Since summer 2022, the Moroccan government of King Mohammed VI has been acting as Europe’s brutal “gatekeeper” at Spain’s external EU border in agreement with the PSOE-Podemos government in Madrid. The agreement includes Spain recognising Morocco’s sovereignty over the formerly Spanish-occupied territory of Western Sahara. According to the Moroccan armed forces, around 87,000 migrants were stopped in 2023, a sharp increase compared to around 56,000 between January and August 2022. The EU provided Morocco with €1.2 billion between 2014 and 2022, including hundreds of millions for the purpose of taking action against migrants.
In June 2022, Moroccan “security forces” drove refugees from the war-torn regions of the Sahel and Sudan from the Spanish border at gunpoint, killing at least 23 people. In 2023, more people than ever before died in the Atlantic Ocean trying to reach Spanish territory. As the Austrian Kronen Zeitung reports, citing high-ranking EU representatives, the previous agreement was nevertheless to be deepened this year by a “migration pact,” the main features of which were agreed between the EU and Morocco in December last year. In January of this year, Spain’s Supreme Court condemned the authorities’ decision to send dozens of unaccompanied minors from the Spanish exclave of Ceuta back to Morocco in May 2021 as “illegals.”
The EU has also been working closely with authorities and paramilitary forces in Libya for years, overseeing a system of serious human rights violations. For example, a recent EU communication boasts of operationally training border guards from the Libyan Ministry of the Interior as part of the European Union Border Assistance Mission to Libya (EUBAM Libya). The so-called “Libyan Coast Guard” has been supported by the EU for years with equipment and funding worth millions of euros.
The InfoMigrants website has compiled eyewitness reports according to which refugees in Libya are “confronted daily with physical and sexualised violence, forced labour, exploitation, arbitrary detention and extortion.” Even the spokesperson for the United Nations Human Rights Office, Liz Throssell, spoke to Deutsche Welle in July of “widespread human rights violations against migrants, refugees and asylum seekers in Libya,” including torture, forced labour, extortion, starvation under intolerable detention conditions, mass displacement and human trafficking. This happened “on a large scale and with impunity, with both state and non-state actors often working together.”
Following the migration deals with Turkey, Tunisia, Libya and Morocco, the EU also signed an agreement with Lebanon in May this year, which stipulates that the country will prevent Syrian refugees from travelling to Europe in return for a financial injection of €1 billion. Amidst Israel’s escalating military strikes against Lebanon, aid organisations are warning that this agreement was also paving the way for further human rights violations.
The campaign against refugees and migrants stems from the same capitalist logic that underlies the global escalation of war. It is directed against the European and international working class as a whole, of which they are a part, and must therefore be vehemently rejected by workers across Europe. The answer must be a socialist policy based on the international unity of the working class, a recognition of their common interests and a perspective of overthrowing capitalism. The Socialist Equality Parties in Europe and worldwide are fighting for this orientation.
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Publish date : 2024-10-24 15:52:00
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