[Mb-civic] Nothing glamorous about this life - H.D.S. Greenway - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  Nothing glamorous about this life

By H.D.S. Greenway  |  April 4, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

CASABLANCA, Morocco THE FAMOUS film named for this city begins with a 
sonorous voice explaining how refugees escaping Nazi tyranny in the 
1940s would make their tortuous way to Casablanca. ''Here the fortunate 
ones, through money, or influence, or luck," could get to neutral 
Portugal on the Lisbon plane, the soundtrack says. ''The others wait in 
Casablanca, and wait, and wait, and wait."

Today there are hordes of illegal refugees waiting in Casablanca and in 
other cities across North Africa -- perhaps as many as a million -- 
picking up odd jobs in order to live, waiting for a chance to get to 
Europe. But today they are not glamorous Ingrid Bergmans or Paul 
Henreids. They are the desperate poor from all over Africa and beyond 
who hope to sneak into the European Union to escape poverty. And those 
who help them escape are not Bogarts with passes for the Lisbon plane. 
They are often unscrupulous people -- smugglers who sometimes take their 
clients' money and leave them in the desert to die, or put them on 
unsafe boats and head them out to sea.

The desperate ones make their way up from the sub-Saharan poverty belt 
to cross the desert into dozens of coastal towns in North Africa. From 
there they will wait for a chance to get into southern Europe in 
competition with North Africa's own poor who also wish to reach Europe. 
And although the vast majority are Africans, some come from as far away 
as the Indian sub-continent. There is a contingent of Bangladeshis now 
with the Polisario rebels in the desert -- rebels who would expel 
Morocco from the former Spanish Sahara. The Polisario doesn't want them, 
but they cannot get across the lines to the disputed Moroccan-held 
territory, so they wait, and wait, and wait.

Morocco is a favorite destination because it is so close to Europe that 
on a clear day you can see Spain across the Gibraltar Strait from 
northern towns such as Tangier. These refugees, waiting for their 
chance, speak of Spain as if it were an unimaginable el dorado worth 
risking one's life for, and many die in the attempt. In this it is 
similar to the fate of Latin Americans trying to cross the desert into 
the United States from Mexico, dreaming of ''El Norte," or the boatloads 
of Haitians and Cubans who risk their lives at sea.

In Morocco, these would-be asylum seekers are called ''Harraga," from 
the Arabic word ''burn." This is because, under Spanish law, the 
authorities cannot expel refugees if their identity and nationality 
cannot be proven within 40 days. So, of course, the first thing the 
refugees do is burn their papers.

Last autumn, the world was horrified by the heartbreaking scenes of 
Africans trying to climb razor-sharp wire in order to force their way 
into Spain's last two tiny toeholds in Morocco, Ceuta and Melilla. The 
two enclaves are the last European colonial relics on the continent of 
Africa.

Morocco was criticized for allowing Africans to assault the fences from 
Moroccan territory, and today the government has made it much harder for 
immigrants to reach Europe from Morocco. But as a squeezed balloon will 
bulge out somewhere else, immigrants shifted their gaze south to the 
former Spanish Sahara, disputed territory under Moroccan control. From 
the capital, Laayoune, refugees can reach the Spanish Canary Islands off 
the African coast.

Falwa Jaafari, who recently produced a documentary for Moroccan 
television on the problem, told me that she had asked an African who was 
about to embark for the Canaries if he really was going to risk his life 
on such an un-seaworthy boat. ''Well, even the Titanic sunk," she was 
told as the boat departed the shore.

As Morocco cracks down on the Harraga, however, their embarkation points 
shift even further south to Mauritania. From there they arrive in the 
Canaries in the hundreds in frail and overcrowded boats, providing 
tourists with grotesque photo opportunities. Already around 4,000 
Africans have arrived illegally in the Canary Islands this year. Some 
have been apprehended and sent back to try again, while more than 1,000 
have drowned at sea.

Spain and the European Union have become increasingly alarmed, but 
Europe has no common immigration policy, and it is a sign of our times 
that waves upon waves of the world's poor will continue to risk all to 
wash up upon the shores of the industrialized rich.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/04/04/nothing_glamorous_about_this_life/
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