Human trade in misery and hope

FUERTEVENTURA, CANARY ISLANDS - You might call it an invasion. Given the climate of paranoia, perhaps the word armada comes to mind.

This was another huge weekend for Africans in the Canary Islands. More than 7000 illegal immigrants from Africa clambered ashore last year, mostly on Fuerteventura, the closest to the African coast. That's around 20 a day.

Around Christmas, terrible tragedies were reported - a boat with 10 corpses aboard, another with 13 dead among dozens who were barely alive.

Then came a lull of more than two weeks. No arrivals at all.

It's the manoeuvres, suggested the man at the Red Cross. The Spanish and Portuguese Navies were reported to be doing joint manoeuvres in the channel, trying out new radar with laser gear, trying to monitor the African coast as precisely as they would a harbour. Perhaps the new kit was working. Perhaps they'd fixed another hole.

Nothing of the sort: the deluge began again last week. First on Friday one of the migrants' boats arrived in the far south of the island, at a place with fabulously long, sandy beaches called Morro del Jable.

Thirty-two on board it was reported, though it beggars the imagination how: you would hesitate to row your family across a pond in this vessel.

The big one arrived on Sunday. A rusty old fishing boat shorn of its lifting gear was arrested 140m off the port of Tenerife: a two-man white crew sped off in a launch, leaving 227 sub-Saharan Africans, nearly all young men, squashed into the boat. Some were reported to be hungry and suffering from hypothermia but the condition of most was good.

Then two more on Monday, tiddlers like Friday's, so similar the boats might have been hammered together by the same carpenter. About 4m long, bare, unvarnished wooden ribs clad in a hull of box wood, plastered in a greenish tar-like material to keep out at least some of the ocean. Twenty or 30 Africans in each, all of them young, all male, apparently from Senegal, Gambia, Mali, Nigeria.

 

For the arrivals, it was the end of a harrowing adventure that cost each one all the money he possessed and probably the savings of his relatives as well. It could have ended in death or prison at any point.

The Africans whose journeys end in the Canaries sneak across fiercely guarded borders, hide in the dunes of the Sahara, get passed from one gang of traffickers to another, ripped off by each group. Somehow they avoid detection by police and soldiers. They survive hunger and thirst in the desert, their lives at the mercy of smugglers for whom they are no more than pieces of merchandise.

At the coast they are packed into these pathetic little handmade boats until no more will fit in. They are allowed to bring nothing with them except the clothes they stand up in: any document proving their nationality could lead to their prompt deportation.

And all this sacrifice for what? To make landfall in a Europe that could not make its distaste for them more plain. The face mask and sanitary gloves of the Red Cross volunteers in Tenerife who bundled them in blankets to bring them back to life are merely sensible precautions against disease. But metaphorically, the masks and gloves will pursue them every kilometre of their European passage.

Spain will quarantine them for 40 days, and then deport all those that it legally can. Those it cannot physically deport it will notionally expel: the only bit of paper the migrants take away from the detention centre is an expulsion order.

As the Canaries are rapidly filling up, Spain now packs the Africans into a plane, flies them to Madrid and other big cities and sets them free. Or rather, washes its hands of them. They remain penniless, without documents giving them any legitimacy, unable to work except in the black sector. "The only work available to them," said the head of the Red Cross in Fuerteventura, "is crime and prostitution."

Spain marginally moderated these harsh conditions yesterday: if they have been in the country for six months and by some miracle have persuaded a legitimate employer to take them on, they can get documents to allow them to remain in the country legally. This drop of humanity has been greeted by howls of outrage from Spain's right-wing opposition. It has drawn dismay from Spain's EU partners, which moan that the migrants thus sanitised will be free to spread across the union.

 

The Canaries are also full of fugitives of a different sort.

The swarms of northern visitors escaping winter have changed Fuerteventura beyond recognition in the past 20 years. The island's population has soared from 20,000 to 90,000. Entire volcanic cliffs looking out to sea have been carved into terraces of miniature suburban villas served by shopping centres with a multiplex cinema, a supermarket, a Burger King and a bouncy castle for the kiddies.

You might be just about anywhere in Europe, with the minor difference that this is early February, it's hot and there's not a cloud in the sky.

The other continent, the dark one with its freight of troubles, is barely 100km away.

If you were to set off from the coast of Western Sahara in a small boat and sail all night, in the morning you would see the lighthouse of Fuerteventura.

It's an Atlantic passage, and the Atlantic is everywhere a serious ocean; those big breakers can pick up and flip over a skiff and smash its remnants and drown its passengers within minutes, leaving no evidence.

But if their timing is lucky, and the gangster who takes their money slaps enough hot tar on the flimsy boxwood of the little craft, then their life savings will not have gone to waste. They will have achieved a toehold in a different life.

Mohamed is 18, he says. He's a gangling black kid from Gambia, and for now he's alone in the world. You can see him on the benches by the fancy fountain outside the Red Cross offices at the top of Puerto del Rosario, Fuerteventura's biggest town, kicking his heels, waiting for something to happen.

Last week he got out of the 40-day detention the Spanish Government imposes on the informal new black arrivals in the Canaries. After 40 days, if the authorities can't deport you (because you haven't told them where you come from, or because Spain has no extradition arrangements with that country), they let you go.

The Red Cross put Mohamed up in one of the two houses it keeps for the most vulnerable of the African arrivals. So he has a temporary roof.

He also has parents and a brother who have already come this route and have fetched up in Barcelona. So he's in limbo. He has no money and no documents and speaks not a word of Spanish. But his brother tells him he has a passport for him, and it will arrive by post. Then he's got to get himself to Barcelona.

How is he going to do that, without two beans to rub together? A look of perfect blankness. But it will happen, somehow, sometime.

Africans fleeing the desperation and poverty of their failed states have been washing up on Europe's coastline, or dying in the attempt, for 10 years now. Thousands have staggered ashore on Lampedusa, south of Sicily, in Gibraltar and Malaga, or they have scrambled over the triple fence of razor wire at Cuentes, a Spanish enclave on the northern coast of Morocco, and every time the European authorities plug one hole, the Africans find another.

The Canaries are the destination of choice now, because the Mediterranean has got too tough. Western Sahara has more than 1000km of sandy shore and Fuerteventura is only a day's sail away.

Western Sahara was once a Spanish colony but its annexation by Morocco is disputed by the Polisario Front, an independence movement. Hundreds of United Nations peacekeepers monitor the ceasefire line that divides Greater Morocco from east to west like an enormous scar.

The Sahrawis, the nomads native to the region who have fought for their own homeland, have seen their political aspirations frustrated for so long that they, too, dream of fleeing to the happy lands in the north. In fact the first to come to the Canaries, 10 years ago, were Sahrawis brought over by fishing boats.

At first there were just a few every year. Then the authorities in the Canaries began arresting the fishermen and sentencing them to long jail terms and the original traffic died off.

It was quickly replaced by the more systematic and ruthless mafias that run the trade today. They have sent their clients off in boats that were bound to sink, helmed by immigrants who had been given the scantiest idea of what to do, packed to the gunwales, in filthy weather, with neither food nor drink nor clothes to keep out the cold. And the customers keep on coming. Nothing will put them off.

Stopping the trade in one place only forces it open in another. Neither granting amnesties nor refusing them makes an ounce of difference to people mired this deep in hopelessness.

If either the Spanish or the British, or the Europeans at large, believe they can close down African immigration into Europe, they are in dreamland.

Every boatload of misery that spills on to the Canaries' pristine beaches drives further home the fact that Africa's misery is Europe's responsibility. Europe created these nation states, set them free, corrupted them during the Cold War with billions in aid that went straight into the pockets of dictators.

Europe cut them adrift when they no longer served any geopolitical purpose. Europe crucified them with World Bank and IMF solutions which had no bearing on countries where the state had ceased to be anything but a means for dictators and their relatives to grow obscenely rich.

Every new boatload arriving tells Europe that Africa is a problem that must be treated with full seriousness. For perhaps the first time ever.

- INDEPENDENT