Six sub-Saharan Africans died yesterday while trying to enter Spanish territory on the northern border of Morocco — the latest of a half-dozen human avalanches of desperate men to rush high, razor-wire fences along the border in the last week.
An AP report best described the intensifying crisis brewing since the “frenzied rushes” began in August:
For the past week, increasing waves of men from impoverished, sub-Saharan African nations seeking entry in Europe have charged guard posts along the borders separating the centuries-old Spanish enclaves of Melilla and Ceuta from Morocco.
Six men died Thursday during a violent assault by 400 immigrants trying to enter Melilla.
Moroccan police opened fire as the illegal immigrants rushed the post, killing several of them, said a government official in Rabat. Others among the six dead suffocated and were trampled. …
Last week, five people died of gunshot wounds when some 600 Africans tried to climb fences and reach the other enclave, Ceuta.
It’s a searing image, and arguably the biggest story coming out of Africa at the moment. But print readers of three of our most important newspapers — the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post — have been exposed to the story only in passing.
Today, the New York Times and Los Angeles Times both carried three-paragraph wire stories, while the Post ran a medium-length Reuters story on A19. Over the past week, the Los Angeles Times has run three wire briefs, while the New York Times has published one correspondent’s report and two wire stories. The Post has been more consistent, running five wire stories in its print edition.
On their Web sites, both the New York Times and the Post — especially the Post — have done better. But Web articles do not carry nearly the same heft as printed ones. Nor do wire stories usually carry the same immediacy as pieces produced with a newspaper’s own resources, voice and expertise — and the New York Times‘ staff report from last Friday stands as the only such example among American “major papers” in the Nexis database.
Meanwhile, the AP, Reuters, and the European press have found plenty to write home about. Today the Independent of London carried a 1,000-word-plus piece from its writer in Melilla, headlined, “Spain to deport illegal migrants from its north African enclaves”:
News of imminent deportations spread rapidly among more than 1,500 people crammed into Melilla’s immigrant holding centre on the dusty outskirts of the handsome, if flyblown, fin de siecle town centre. A field of campaign tents house people who cannot fit. The euphoria of those who had reached Europe after tramping across Africa for months or years turned to fear at the prospect of being turned away.
“It’s terrible news. We are very afraid of being sent back,” said Augustin, 20, a farmworker from Mali, whose odyssey to Melilla had taken two years. “I’ve suffered so much to get here, I prefer death to expulsion,” [he] said …
AP correspondent Daniel Woolls has been steadily filing updates from the area, including an incisive report that alerted us to the situation last Friday. In that report he told the story of “Felix Akah, a 33-year-old electrician from Cameroon” and father of two who “said it took him almost nine months to make his way north to Morocco, hoping to find work in Spain or elsewhere in Europe. He, Aborah, and others described their feat of climbing ladders, fashioned from tree branches held together with bicycle inner tubes or strips of fabric, and crossing two 10-foot razor wire fences in the middle of the night.”
Once on Spanish territory, the Africans hope to take refuge anywhere in the borderless EU. But “In a radical change of policy, Spain sent 70 migrants back to its neighbor late on Thursday after it reactivated a 1992 accord with Rabat to allow it to send back sub-Saharan African migrants who have entered Spain via Morocco,” Reuters reported today. And also today, both the AP and Reuters point to a Doctors Without Borders report that between 400 and 500 Africans rounded up by the Morocco government near the Spanish enclaves have been deposited in the desert with little food or water. Spain and Morocco both strongly dispute that claim.
Meantime, the Independent reports that Morocco is pushing for an “EU Marshall Plan for Sub-Saharan Africa,” and that Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero “emphasized yesterday the international scale of a crisis he considers the responsibility of all Europeans.”
The overall death toll thus far, we suppose, is small, as crises go. Still, at what point does this dramatic, heartrending story of people so desperate they risk their lives for asylum merit more than a passing glance from our major newspapers?
For the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post, that time should be now.
–Edward B. Colby
Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.