On Ceuta
Reflections on the ‘incident’
How bad does a state have to be for 50,000 people to choose to take the first opportunity to leave? The Moroccan monarchy isn’t worth a single drowned Moroccan, and it must be overthrown.
57 people, at least, are dead.
The Moroccan monarchy is able to use the migration card because it understands how fragile the EU’s xenophobic policies are. The monarchy is hardly the first to have done that; virtually every MENA government from Turkey to Libya passing by Lebanon and Egypt have extracted money out of the EU by threatening to unleash our most desperate populations unto a continent whose own White supremacist policies are taken for granted.
Fortress Europe is extremely fragile because it made itself fragile. It is a political decision, one made by millions, to view newcomers as a crisis instead of an opportunity.
Don’t get me wrong, the Ceuta ‘incident’ counts as a crisis because it was very evidently politicised from the start by the Moroccan monarchy, which has proven, yet again, how worthless the lives of its ‘subjects’ are. I have nothing good to say about that monarchy.
But there have been many previous examples, and we will likely see many more in the future, of ‘crises’ that were just people fleeing objectively-identifiable horrors, like the Syrian ‘crisis’ of a decade ago. These were people fleeing the Syrian dictatorship that had been annihilating entire cities, just as Ukrainians fled the Russian dictatorship. I don’t need to tell you how Syrians were treated differently.
All it takes is for another migrant ‘crisis’ for the continent to lose its mind. The securatisation of migration is only getting worse. Shengen countries abandon their commitments the second the potential for more brown/black people becomes too real. EU countries abandon other EU countries while non-EU countries like the US and Israel take advantage of these situations to weaken the EU further.
It makes being in a brown body feel extremely uncomfortable. It makes one feel extremely vulnerable. We have seen the difference in how a huge number of Ukrainian refugees were treated (without diminishing the difficulties they also had to go through) when they were deemed to be worthy victims. The difference is not between Ukrainians and non-Ukrainians. The difference is in how Europe decides who is worthy and who isn’t.
The vast majority of refugees and migrants who will attempt to reach Europe in the hope of finding a better life have not done so yet. The effects of global warming are only barely starting to be felt, and dozens of countries have been rendered structurally weaker by colonialism and post-colonial capitalism.
The irony here is that both Morocco and their Israeli allies will claim that Ceuta and Melilla are colonial entities, while Morocco and Israel are settler colonies occupying Western Sahara and Palestine respectively. I’d call it cynicism at its best (which it is), but at this point I’d be more surprised if the Israeli was not acting in bad faith in everything it does.
If the EU never understands that one its main problems is Fortress Europe itself, this will only get worse.
Bonus: Read Harsha Walia’s take here. Unlike most of what I’ve read so far, including on the Left, it is nuanced and well-informed.