Since the mass entry of migrants into Ceuta on July 30 and 31, the Spanish press has published a flood of news articles, op-eds, and analyses sharing the common denominator of questioning Morocco’s conduct and feeding suspicion about its behavior during those two days. In fact, and perhaps more critically, there has even been a rare unanimity in accusing Morocco of having launched a “hybrid war” against Ceuta, with the supposed goal of overwhelming the city and denying Spanish authorities time to react.
After the publication of reports showing no evidence that Morocco had planned or ordered what took place at the Ceuta border in late July, one might have expected the attacks and accusations pinning responsibility on Rabat to lose some of their force. Curiously, though, that does not appear to be the case. And even the few Spanish commentators who have softened their accusations continue to fall back on insinuation, keeping alive in their readers or audience’s minds the impression that, if Morocco was not responsible by action, it was responsible by omission.
The height of such unreason was reached in a recent El País article by Andrea Rizzi, whose analysis is, to put it mildly, far-fetched. Rizzi’s quite evident purpose is to keep the suspicions about Morocco alive. And so, even as he admits that Morocco may not have planned or ordered the mass entry into Ceuta, Rizzi hastens to sow a string of questions with the obvious goal of preserving, in his reader’s mind, the suspicion that Morocco must somehow have been behind what happened in late July and has been unfolding since. The bet here is that the accusation of Moroccan “blackmail” cannot be proven, insinuation will at least linger in and eventually give a veneer of factuality and believability to the initially far-fetched allegations.
One passage captures with striking clarity the double standard by which Morocco is judged: “If repelling the arrivals was an impossible task for Spanish forces without risking terrible violence, it was more feasible on the other side, on dry land, to defuse, disperse, and stop the avalanche. Why wasn’t it done?”
The contradiction is glaring. When it comes to Spanish forces, Mr. Rizzi understands perfectly well that using brutal force to contain a large crowd of unsurpassing migrants could have unleashed “terrible violence” and ended in tragedy. So he rationalizes the passive reaction of Spanish security forces by rightly invoking prudence, proportionality, and the need to minimize or prevent any action that would put human lives at risk.
But cross a few meters to the other side of the border, and those same principles magically vanish from Rizzi’s political and moral imagination. And so, by comparison, he expects Moroccan forces to use whatever means necessary to “defuse, disperse, stop the avalanche” of migrants and prevent them from crossing into Ceuta. As though Morocco possessed some miracle formula for forcefully dispersing thousands of people without causing the unforgivable tragedy and quite preventable losses he cautioned about when it came to Spanish security forces.
As such, the question one should really put to Mr. Rizzi is simple: what exactly did he expect Moroccan forces to do? Charge at thousands of people? Use the very violence he considers unacceptable when Spanish forces are the ones deploying it? And what would El País have written the next day if Moroccan forces had taken the course of action that would have left dozens or hundreds dead, and hundreds or thousands wounded?
When Morocco did ‘throw everything’ at the migration problem in 2015
This brings to mind an article Ignacio Cembrero published in El País in October 2005, during that year’s mass attempts to cross into Ceuta and Melilla. After Moroccan forces had used force and live ammunition to deter sub-Saharan migrants attempting to enter both enclaves, Cembrero wrote about how such a “disastrous” and “wrong-headed” response could prove devastatingly damaging for Morocco’s image.
Morocco had indeed “thrown everything at the issue” to “defend the border of two enclaves over which it does not recognize Spanish sovereignty, since it claims them as its own,” Cembrero acknowledged. Yet, he charged, all that commendable effort was ultimately eclipsed by a regrettable use of brutal force and by the decision to transfer sub-Saharan migrants to the desert region of Bouarfa, some 250 kilometers to the south, rather than returning them to the Algerian border through which many had entered Morocco.
That handling of the crisis earned Morocco sharp criticism from human rights organizations, several of which called for investigations to establish responsibility for what they then described as unwatchable scenes of violence and brutality.
In fact, complaints against Morocco predictably followed in quick succession. Amnesty International lost no time issuing a statement expressing “grave concern” over reports that Morocco had detained groups of West African migrants and summarily expelled them to Algeria, as well as over the abandonment of migrants in desert areas near Mauritania. Days later, Amnesty International returned to the charge with another report denouncing the use of “illegal and disproportionate force, including lethal weapons. Following suit, both Human Rights Watch and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) issued their own severe denunciations of the reprehensible abuses migrants suffered at the hands of Moroccan security forces.
What is particularly striking in the MSF report is the sheer volume of text devoted to describing the “violence” carried out by Moroccan security forces. One section is titled “Violence exercée par les Corps et Forces de Sécurité marocaines,” while the section on Spain is titled “Responsabilité des Forces de Sécurité espagnoles.” Even more telling: the MSF report attributes 52% of incidents deemed very serious to Moroccan security forces, against 15% attributed to Spanish forces. In other words, Morocco has received far more negative attention than Spain whenever heavy-handed police response has resulted in human losses.
It is worth remembering, however, that MSF carried out much of its medical work for that report on Moroccan soil, so these figures alone do not amount to a statistical comparison of the two states’ overall conduct. What they do show clearly is the enormous reputational cost Morocco can incur simply by performing the function of migration containment.
This asymmetry in the critical attention Morocco receives reveals just how much managing migration flows can damage its international standing – whatever stance it takes toward those flows.
But the repercussions of that tragic 2005 episode did not end there. A year later, Amnesty International published another report on violations of migrants’ and asylum seekers’ rights at the Spanish-Moroccan border. While the report leveled serious accusations against both countries: excessive use of force and illegal expulsions on the Spanish side, it devoted much more considerable attention to Moroccan raids, expulsions without safeguards, and the abandonment of migrants in desert areas.
The impossible dilemma of containment without violence
However much effort Morocco makes to curb or contain migration flows, it invariably seems to face two options, each carrying a heavy cost. If it acts forcefully to contain migrants, it is accused of violating human rights. And if its security agents are overwhelmed after refraining from deploying excessive force to avoid human losses, as happened in Ceuta, it is accused of tolerating and orchestrating the ensuing migration crisis.
That is the real heart of the problem we have witnessed in recent weeks. Spain is understood and credited with moral points when its forces refrain from forceful actions to “avoid terrible violence.” Yet when Moroccan border security agents behave in the same way, Morocco’s “suspicious passivity” is overinterpreted as proof of some mysterious conspiracy against Spanish sovereignty. This means that while Spain is automatically given the benefit of the doubt when its border agents are overwhelmed, Morocco is summoned to prove its innocence before the court of an initiated public opinion.
Behind this double standard lies an even more troubling premise: Morocco must do the thankless work that Spain neither wants nor can do itself. Morocco must intercept, disperse, detain, and contain migrants before they ever reach Spanish territory. It must thus absorb the human, political, and media cost of that containment so that Spain can keep its hands clean. But if Morocco uses too much force, it is accused of violating human rights. If not, it is accused of complicity, of using mass migration as a weapon of mass distraction to wage a “hybrid war” on Spain’s sovereignty or territorial integrity.
That is the double standard poisoning much of the Spanish debate on Morocco’s migration management efforts. And until there is the intellectual honesty to acknowledge it, we will keep watching the same exercise play out: Spanish responsibilities get explained, contextualized, and excused; Moroccan ones get presumed, magnified, and, when evidence runs short, insinuated.
What the 2005 episode did to Morocco’s border security imagination
From all of this, an answer emerges to Mr. Rizzi’s question: “Why wasn’t it done?” The experience of 2005 makes it entirely possible to understand why Morocco might have had powerfully valid reasons to avoid resorting to the use of force to curb the most recent waves of migrants attempting to reach Spanish shores.
A state has institutional memory, and its leaders learn from past mistakes. The tragic episode of 2005 and its accompanying tides of negative press and denunciations by human rights organizations informed Morocco’s decision to not mobilize the army or deploy thousands of police and gendarmes in the most recent incidents of mass migration attempts. It is why, to borrow from Cembrero’s phrasing, Rabat did not “throw everything at” the issue in July when faced with crowds of migrants determined to reach the other side.
Morocco has learned the hard way that resorting to force in such cases often ends in real bloodshed that almost immediately triggers a wave of international reports and complaints that would have seriously damaged the country’s image. For a country now broadcasting itself as parangaon of human-centered migration management, an exemplary leader and champion of South-South diplomacy or intra-African solidarity, as well as a confirmed co-host of the 2030 World Cup, the ill-advised response to the 2005 waves of Ceuta and Melilla-bound migrants are the kinds of strategic blunders that Morocco knows it can no longer afford.
Although I cannot say for certain that these highly legitimate strategic considerations were the most decisive in shaping the decisions Moroccan authorities made in those two critical days in late July, the precedent of 2005 showed the risk of an uncontrolled descent into chaos and tragedy was very real. And I am certain that had Morocco deployed the same degree of force it used in 2005, and had such bloodshed followed, Mr. Rizzi and many other commentators and politicians bemoaning Moroccan passivity would have been the first to denounce Morocco’s actions.
In fact, had such a tragic scenario taken place in late July, the migrants being described by Spanish ideologies and politicians as unwelcome “invaders” would have instantly turned out to be what they never stopped being: dignified human beings seeking better socio-economic prospects. And that is ultimately the problem the current debate seeks to sidestep: Morocco is required to stop migrants from arriving at all costs, yet condemned the moment the human cost of stopping them becomes unbearable.
Samir Bennis is the co-founder and publisher of Morocco World News. You can follow him on Twitter @SamirBennis.
