Refugees 'dumped in the desert'

2005-10-07 14:12

Madrid - African immigrants attempting to reach Spain are being deported by Morocco to the Sahara Desert without food or drink, said reports on Friday.

Non-governmental organisations in Spain were critical of Madrid's decision to start expelling illegal migrants from west and central Africa back over the Moroccan border, saying they risked dying in the desert or being mistreated by Moroccan police.

Spain expelled a first group of 70 Malians to the Moroccan city of Tangier on Thursday in an attempt to discourage Africans from storming the border fences surrounding the Spanish enclaves of Melilla and Ceuta on Morocco's Mediterranean coast.

'Security forces kill some migrants'

Six immigrants died on Thursday in an attempt by hundreds of migrants to storm the Melilla border, bringing to 14 the death toll along the borders of the two enclaves within a little more than a month.

Morocco said its security forces had fired in self-defence, killing some of the migrants, while others were trampled to death.

More than 13 000 would-be immigrants had participated in massive, co-ordinated attempts to storm the Melilla border so far this year.

The Spanish government said the expelled Malians would return to their home country, but press reports said Morocco was rounding up large numbers of sub-Saharan Africans, near Melilla, and other places and taking them by bus to the desert, near the Algerian border.

Immigrants taken to desert

According to the daily El Pais, formerly, Morocco deported migrants to the region of Oujda, from where they returned to the border area of Ceuta or Melilla and made a fresh attempt to enter Spain.

According to the daily, Morocco had now started taking refugees to the desert, 500km south of Oujda, where there was no food or drink available.

Congolese Philippe Tamouneke said: "In front of us, there is nothing but sand, rocks, hills and a lot of sun."

Tamouneke said he was handcuffed, put on a bus for nine hours and left in the desert. He said his group included a pregnant woman and three children.

1 000 immigrants deported

The Spanish non-governmental organisations Prodein and Paz Ahora said 1 000 immigrants had already been deported to the Sahara Desert and that at least eight had died.

According to the NGOs, the immigrants were taken to the Algerian border, because they had entered Morocco from Algeria, but found themselves unable to cross back to Algeria, because frontier guards shot at them. The Moroccan-Algerian border had been closed since 1994.

Moroccan officials denied reports that expelled immigrants included political refugees with authentic certificates from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees.

Spanish interior minister Jose Antonio Alonso said Spain could not be responsible for the situation of migrants in Morocco, because "we would come to the absurd situation, where Spain would be responsible for what happens to an immigrant in Mali or Senegal".

- SAPA