 2013, the Moroccan government and the European Union signed an
	accord on a so-called mobility partnership. At issue was one of the
	bilateral agreements that currently exist between the European Union and
	eight states: the Cabo Verdean islands, the Republic of Moldava, Georgia,
	Azerbaijan, Armenia, Tunisia and Morocco. Morocco was the first
	Mediterranean state to enter such an agreement; Tunisia followed on 3 March
	2014.

	On the EU side, these bilateral agreements deal chiefly with the offer of
	visa facilitations for certain categories of citizens of Morocco, Tunisia,
	etc.; the central counter-offer on the other side is the respective state's
	obligation to “take back“ migrants who have been deported from Europe, or
	who are not welcome there. For the latter side, the obligation of
	re-acceptance applies not only to citizens of the receiving state itself,
	but also to citizens of third states who have verifiably traveled through
	Morocco.

	As human rights activist Ramy Khouili observed in an article in the
	Huffington Post on 27 October 2015, with regards to visa facilitations, the
	agreement offers nothing more than statements of intent, whereas the
	objectives in the section on “taking back“ migrants rejected from Europe
	exhibit a concrete, compulsory quality.

	Morocco has long been a country whose citizens attempted to emigrate. Many
	of them have resettled, for instance, in France, Belgium, and Spain, and in
	part, in the 1970s, in the Rhine-Ruhr region of West Germany as well.
	Continuing to the present, young people lacking opportunities in Moroccan
	society are still trying to leave its territory and head toward Europe. On
	1 December 2013, the Moroccan online newspaper Bladi.net issued a report
	based on data from Spanish Minister of the Interior Jorge Fernández Díaz,
	stating that in the period from 2002 to 2012, about 47,000 Moroccan
	citizens had entered Spain “illegally“.

	## Ceuta and Melilla

	Currently, in any case, when this country on the north-western tip of
	Africa is broached as an issue in regards to migration policy and EU
	relations, the discussion revolves not around its own citizens, but around
	citizens of third states who are entering Europe, or trying to reach the
	EU-Europe, by crossing Moroccan territory.

	One of the European Union's external borders runs through Morocco. Not
	between Morocco and the EU, but through Morocco itself. Two Spanish
	enclaves – that is, territory belonging to the EU – are located on Moroccan
	soil. For historical reasons rooted in the colonial past, the two cities of
	Ceuta and Melilla – which have a population of around 170,000, taken
	together – are still regarded administratively as part of Spain, and
	therefore, of the EU.

	During the night between 28 and 29 September 2005, and again between 5 and
	6 October 2005, massive attempts to cross this border occurred, at the
	external border of Ceuta in the first attempt, and at that of Melilla in
	the second. Several hundred migrants, mostly from sub-Saharan Africa, tried
	to storm the guarded border fence and knock it over with the sheer force of
	their combined weight. Their chosen tactic has been used repeatedly, and is
	still being applied today. The suppression of this collective attempt to
	cross the border left 14 people dead. To this day, not one person in
	authority has ever been convicted in this matter; Moroccan and Spanish
	border officials passed the blame back and forth between each other for
	years.

	## Raids as the answer

	The fatal incidents in Ceuta and Melilla catalysed a discussion in many EU
	countries about the EU's external borders, their alleged protection and the
	tacit acceptance of sacrificing human lives to this end. There were protest
	demonstrations in several EU countries, as well as campaigns, public
	discussion events and books published on these topics. Awareness increased
	– at least within certain circles open to the subject – about the issues of
	the sometimes lethal regime along the EU's external border.

	In Morocco itself, however, the outcomes of the incidents were utterly
	different. Shortly afterwards, massive organised raids and arrests were
	carried out among sub-Saharan Africans.

	3,000 people were forcibly loaded onto buses and hauled away from the zone
	near the border. At least 1,000 of them were abandoned in the desert in
	southern Morocco – somewhere in the vicinity of the border to Algeria or
	Mauritania (in the Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara). Moroccan authorities
	have consistently denied that this action took place. However, once they
	had come under international pressure, these very same authorities called
	for search parties to locate those abandoned before they could die of
	thirst. Observers consider it extremely likely that there were also
	fatalities in this case. Still, Moroccan authorities categorically deny
	this as well.

	Some time later, further push-back actions occurred in the desert border
	region of southern Morocco; for instance, in December 2006. But in this
	case, 42 migrants, 36 men and six women, – who had already been officially
	granted recognised refugee status by the UN refugee aid agency UNHCR –
	filed charges afterwards. With the help of the Spanish non-governmental
	organisation “Commission for Refugees“, they brought the case before the UN
	Committee Against Torture. On 8 April 2013 , the Moroccan online newspaper
	Ya biladi (translated: “You, my country“) announced an investigation of the
	occurrence by that committee.

	On 2 July 2013, another massive raid on sub-Saharan migrants was carried
	out in northern Morocco, in Tangier – particularly in the city district of
	Boukhalef. 700 people were arrested, packed onto buses and taken, this
	time, not to the desert in the South, but instead “only“ as far as Oujda,
	several hundred kilometres away to the East. On this occasion, a
	39-year-old Congolese man named Toussaint-Alex Mianzoukouta, a French
	teacher at a private school in Rabat who held a legal residence permit for
	Morocco, was thrown from a moving bus during a violent conflict with the
	police. Severely wounded, he was admitted to a hospital, where he lay in a
	coma for several days. On 5 August 2013, his death was publicly announced.

	## Rabat “is sleeping“

	In 2006, Morocco's involvement in the border regime of the EU began to
	intensify. On 10 and 11 July 2006, at a ministerial conference in the
	capital city Rabat entitled, “Euro-African Ministerial Conference on
	Migration and Development“, the so-called “Rabat Process“ was initiated.
	Over fifty West and North African states and EU member states took part at
	this meeting. The participating states hold joint conferences at which
	causes of flight and migrations are debated, purportedly leading to
	recommendations on how, through “improved development co-operation“,
	irregular emigration in the area can be put to a stop. In practice, this
	intention has proven to be a mere fig leaf.

	With over fifty states participating, the “Rabat Process“ may be too
	cumbersome to yield concrete results. At follow-up conferences on 25
	November 2008 in Paris, in the context of the French EU council presidency
	at that time, as well as on 23 November 2011 in the Senegalese capital of
	Dakar, attempts were made to intensify the co-operative work. In any case,
	essential decisions about the transnational migration regime continued to
	be made most often within bilateral relationships between states, or
	between the EU and individual states in the global South, rather than
	within this multilateral framework. In 2015, the media of record in France
	referred to the “Rabat Process“ as having “gone to sleep“. Presently,
	however, driving forces in the EU are trying to reactivate this process and
	to involve further African states in the migration control regime, through
	measures including the “Khartoum Process“ since 2014 and the Valletta
	Conference of November 2015, among others.

	In some parts of Moroccan society, conspicuous problems of racism persist
	in connection with the presence of migrants. In part, this phenomena is
	closely related to religious resentments, especially against African
	non-Muslims.

	In an interview on 14 July 2103 for the Moroccan information portal
	H24info, Hicham Rachidi, general secretary of the anti-racist, Rabat-based
	human rights association GADEM, stated that his group had observed since
	2006 that, “in many cases, sub-Saharan migrants who went to police stations
	to file charges of discrimination or racist expressions were then
	arrested“. He also criticised the police for planned actions with the
	supposed objective of halting “illegal“ immigration: in certain city
	districts in Rabat, Casablanca, Fes, Nador and Oudja, police apparently
	organised the actions with the aim to “absolutely hunt black people down“.

	## Violent racism

	On August 12 of the same year, in the wake of a dispute with a “native“
	Moroccan man over occupying space on a bus, thirty-year-old Senegalese
	citizen Ismaila Faye was stabbed to death at the Rabat main bus station.
	Afterward, many Moroccan media sources referred to the crime as
	“anti-foreigner“, whereas Cameroon citizen Eric Williams – an activist wi…
	a refugee association – stated that within a single week, fifteen racist
	attacks against migrants in Morocco had occurred, and evidently the murder
	was only the tragic climax. In the following week, on 19 August 2013, about
	300 people demonstrated in the Moroccan capital of Rabat to do honour to
	Ismaila Faye. On social networks, as well, many Moroccans denounced racism
	against black people in their country. Late in the afternoon of 14
	September 2013, a sit-in protest against racism was held before the
	Moroccan Parliament, following a conference on 11 September at the premises
	of the bar association.

	Then for the first time in Morocco's history, from 21 March to 20 June
	2014, a broadly conceived anti-racism campaign was mounted, offering
	cultural activities and events. Its official slogan was the phrase, “Je ne
	m’appelle pas Azzi“(“My name is not ‚Azzi‘“, referring to a racist …
	and it was supported by an alliance of civil society organisations called
	the “Coordination Centre for Universal Rights of Residence“. A number of
	intellectuals also supported the campaign. It seems that it did contribute
	toward changing the mentality in the country in some measure, or at least
	toward questioning racist certainties. Hardly any open displays of racism
	in the raw, such as those that flared up in the summer and fall of 2013,
	have been recorded since then. The campaign also had a stroke of luck, in
	that it ran concurrently with the Moroccan government's operation to
	legalise illegal immigrants, though this had not been the initial intent.
	Against this backdrop, at least for the time frame in question, the
	campaign could reckon with a certain measure of tolerance from the
	authorities.

	## Legalisation and deportation

	On 21 March 2016, the Coordination started a similar campaign together with
	partner associations in Algeria, Tunisia and Mauritania, entitled
	“Maghreb-Wide Campaign Against Racial Discrimination“, demanding the
	introduction of anti-racist laws in all the Maghreb countries.

	A particularity of the development in Morocco was that in late 2013, the
	country's authorities introduced a more or less broadly-based “legalisation
	policy“ for migrants living on Moroccan soil. The term used within the
	official, French-language documents was régularisation, which is also used
	in France to describe a measure by which those who have previously been
	sans papiers, or “undocumented immigrants“, are granted residence permits.
	In the first half of 2013, by the account of the Moroccan Association for
	Human Rights (AMDH), a total 6,406 migrants had been deported from Morocco.
	Even as late as 23 September 2013, an article in the daily newspaper El
	Pais reported that the Spanish government had offered to help Moroccan
	authorities deport “illegal“ migrants from northern Morocco – in order to
	remove them from regions close the Spanish border.

	What accounted for Morocco's ensuing decision to legalise migrants'
	residency status could ultimately have been the fact that the lives of tens
	of thousands of migrants have been centrally based in the North African
	country for years. It is where they work, receive medical care, and send
	their children to school.

	In the months just after the start of the “operation“, the residencies of
	6,000 people were legalised. In total, during the year and a half of this
	policy, around 14,000 residency permits were issued. This predominantly
	affected sub-Saharan Africans; however, the palace government also
	explicitly included Europeans who were illegally residing in Morocco within
	the measure. Coming primarily from the South of crisis-ridden Spain, in
	recent years, not a few people had emigrated to North Morocco to try their
	luck there.

	## A sudden end

	Still, from the very start, the entire policy was marked by great
	ambivalence as well. On one hand, it brought significant relief to people
	who often had been living, and also steadily working, in Morocco for years
	– for example, to travellers who had become stranded long-term in the
	Maghreb state, although the original goal of their journey may have been
	Europe. On the other hand, from the policy's inception, the EU – which
	generally puts substantial pressure on Morocco, aiming to move the state
	toward its own migration policy specifications – had linked the operation
	to its objective of barring the door against further travel or entry to
	Europe, with the tactic of offering migrants an alternative opportunity
	“along the way“.

	On 9 February 2015, the Moroccan regime cancelled its prior legalisation
	policy: directly, immediately, abruptly. Its end was announced by State
	Secretary of the Interior Charki Draiss at a press conference.

	Two hours later, massive raids began in the migrant camps and multiple
	arrests occurred in the forests near the city of Nador, especially around
	the now-famous Gourougou Mountain. Between 1,200 and 1,250 people were
	arrested and dispersed to cities far from the border, often in the South of
	the country. Ten days later, 450 persons were still being held in police
	detention or deportation centres. Attempts began to deport entire groups to
	ten different countries of origin; these attempts were not always
	successful, since not all of the states‘ consulates spontaneously
	“co-operated“.

	The practice of apprehending migrants in northern Morocco – with the intent
	to distance them from the exterior borders of the EU – and transporting
	them to the desert in the South of the country was also reinstated. On 5
	November 2015, about 100 refugees in Tangier were arrested and taken to a
	location near the southern Moroccan town of Tiznit. Similar actions had
	been undertaken in early October.

	After several approaches that had seemed hopeful, including the
	“legalisation operation“ of 2013, the situation for migrants in Morocco has
	again become visibly and drastically worse. This will not prevent the
	European Union from treating Morocco as a leading “partner“ in the area of
	migration control.

	In the meantime, on 12 December 2016, Moroccan authorities announced that a
	second “legalisation period“, similar to that of 2013-14, would supposedly
	begin before the year's end. A communiqué from the Moroccan minister of the
	interior, dated 12 December 2016, makes reference to the fact that in the
	week prior, during King Mohammed VI's tour of West and East Africa
	(including Senegal, Mali, Rwanda, Tanzania and Ethiopia), the respective
	heads of state had apparently acclaimed his country's legalisation policy.

	The touring visit had served predominantly to prepare for Morocco's return
	to the African Union (AU), which Morocco had left due to the conflict over
	the occupied Western Sahara; and also, to set in motion an expansive
	Moroccan economic policy on the continent. Morocco's migration policy is
	now to be elevated as a component of these new political relationships.

	12 Dec 2016

	## AUTOREN

	Bernard Schmid

	## TAGS

	migControl
	Afrikanische Flüchtende

	## ARTIKEL ZUM THEMA

	Spanische Enklave Ceuta in Nordafrika: Flüchtlinge klettern über Zaun

	Mehr als 100 Menschen überraschten Sicherheitskräfte sowohl auf
	marokkanischer als auch auf spanischer Seite. Die Gruppe schaffte es so
	über den Zaun nach Ceuta.