Lying semi-submerged in sand and seawater the small, deflated dinghies are testimony to a perilous passage. While hiking the coast of southern Spain that runs along the Strait of Gibraltar these past weeks, time and again I would come across these tiny abandoned craft.
Where had their occupants come from and what had become of them, I would often find myself asking? These days the answers to such questions are almost invariably to be found in the picturesque Andalusian port town of Tarifa.
There like elsewhere along Spain’s southern coast, emergency makeshift relief centres have been hastily set up to cope with the surge in arrivals by sea of migrants. Most have made the dangerous crossing from Morocco that sits barely nine miles away across the Strait of Gibraltar.
Almost daily now men, women and children most from sub-Saharan Africa disembark from rescue boats, most are exhausted, bewildered and shivering.
Such has been their numbers of late that in Tarifa town many of the municipal buildings including a local gym and sports centre have been used to accommodate them and are now full to capacity.
According to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) more than 15,000 migrants have already entered Spain this year via the short but treacherous trip across the strait where the Mediterranean Sea and Atlantic Ocean meet. Over 2,700 more migrants crossed into Spain by land in its North African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla.
Only this past week, Spain’s Maritime Rescue Service confirmed it had picked up 160 people from five boats that were crossing the strait, 57 of those rescued from three boats were taken to Tarifa. Another rescue vessel took 103 people from the other boats to Algeciras, a large port city to the east.
At its peak recently, Spanish authorities brought ashore nearly 500 people who were trying to cross. This current influx echoes similar circumstances in 2014, when over 1000 migrants reached Spanish shores in less than 48 hours, placing huge demand on authorities in the area.
“We’ve known for months that this could happen,” Francisco Ruiz, the mayor of Tarifa was quoted recently by Europa Sur newspaper as saying.
To its credit the Spanish authorities have shown considerable compassion to the plight of the migrants while enforcing the country’s immigration policies.
Spain’s new Socialist government has taken up the cause of the migrants’ plight to demonstrate its commitment to protecting human rights and respecting international law.
“As a council, we are doing what the government is asking of us but also what our citizens demand, which is that we show maximum solidarity,” was how Mayor Ruiz summed up their approach.
While most sub-Saharan migrants hope to be picked up by Spanish rescuers as soon as they leave Morocco’s territorial waters, some try desperately to get all the way to an Andalusian beach in order to evade near-certain deportation.
Many of those rescued are found to be carrying the inflated inner tube of a tyre as makeshift live preservers for the crossing should their dinghy capsize or sink.
Some lose everything they carry during the passage across the strait, but cling desperately to vital personal identity documents and mobile phones wrapped in plastic. The phones especially are essential so they can send their locations should they need to be rescued and to contact relatives on arrival in Europe.
Many though never make it across this often gusty stretch of water with at least four migrants having died in past weeks, their deaths marked by a minute’s silence by members of Tarifa’s authorities.
In all more than 200 migrants have drowned at sea in the Mediterranean in the past four days, taking the death toll for the year to more than 1,000.
The 1,000 deaths landmark was reached on 1 July. It is the fourth year in succession that more than 1,000 migrants have died trying to reach Europe via the Mediterranean Sea.
Not surprisingly this latest migration crisis dominated last week’s gathering of EU leaders and was shaped by the different needs of two nations, Italy and Germany. The issue has risen to the fore, since Italy closed its ports to migrant rescue ships, leaving several boats adrift at sea, until other countries stepped in to help, notably Spain.
For the moment some EU leaders finding the need to capitulate to populist anti-immigration politicians, have started pulling up the drawbridge to migrants fleeing war, famine and poverty in Africa and the Middle East.
In Italy the new hard-line coalition government has used the migration crisis to assert its authority on the European stage, while in Germany it has become a point of leverage in the domestic political crisis facing Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Three years ago a picture of a drowned infant on a Turkish beach triggered an outpouring of solidarity across Europe. Today though as online magazine Politico pointed out this week, the cries of those drowning in the Mediterranean trying to reach Europe are being downed out by the sound of EU leaders washing their hands of the misfortune of migrants in order to save their own political skins.
After marathon talks lasting nearly ten hours at the recent EU summit, leaders merely papered over the divisions on migration with a promise that some EU countries would take in migrants rescued from the Mediterranean to alleviate the burden on Italy and Greece. The devil though remains in the detail and those details still remain unclear.
So far this year, 42,000 undocumented migrants have arrived on Europe’s shores, hardly a continent under siege, as some politicians would have us believe. But for the moment the dominant political consensus remains that the migration crisis can only be solved by even tighter controls on immigration. Rarely is there ever the same emphasis on tackling the humanitarian and demographic pressures that lie behind migration.
Either way those seeking to escape poverty war and oppression at home will continue to venture across the Mediterranean. For some time to come Spain’s southern coastal towns like Tarifa look set to become the new sanctuary for the human flotsam turning up Europe’s shores.
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