Morocco blocks mass influx of migrants to Ceuta

Moroccan security forces repelled a mass attack on the Spanish exclave of Ceuta on Sunday. Dozens of people followed calls on social networks and gathered on a hill on the border of the port city of Ceuta. A video distributed by local media shows them throwing stones at Moroccan security forces. The forces prevented them from approaching the border fence with Ceuta. Ceuta and the second Spanish exclave of Melilla are the only two land borders in Europe on African soil.

Moroccan authorities say that at least 60 people were arrested in operations last week. Since Friday, police have been deployed in large numbers in the area around Ceuta. “The authorities have set up several checkpoints on the roads to northern Morocco as a preventive measure,” said Mohammed Ben Aissa, a human rights activist. Hundreds of migrants have been taken away in buses. Most of the migrants are young Moroccans. A smaller number come from sub-Saharan African countries.

Morocco and Spain have strengthened their cooperation in the fight against illegal migration. In the first eight months of this year, Morocco prevented 45,015 people from entering Europe illegally, according to the Interior Ministry. The tightened surveillance of Morocco’s northern borders has led more and more migrants to take the risky and longer Atlantic route to the Canary Islands.

Dozens of migrants had already taken advantage of thick fog on the Moroccan coast at the end of August to swim to the Spanish exclave of Ceuta. Many were intercepted in the water and on the beach of Tarajal on the southern border of the exclave, a spokesman for the Spanish Guardia Civil in Ceuta told Reuters.

“We have mastered this with Morocco,” said the spokesman. People who cross the border to the port city are without exception arrested by the police and sent back to Morocco, unless they are minors or asylum seekers.

The two Spanish enclaves on the Moroccan Mediterranean coast, Ceuta and Melilla, share the European Union’s only land borders with Africa. Migrants repeatedly try to get into the EU from there.