Published in Magill Magazine, June 2008

This man, Mohamed, is from Kashmir, the contested area of India on the border with Pakistan. He is photographed in Plaza España in Melilla, Spain, where he is on hunger strike, along with a dozen or so other migrants from India, and a further group from Algeria. Their strike is in protest at the Melilla authorities’ refusal to send them to Spain. Melilla is part of Spain, but is located on the north African coast, a Spanish enclave in Morocco that dates from the end of the 15th century. Mohamed arrived in Melilla overland, through west and north Africa, having travelled to Africa by boat from India – a journey of some 11,000 miles by sea, and more than 2,000 miles overland. He paid traffickers thousands of euro to get him to Europe. Now, he is in Europe, but 100 miles from Europe, in a place one commentator has called “Limbostan”. He has been here for two and a half years. There are another 90 or so Kashmiris in Melilla, amongst some 200 Indians. This is their story.
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Mohamed sits on a bench in the park in Melilla and quietly tells the story of his journey. He is smartly dressed in a t-shirt and jeans; softly spoken but earnest. He speaks very good English and excellent Spanish. Mohamed is his first name. He is unwilling to have his full name published or his photo taken. (The accompanying photo is of one of his countrymen, also called Mohamed. The group on hunger strike are willing to have their photos taken, but do not speak English.)

Mohamed qualified as an engineer in 1998, at university in Afghanistan. He returned home to Kashmir, India, but had few opportunities there. His father had been killed in shelling in 2001, and his family was left relatively poor. The local economy was weak, and Kashmiris were not readily welcomed in other parts of India. He decided to try his luck in the UK. He sold a portion of the family lands and raised €8,000 to pay a trafficker. The trafficker said he would ship him from Mumbai, India to Africa, and then give him papers and fly him to the UK.

Mohamed left Mumbai as a stowaway aboard a cargo ship in October 2005. Three months later – three months confined to a small cabin with another migrant, living on “milk and biscuits” – they arrived in Togo, west Africa. There was no flight to the UK, and no papers.

Instead, they were handed over to a local “mafia”, a Malian named Abdullah, who drove them to Burkina Faso and then, via the desert (“because we had no passports, no documentation”), to the town of Gao in Mali. They spent three months there, in a house, waiting. The trafficker said security on the border was too tight to attempt to cross. When he did eventually move them to the border, the Algerian soldiers there demanded a bribe larger than the trafficker had anticipated, and refused to let them cross. They spent a week camped out in the desert at the border, without shelter, waiting for the standoff to be resolved. They were with a group of 28 migrants being trafficked, and a further similar group, each group travelling in an open-back jeep. They survived on a supply of biscuits, “toffees”, and water in petrol cans, provided by the traffickers. Eventually, the trafficker paid off the soldiers, and the two jeeps proceeded into Algeria.

In Algeria, they hit another problem. Police raided their camp one night. Mohamed and a friend fled, on foot, into the desert, and avoided the round-up. They walked to the road, but then didn’t know in which direction to go. They walked for two days and nights, without food or water, eventually arriving at the city of Ghardaia. There, Mohamed phoned Abdullah, the trafficker, whom they had lost in the raid. Abdullah put Mohamed in touch with another “agent”, who gave him a further number for somebody else. Finally, Mohamed made contact with an Algerian trafficker, who demanded a further fee of €6,000.

Mohamed’s family had retained some land in Kashmir, and he organised for his uncle to sell most of it and transfer payment via a “mafia” in India. The Algerian trafficker drove the two men to a house, where they waited for a week, and then brought them across the Moroccan border on foot. In Morocco, they were handed over to a Moroccan trafficker, who brought them to the town of Nador on the Mediterranean, a short distance from the Spanish enclave of Melilla. In Nador, the trafficker hid them in a derelict factory and, then, they hit a further problem. Their trafficker was arrested, and subsequently imprisoned. The men spent two months squatting in the factory and begging for food, until Mohamed made a chance contact with a local trafficker. This man said he would get Mohamed into Melilla for €2,000. Mohamed paid him.

The local trafficker brought Mohamed to his house, where he jacked up his car and told Mohamed to climb inside a “box” underneath. The fuel tank had been turned into a smuggling compartment, with a removable cover, and a small, additional tank for fuel had been fitted to the car.

“They put me in the box, and they fitted the cover, and for two hours I was inside this box like a ball”, says Mohamed. There was some light and air, and he had no problem breathing, though his muscles cramped.

“For the desire to enter Europe, a man can bear many hardships.”

Mohamed passed through the frontier at Beni-Enzar without problems, and entered Melilla. It was March 8, 2006, six months after he had left Kashmir. He had spent €16,000 on his journey. Instead of arriving in the UK, where he would have had some opportunity to find informal work, he found himself in a European anachronism – a quasi city-state, 100 miles south of the European mainland, where he didn’t speak the language and had no opportunity to integrate or find employment, illegal or otherwise.

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The 100-mile journey from the city of Oujda, on the Morocco-Algeria border, to the Melilla frontier is characterised by empty countryside, chaotic coastal resort developments, and regular police checkpoints. Oujda, an apparently booming town eight miles from the Algerian border, is home to a thousand-strong population of illegal migrants, mostly from sub-Saharan Africa. They are highly transient. Many are on their way to the coast, or the Melilla frontier, to attempt to cross into Europe. Others have made an attempt, failed, been caught, and been dumped back at the nearby Algerian border by the Moroccan security services. From there, they trek back into Oujda, and squat in one of the informal camps or “tranquillos” until they are ready to make another attempt at the crossing. They are often raided by police in Oujda, and sometimes deported from there, though the way back is reasonably clear. “There is nobody here who does not know the walk back from the border”, a Nigerian named Eric tells me.

Because of this cycle, there are many migrants with experience of the journey to Nador, a key departure point for traffickers’ boats, and to Melilla. Groups form spontaneously around experienced people, and set off at night to walk the distance from Oujda. One Algerian I meet in Melilla spent 16 days on this road, trying to avoid a heavy police presence. Others manage to walk it in three or four nights. The African migrants seem to be less reliant on traffickers until they get to the coast and need to take a boat. It seems that Asian migrants are less likely to make their own way along the land routes, and so do not congregate in Oujda to the same extent.

We drive by local “grand taxi”, a weathered white Mercedes 240, to the frontier town of Beni-Enzar, and the driver leaves us at the border gate. The road is dirty and badly potholed. Hustlers approach to offer to help us negotiate the border. Outside the Café Casablanca, a man lies, cruciform and unconscious, on a large pile of cardboard packaging. At the pavement cafes, men sit over mint teas and coffees, watching. Some throw us ugly looks. The Moroccan border post consists of a security block and a couple of officials standing at a desultory barrier. There is a long walk to the Spanish side, and then a more impressive security gate. A drab group of Moroccan men lean on a barrier on the Moroccan side of this gate, apparently pleading with the Spanish officer. “You’re lucky”, the officer tells us. “It’s quiet. Sometimes there are thousands of people here, queuing and pushing. It can take hours.”

The Spanish side does not seem so different. There are drunks stumbling about, discarded packaging strewn across the street, and a long line of cheap shops and packaging-and-postage bureaux. But this slowly gives way to a modern city, and then a smart urban beachfront and an immaculate, elegant central square, the Plaza España, with boulevards radiating out from it, distinguished by modernist architecture (Melilla is the second centre for modernist architecture in Spain, after Barcelona) and high-end retail, with a notably high prevalence of electronics shops.

But there are traces of the city’s geographical location: Bazaar Ismael sits nestled amongst some run-down Spanish shops, and there is a Muslim barrio, El Rastro. In the cafes, the drink of choice is the fresh-mint tea that is ubiquitous in Morocco. In the evening, the call to prayer rings across the enclave, and it is not obvious whether it is coming from within, or from the Moroccan hills overlooking. There is a large Berber Muslim population – Spaniards, not immigrants; people from this land, which just happened to become part of Spain.

The city is home to just 70,000, and quickly runs out, yielding to dry scrub and some farmland. The “temporary stay” immigrants’ centre sits on the edge of the enclave, a series of prefabricated units inside a fence. Facilities are good, apparently, though it is chronically overcrowded: capacity is 400, and there are currently some 530 residents. At times, that number has gone as high as 900 – at those time, the local authorities are forced to ship people to the mainland.

Before immigration became an issue, in the 1980s, one could walk from Melilla into Morocco – from Europe into Africa – without difficulty. Through the 1990s, a series of fences were built, and it became progressively harder to cross. Now, that fence is three tiers deep, shrouded in razor and barbed wire, and runs the length of Melilla’s land border, enclosing the enclave’s 12 square kilometres of land. The tallest of the three fences is six metres high. Where we pull in to take a closer look, there is a Moroccan army camp visible on the other side, and as we pull away, a Spanish Guardia Civil (police) jeep arrives. Later, in the port, where there is another fence lining one side of a wide breakwater, to block immigrants scrambling ashore from boats, a policeman in a watchtower spots me taking a photo, asks for my identification, makes me delete the picture, and then makes me wait until a patrol car arrives to allow me leave.

“This is a jail”, says Mercedes Rubio, a lawyer working in the immigrants’ centre with the Spanish Commission for the Aid of Refugees (CEAR). She laughs, self-deprecatingly. “But you can live well here, too. There’s no traffic, there’s a beach, loads of bars, everything is very near, the weather’s usually good.” Apart from contraband and some fishing, there is no industry in Melilla. Most of the local population works for the Administration, which pays over the odds in order to attract personnel. There is a large Spanish “migrant” population here from mainland Spain, enticed over by government jobs and the high quality of life. Local residents are offended by reference to the mainland as “Spain”; they call it “the Peninsula”. The immigrants talk of going to “the big Spain”.

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More than two years after he passed through the border in the fuel tank of a car, Mohamed says he is happy he is here. He spends his days washing cars in the street, which brings in a few euro and provides some occupation. He now speaks near fluent Spanish, having taken classes at the immigrants’ centre. He doesn’t show the frustration of his countrymen who have resorted to hunger strike in the attempt to force the local authorities to move them to the mainland. He seems to think this would be impolite, ungracious. Mohamed remains optimistic that he will be regularised – he thinks there may be a three-year threshold, after which he would be given papers and allowed to stay and work. If given the choice now, he would not return to Kashmir. His regret is that he chose the route he did. He experienced “a long and terrible journey”, during which he “saw too many things – terrible, horrible things”.

“If I (had) applied for an educational visa, maybe today I would be in England.”

“I made a mistake”, he says. “This mistake drew me to Spain. Sometimes, man makes mistakes. So this is my mistake, but this is the experience of life.”

Colin Murphy travelled to Morocco and Melilla with the support of the Simon Cumbers Media Challenge Fund, funded by Irish Aid.