On 27 March, the President of the Canary Islands region, Angel Victor Torres, said that the “good relations” between Spain and Morocco were benefiting the border regions. According to him, we are witnessing a gradual normalisation of relations between Spain and Morocco, resulting in a decrease in irregular migration flows. However, Angel Victor Torres insisted on the maximum vigilance in this matter, even in the case of bad relations. NB: Two weeks earlier, he had visited Morocco to strengthen economic and commercial cooperation between the two countries. On this occasion, he met the Head of Government, the Minister of Foreign Affairs as well as the Minister for African Cooperation and Moroccans living abroad.
Since 2019, the Moroccan region of Béni Mellal-Khénifra has been marked by numerous migrant disappearances. On 27 March, the trial of those accused of the sinking of a migrant boat off the coast of Lâayoune a year ago, which killed more than ten people, took place. The families of the victims gathered to call on the Moroccan state to shed light on this tragedy. Moreover, the EU’s visa policy is also under fire.
On March 25, Alarm Phone reported the shipwreck of a pirogue carrying 50 people off Dakhla. Only 9 survived. On March 15, 21 people in distress were rescued, safely brought to the Alboran Island and subsequently transferred to Melilla by Salvamento Marítimo. On March 9, 16 people stranded on Alboran to be safely taken back to mainland in Motril three days later.
On March 16, dozens of migrants were dislodged by the Moroccan police from their informal camp at Mount Gourougou, in northern Morocco, near Nador. According to InfoMigrants, exiles usually hide in the area while waiting to attempt to reach Spain by land via the enclave of Melilla or by the Mediterranean Sea. For several months, the number of sub-Saharan migrants being sent back to the interior of Morocco from the north has increased considerably. Hundreds of exiles find themselves blocked in Casablanca, prevented from going back to Nador or Tetouan, near the coast, from where boats leave to try to reach Europe.
On March 13, the Spanish ombudsman closed his investigation into the deadly tragedythat took place last year on June 24 when dozens of migrants were killed by Moroccan security forces at the border between the city of Nador and the Spanish enclave of Melilla. According to what was reported by El País, the ombudsman concluded that the 470 deportations from Melilla back to Morocco that were carried out that day, when more than 1700 migrants attempted crossing the border, were illegal. Migrants were returned through accelerated procedures and, once in Morocco, brutally beaten up by Moroccan security forces, according to the videos and the testimonies released by the survivors. On March 22, Spanish Minister of the Interior Fernando Grande-Marlaska appeared before the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs of the European Parliament to provide explanations and shed light on the event. Grande-Marlaska denied any responsibility for the death of the 23 migrants who tried to cross the border between Morocco and Melilla last June, insisting that no death had taken place on Spanish soil. On September 21, during an appearance before the Spanish deputies, Grande-Marlaska had defended the action of the police against what he had then described as a “violent aggression”.
On March 12, more than a dozen Moroccan NGOs issued a joint statement denouncing the racist and hate speech against migrants of sub-Saharan origin in Morocco and in North Africa. The human rights organizations said they have witnessed a rise in racist discourses against immigrants both in the real and the virtual public space in Morocco, that has exacerbated after the controversial remarks of the Tunisian President Kaïs Saïed accusing Sub-saharan migrants of being a demographic threat to his country. The NGOs underlined that racist and discriminatory statements “exaggerating the presence of immigrants are contradicted by statistical”, including official data on the number of immigrants in Morocco.
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