Ceuta border battles show how EU is funding anti-migrant brutality

People preparing to make a new attempt to claim asylum in Spain’s North African enclave on Saturday (15 August) faced aggressive arrests by Moroccan police before even arriving at the border, showing how the EU is paying third countries for increasing cruelty to keep out migrants. Reports had been circulating of another mass-crossing attempt on Ceuta’s border after over 70,000 migrant arrived in late July, prompting Spain to mobilise its police forces to the enclave and to synchronise its response with Rabat. This time, people from mostly Sub-Saharan Africa who had hoped to cross were stopped around 3km before the border, while others were spotted via racial-profiling while boarding trains towards Ceuta from large Moroccan cities and prevented from moving. Most of those attempting to cross Morocco’s border with Spain were dispersed with tear gas and police dogs, while around 300 sub-Saharan migrants and 50 Moroccans were arrested and since distributed between police stations in the towns of Fnideq and Tetouan, according to the Moroccan human rights association (AMDH). “The sub-Saharan Africans arrested by the Moroccans were mistreated,” Hakim Sikouk, the president of AMDH in Rabat, told EUobserver. “According to some lawyers, these migrants will be deported to their countries of origin, with the exception of the Sudanese, who will be sent to the Sahara or the ‘Oriental region’ on the border with Algeria,” he added. Desert dumping, or forced expulsions to desert zones and remote border areas, has become commonplace in countries such as Egypt or Tunisia, which the EU has paid to externalise its border-control agenda, as well as Algeria, which has increasingly aligned itself with Europe's policies. And experts now fear that this will be the fate of many of those caught up in Saturday's operations.