Human rights groups in Morocco and Spain have called for an investigation into the deaths of 23 people during a mass crossing attempt in the Spanish enclave of Melilla, North Africa.
Authorities said the individuals died Friday as a result of a “stampede” after some 2,000 people tried to climb the iron fence separating Morocco and Melilla, with some falls in the attempt.
The Moroccan Association for Human Rights (AMDH), in a series of tweets on Saturday, called for a “thorough, swift and serious” investigation into Friday’s events and released videos of the aftermath of the attempted mass crossing.
The images showed dozens of people lying next to the border fence, some bloody and many seemingly lifeless as Moroccan security forces rose above them. In one of the clips, a Moroccan security guard appeared to be using a truncheon to hit a person lying on the ground.
The AMDH said many of the injured “remained there without help for hours, which increased the number of deaths.”
It also gave a higher number of deaths than the figure provided by the Moroccan Interior Ministry, saying 29 people were killed, but the figure could not be confirmed immediately.
Five human rights organizations in Morocco and APDHA, a human rights group based in the region of Andalusia in southern Spain, also supported the call for an investigation. They urged authorities not to bury the dead until after formal investigations.
There were no immediate comments from Moroccan authorities on the AMDH allegations, but an unnamed Moroccan official told Reuters news agency that security personnel had not used undue force during the events. on Friday.
Meanwhile, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has condemned the attempted mass crossing as a “violent attack” and an “attack on the territorial integrity” of Spain.
“If there is anyone responsible for everything that seems to have happened on this border, it is the mafias that are trafficking in human beings,” he said.
A Spanish police source told Reuters that people who tried to cross the fence had used sticks, knives and acid against security forces and had changed tactics to try to cross a perceived weak spot en masse, instead of separate attempts along the fence.
Some 133 people crossed the border, while 176 Moroccan security guards and 49 Spanish border guards were injured, according to authorities.
‘Deep sadness’
Ousmane Ba, a Senegalese asylum seeker from the Moroccan side who leads a community group to help others like him, said the violence arose after days of growing tension in the area.
Ba, who neither took part in nor witnessed the incident on Friday, said asylum seekers living nearby had clashed several times with Moroccan security forces as they tried to cross the fence at earlier this week.
Many of them live badly in the nearby countryside and were desperate, he said. “I have never seen migrants attack this violently. We mourn the deaths near the fence, ”he said.
The fence that separates Morocco and the Spanish enclave of Melilla [Jose Colon/AP Photo]
Amnesty International issued a statement saying it was deeply concerned about the events at the border.
“Although migrants may have acted violently in their attempt to enter Melilla, in terms of border control, not everything comes out,” said Esteban Beltrán, director of Amnesty International Spain. “The human rights of migrants and refugees must be respected and situations such as the views cannot happen again.”
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) also intervened in a statement expressing “deep sadness and concern” over what happened at the Moroccan border. and Melilla.
“IOM and UNHCR urge all authorities to give priority to the security of migrants and refugees, to refrain from the excessive use of force and to defend their human rights,” the organizations said.
The Spanish Refugee Commission, CEAR, also denounced what it described as “the indiscriminate use of violence to manage migration and control borders” and expressed concern that the violence had prevented people who were eligible for international protection reach Spanish territory.
Meanwhile, the Catholic Church in the city of Malaga, in southern Spain, said that “both Morocco and Spain have chosen to eliminate human dignity on our borders, maintaining that it must be avoided at all costs. the arrival of migrants and forgetting the lives that are broken along the way. ”.
Melilla and Ceuta, the other North African enclave in Spain, have the only land borders of the European Union on the African continent.
Friday’s mass crossing attempt was the first since Spain and Morocco settled relations after a one-year dispute over Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony annexed by Morocco in 1976. The dispute had started when Madrid allowed Brahim Ghali, leader of Western Sahara. Front Polisario independentista, will be treated by COVID-19 in a Spanish hospital in April 2021.
Rabat wants Western Sahara to have an autonomous status under Moroccan sovereignty, but the Polisario Front insists on a UN-supervised referendum on self-determination, as agreed in the 1991 ceasefire agreement.
A month after Spain allowed Ghali to be treated in a Spanish hospital, some 10,000 refugees and migrants crossed the Moroccan border into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta while border guards allegedly looked the other way, in which Rabat he regarded it widely as a punitive gesture.