Letting Cross, Letting Die: “Dark Friday” In Melilla

Guest post by Elisa Floristán Millán (anthropologist, PhD student at Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM)) and Cléo Marmié (sociologist, PhD student at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales de Paris – Centre Maurice Halbwachs- LIRTES, CNRS).

June 24, 2022

After a night on the train crossing Morocco from Rabat to the Oriental region, we arrived in Nador in the early morning to continue our research on children and youth on the move. The city was sluggish, hemmed in between a slope of the Mediterranean and Mount Gourougou, which spreads its vegetation as far as the small port of Beni Ansar. This is where the barbed wire fence that separates Morocco from the Spanish exclave of Melilla begins. Together with Ceuta, Melilla is the only European land border with Africa. In the little blue taxi we hailed outside the station, through the local Twitter account of the Moroccan Association for Human Rights (AMDH), we found out that an attempted mass crossing was happenning at the frontier. A few metres from Nador, at the "Barrio Chino" crossing point, hundreds of black people were trying to cross the double 6 to 10-metre-high secure border fence, guarded by Moroccan and Spanish law enforcement agencies.

Those who managed to survive the violent repression and to cross the first fence controlled by Morocco found it very difficult to reach Melilla, which in turn is protected by the fence controlled by the Spanish state. Between two fences, between two states, trapped between the global south and the global north, several asylum seekers died of asphyxiation while suffering bodies were left for hours without medical assistance in the sun. Human rights associations have issued a collective statement condemning what is now known as the “Melilla Massacre”. 37 deaths have been recorded so far and the African Union and the United Nations called on an independent investigation.

There is mixed information about how many migrants tried to reach Melilla, some sources estimate up to 2,000. What we certainly know is that only 133 managed to enter the Spanish exclave of Melilla to apply for International Protection. They are now inside the Temporary Immigrant Holding Centre (CETI) and will be able to seek asylum. The migrants who have not managed to enter the CETI are the ones who are suffering the consequences of having tried to jump and not succeeding. On the Moroccan side of the border, a logic of disappearance of bodies and silencing of the voices of surviving migrants is orchestrated. The injured are sent to hospitals in Nador and Oujda, to which access for organisations is restricted. Some are sent back in so-called "refoulement buses" to disperse migrants to the south of Morocco. Others are incarcerated and one of the biggest trial of migrants in Morocco began on 27 June. Meanwhile, from the day after the repression of the attempted crossing, funeral vaults are dug in the cemetery of Nador. AMDH warns of the risks of an early burial which would prevent the identification of the bodies and the carrying out of an autopsy to determine the causes of death and demand justice and reparation.

How can we examine, through the prism of social sciences, the tight time frame of "breaking news” and emergencies? As we were present on the spot, we came up against the constraints of investigation in 'difficult', 'dangerous' and 'sensitive' fields. Ready to support the assistance actions for the survivors and to collect the testimonies of the people mobilised in the humanitarian and health response, we quickly realised that in Nador nothing else was waiting for us but hypersurveillance, a 'tense calm' and closed doors.

In the absence of information, how can we carry out scientific research without data? What explanation can we offer when there is nothing to investigate? Precisely, the absence of a story is the story itself. The local and international management of the border had shown its darkest patterns, with death, wounded and sufferings, but also with the silencing of all the information that could lead to a formal investigation. In fact, it was then a matter of "making the silence speak" and "revealing the absence" in order to question what this "emptiness" in the face of tragedy translates into the externalisation of the European Union's borders (of which Ceuta and Melilla can be considered paradigmatic) and the political anatomy of the repression of those perceived as “undesirable”.

This “Dark Friday” is only the froth of a groundswell that has been going on for several years now, defined by the criminalisation of international mobility and the militarisation of the external borders of "Fortress Europe". In Morocco, strategies to dissuade and disperse prospective arrivals to Europe are embodied in police harassment of black people and forced displacement. European funds finance "assistance" and "integration" projects for migrants in Morocco, which implicitly prevent them from moving to Europe, while in practice there are minimal possibilities of regularisation and dignified life in the country.

On 29th June, 5 days after the events, a commemoration was organised at the CETI with the survivors. An olive tree was planted in memory of the victims and the asylum seekers lied down on the floor to re-enact the scene of the massacre. One of them took the microphone: "Try saying 'asylum' when you are at the middle of a crowd of guns and gaz...". While media and political discourse have emphasised the 'violence' of the “assault” and the “assailants”, social scientists have long shown that violence is first and foremost produced by the configuration of the border itself in a context of militarised management, criminalisation and repression of mobility.

There is nothing exceptional about what happened at the border. The spectacularisation of the violence, the precariousness of people on the move in Morocco, the deaths at the border and the repression and dispersion of the survivors are a fact the past two decades. What we have witnessed through the “Dark Friday” is the same border regime – but with a level of cruelty rarely reached before. This is a difference of degree but not of structure. As the placards of the migrants in Melilla in the demonstration in front of the holding centre said: “The Ukrainians get roses, why are you sending black people to hell”. The Melilla massacre thus reminded us of the human consequences of European necropolitics, the racialised management of borders and the inequality of human lives. Not letting black bodies cross, but letting them die at the gates of Europe.

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