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Hundreds of people have gathered in the northern Moroccan town of Fnideq, near the border with Spain’s Ceuta, flashing photos of their missing loved ones to passersby in the hope of tracking them down.
Their perch was the same small tranche of land that made headlines around the world last week as extraordinary scenes emerged of about 72,000 people making their way into Ceuta, a tiny Spanish territory in north Africa.
On Tuesday, as interior ministers from across the EU joined an emergency videoconference to grapple with the lingering tensions, the focus on the Moroccan side of the border with Ceuta was on the harrowing death toll.
At least 88 people have died in Ceuta, according to local officials, and another 11 in Morocco, while dozens of others remain missing.
“I have just one son,” said Hadijja, who had been waiting at the border since Saturday, scanning the steady stream of returnees for any sign of her 23-year-old son. “I haven’t had any news of him; he’s not answering his mobile phone.”
She had travelled to the border from her home in Tangier, surmising that her unemployed son was among those who had made the crossing. “He didn’t tell me he was going to cross,” she said. “This is a tragedy.”
People in Fnideq wait at the Ceuta border hoping to see their missing friends or relatives. Photograph: Abdel Majid Bziouat/AFP/Getty Images
An estimated 70,000 people who arrived late last week in Ceuta had been returned to Morocco in recent days, Spain’s interior minister said Tuesday.
Referencing posts on TikTok, Facebook and WhatsApp that had claimed Morocco was letting people cross the border, people arrived at Fnideq by foot or packed into buses and cars as they joined the surge of people crossing into Spain.
Madrid sprang into action, working with Rabat to return the vast majority of those who crossed within 48 hours, even as it fended off a political crisis sparked by calls for Spain to be suspended from the Schengen free-movement zone.
As they returned to Moroccan soil, some said they had come home voluntarily. “I was hungry for days and filled with fear,” said Abselam, 19, from Kenitra in north-western Morocco.
A Ceuta resident had eventually taken him in, giving him food and a place to sleep, before he decided to return home. “It’s not worth it, there aren’t jobs for everyone.”
Others said they had been forced out of the Spanish territory. “The police surrounded a group of us and escorted us all the way towards the border,” said Simo, 21, from Tetuan. “We didn’t really have a choice.”
In recent days, NGOs across Spain have voiced concerns that some of those who crossed into Ceuta and who were eligible for international protection were being returned before being allowed to exercise their right to request asylum.
On Tuesday the Spanish government estimated that 2,000 people who had made the crossing were still in Ceuta. The tally includes at least 862 children who have been registered as unaccompanied minors, as Unicef Spain warned that dozens more could still be wandering the city’s streets unprotected.
“Many small children crossed over; we don’t know how many have disappeared,” Susana Hidalgo, a migration expert for the organisation, told the broadcaster TVE. The result was a “tremendously difficult” situation in Ceuta.
“There are many families on the other side of the border looking for their sons and daughters,” she said, while in Ceuta “there are 10- and 12-year-old children asking for p…
📌 Fonte: The Guardian
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