12/26/1992

Europe's Shame

Eric Ellis, Tarifa

AT FIRST glance, there's not much in common between the white sands of the southern Spanish Atlantic coast and the recent fire-bombing murder of a Turkish family in Germany by neo-Nazi thugs.

But a closer examination reveals a tragic connection. On the sands there are 50 corpses - Africans, who, like the Arslan family of Moelln, sought to escape the repression and despair of their homelands for a future in a tolerant new Europe.

Instead, these men each paid passage of about $US1,500 ($A2,170) to the Moroccan and Spanish mafias - there is evidence of official complicity -only to be drowned and washed up on the beaches of Fortress Europe. The human wave across from Africa has become known as the espaldas mojadas- literally wetbacks - the term used by Americans to describe Mexicans who swim the Rio Grande to the United States.

The Spanish Guardia Civil collects the black and Arab bodies in makeshift coffins, anxious to quickly restore the natural beauty of a coast that attracts thousands of free-spending white tourists each year.

Half a kilometre out at sea, the coast guard patrols for the rickety fishing boats, inflatable sun-beds and inner tubes used by those who attempt the narrow crossing from Morocco. Some even try to swim the distance unaided.

About 100,000 illegal immigrants have made the journey in the past five years. Up to 1,000 have drowned this year trying to get across before the barriers come down forever.

"This year is the worst I've seen it," says Barry, an Australian who has owned a surf shop on the Spanish coast for the past 10 years. "There were 1,000 a week coming across in September. The other day I was out windsurfing and I ran over two bodies in the water. I thought they were logs."

The farmers drive up to the Plaza de Espana in Roquetas, a dusty town inland from the tourist resort of Almeria, every morning about 10.

After parking their vans, they survey the 1,000-odd refugees in the square to see what is available. Ghosts of another violent era, they pick out five or six of the most robust men and drive them to labour for the day in their hothouses of cucumbers, tomatoes and peppers.

While Brussels conveniently looks the other way, the unscrupulous Spanish farmers pay just $A20 a day to have their European Community-subsidised smallholdings tended. The labourers, meanwhile, are abused, spat at and attacked in their beds at night by joyriding youths.

There are about 10,000 illegal immigrants working the fruit and vegetable industry of the Almeria coast, one of Europe's most significant food-growing regions, from where produce is exported across the EC and North America.

This is the industry hooked to the EC drip. It receives 60 per cent of the EC budget in direct subsidies through the Common Agricultural Policy, which the rest of the world is poised to fight a bitter trade war to have overturned.

And in Roquetas, they get all that and more, thanks to the sweat of African slave labour. It's easy to lose count of the countries propping up the EC in Roquetas.

Hassan, a Bangladeshi political refugee, who came via India, Nepal, China, Russia, Angola, Zaire and Morocco, reckons he has marked every African country on an atlas for the people he has met.

There are others, from Peru, Paraguay, Nicaragua, India, Sri Lanka, Palestine. Nearly all of them came by boat across the Strait of Gibraltar, 400 kilometres away. In August, there was even a boatload of Filipinos. A Japanese man was detained at Tarifa. Bosnians and Croatians are now also starting to filter through.

But the exploitation by farmers goes a lot further than the poor pay - 30 per cent of the legal Spanish daily rate. Farmers get a double bonus by renting out their unused storehouses and barns to their desperate workers.

One tiny three-roomed hovel on the outskirts of Roquetas we visited had no electricity, a crude camp stove powered by bottled gas and filthy blankets on the floor for beds. Its four tenants - two from Ghana, one from Guinea-Bissau and one from Angola - washed and drank in the nearby irrigation channel. Their toilet was an external wall.

For this they paid their employer $US500 a month. "We have no legal rights here," says 44-year-old Joao Mandu, from Guinea-Bissau. "If we touch any of those boys (the joyriders), we will be out straight away."

These men symbolise both the corrupt reality that props up European agriculture and one of the reasons why white Europeans have erected the Wall of 1992 around their privileged fortress.

At its narrowest point - just eight kilometres separating Europe and Africa- the Strait of Gibraltar, where the Mediterranean empties into the Atlantic through a turbulent chicane, is one of the world's most treacherous stretches of water.

This year up to 50,000 people have tried to make the passage illegally, in all weather, at any time. Tangier lore has it that the best time is during a midnight storm, on the assumption that Spanish authorities - that is, the ones not on the take - will stay in port.

Nieves, a teacher from Tarifa who has emerged as one of Spain's most vociferous critics of EC immigration policy, believes Brussels is facing trouble.

"Everybody is so concerned about Russia and the Balkans and, yes, they are problems, but it is already a huge crisis and we haven't seen anywhere near the amount of people who could come over," she says.

She refers to a recent BBC television dramatised documentary, The March, in which a Gandhi-like figure who loses his family through famine in Sudan decides in a rage to march across the Sahara to the gates of Europe. Along the way, his message of First World exploitation becomes an African cause celebre. By the time he reaches Tangier, he has 10 million hungry people ready to storm the strait, and the EC armed forces are lined up on the other side.

"This is not fiction," says Nieves. "This is what is happening now and the EC is not paying attention to it. This is the soft under-belly of Europe and there are 500 million hungry, forgotten people down there who will do anything to come here."

Spain, Europe's front-line in the south, joined the EC in 1986 and is passionately pro-European, partly because the billions in EC aid have rebuilt Spain into a modern, rich industrialised nation.

But Spain has a small voice in EC politics.

The power base in the EC consists of France and Germany, the same France where Jean Marie le Pen's National Front has popular support of up to 20 per cent, spurred on by its anti-Arab, anti-foreigner platform, and the same Germany where neonazis torch refugee hostels.

Since the end of Francoism in 1976, the Spanish have been largely tolerant of immigrants, particularly those inspired by repression. That sympathy was recently expressed by the Spanish Prime Minister, Felipe Gonzalez, who said that if he were an African who was deported, he would try and try again to get across.

But the threat of recession has sparked old fires in Spain. Last month a rally of neo-Francoists attracted 10,000 people and led to a riot in Madrid. A week later a Dominican maid and a Moroccan man were murdered by fascist youths.

Entry procedures have tightened up at Africa's entries to Spain.

"The hand of Brussels is very much in evidence down here," says Luis Romero, the editor of Europa Sur in Algeciras , the closest Spanish port to Africa. "Brussels wants Spain to be the gendarmes of Europe. The EC simply does not want these people and, despite what our Government thinks by itself, its hands are tied by its commitment to Europe."

Romero believes African governments, particularly in Morocco, use illegal immigration like a tap, loosening and tightening controls when considered appropriate.

"When they are negotiating - it might be for aid, it might be for investment or anything - we often see the numbers coming across rise very quickly, and then stop when a treaty is concluded.

"They also rise whenever there is a problem in the society. We have seen more Algerians and Egyptians recently at the same time Islam is increasing. This year there has been a big increase, I think, because people in Africa are thinking it will be very hard after next year to get in."

Romero quotes recent United Nations figures that forecast the population of the Maghreb nations of Islamic North Africa will double in the next 30 years. "At the moment our authorities are dealing with it but something has to give.

The ferrying of illegal immigrants to Europe is big business for the ruthless Tangier mafia. Some boats load up in full view of port authorities and leave carrying up to 200 people crammed shoulder-to-shoulder in a motor launch no bigger than the average pleasure boat.

They motor without lights to within a kilometre of the Spanish coast. Then, sometimes at gunpoint, the boat owners push their passengers into the sea to swim to the shore. Some make it. Many don't.

Since August this year, more than 200 Africans have washed up drowned on the tourist beaches of the Atlantic coast of Spain. The Red Cross expects the number attempting to cross to double in the next two years, as poverty and the rise of Islam grip the dark continent.

In Tangier, the attractions of Europe are all too visible. In the bars of the medina, the old town, hundreds crowd around the televisions picking up Spanish and French signals from across the strait.

The images of Dallas, Dynasty, beautiful women and rampant consumerism have a strong allure and make a bizarre backdrop to the shrill muezzin's call that rings out across the city.

"But Morocco is just a bridge, just a bridge. We are the innocent victims,"says Tangier's chief of police.

He spits and gestures out the window at Europe, visible through the port haze. "The wall has shifted from Berlin to the middle of this strait."

The police chief had previously denied that Tangier had a problem with Africans arriving to slip across the strait. "Take a look on the streets. They were coming, but now they are not any more."

He was right on one count. Tangier's streets were free of blacks. That was because in the preceding weeks his force had raided medina hostels and cafes and rounded up anybody who could not prove they were Moroccan.

Those people are now coralled behind the 50-metre-high walls of Tangier's old Spanish bullring, guarded by a gun-toting force of police and soldiers. It is difficult to know whether these prisoners, whose only crime was to seek a better life, receive adequate food, water and shelter.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has no record of their existence, partly because the Moroccan Government denies they exist.

One woman in the bullring says there are about 1,000 people held inside. She is a black South African, and says there are people inside from about 20 other African countries.

She says there are many more places in Morocco, in the south and in other major cities where other illegal immigrants have been rounded up and are being held. "You must help us. We are being held here. We have done nothing wrong."