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<\/a><\/p>\n\u201cWe knew there was a problem back in the year 2000,\u201d Karen tells us .\u00a0 \u201cLiterally, from one week to the next, the English-speaking congregation in Rabat and Casa jumped from 100 people to 200 people.\u00a0 Before that year, the major trafficking routes ran through Libya, but then either Libya found new ways to block the traffic or the country became more lawless, and the routes shifted to Morocco. Karen tells us the story behind the map of migration routes (above): \u201cYou can start out alone, on foot, but eventually you have to pay someone to tell you where to go: you join up with the traffickers.\u00a0 No one leaves their country lightly.\u00a0 The people I\u2019ve interviewed from Cameroon, for instance, many of them are orphans.\u00a0 In urban centers, the social network has collapsed, and there\u2019s no one to care for these orphans.\u00a0 So you do what you can do: you start walking. Or else people come from the rural communities, and these communities are dying, and they choose one person, a courageous person, to go and find work and send money home.\u00a0 I wouldn\u2019t have the courage, to take that walk.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople come from many places, especially where there is violence and upheaval\u2014from the Congo, from Nigeria, from Cameroon, it could be anywhere. From Nigeria, the road lies through Niger and across the Sahara into Algeria.<\/p>\n (At the end of October, 92 migrants–52 children, 33 women, 7 men–died of thirst in Niger when the trucks transporting them broke down. \u00a0Their deaths sparked a major investigation into the trafficking of migrants through Niger.) “In Algeria, the migrants find their way to Maghnia, where they are organized by the traffickers into groups.\u00a0 Those groups are sent across the border into Morocco, knowing at least where they are going and who will be looking out for them in the short term.\u00a0 They come to camps that are often organized according to place of origin.\u00a0 So in the forest, there will be one camp that is \u201cEmpire State\u201d and another that is \u201cIto State\u201d\u2014these are two states in Nigeria, and everyone or almost everyone in the camp will be from that state, whether they started out together or not.<\/p>\n \u201cAfter that, people try to get to Spain, in order to move deeper into the Eurozone to find work.\u00a0 They have one chance to cross, and if something doesn\u2019t work\u2014if the boat doesn\u2019t leave, or if the police disrupt an attempted crossing\u2014that\u2019s it: they\u2019ve lost their money, and they have to wait until they can save up enough money to pay to cross again.<\/p>\n “Many migrants suffer violence from police or army forces, Moroccan or Spanish, in their efforts to cross the border. \u201cStill, despite efforts like the Number 9 campaign, the treatment of migrants continued to worsen. \u00a0Up to the end of this past summer, policies were more and more draconian.\u00a0 Migrants have been beaten and left in a pit for dead; when I was here earlier this year we spoke with some Cameroonians who had just come back from an attempted crossing and told us about security forces trying to drown them, and they were shaking from the experience.\u00a0 One, I think his name was Abdelrachman, was a little crazed: he could barely speak about it.\u00a0 The idea behind this kind of abuse seems to be to discourage migrants from coming to Morocco, but people don\u2019t realize what they\u2019re getting into when they start down the migration trail\u2014and once they arrive here, they don\u2019t have the resources to make other choices.<\/p>\n \u201cThe women are the most vulnerable: they have been forced into prostitution, many of them, or assigned a protector, and basically all of them have been raped.\u00a0 They\u2019re really not all right. \u201cBut this fall, CEI helped put together a report on the migrant situation, and this was presented to the king, and he said publicly that something must be done.\u00a0 Almost immediately, it was announced that Morocco would give work permits to people whose refugee status had been recognized by the UN High Commission on Refugees\u2014though that\u2019s only about 8500 people out of the thousands of migrants in the country.\u201d<\/p>\n Morocco has also been angling for a position on the UN High Commission on Refugees and it finally got that position.\u00a0 On the day \u00a0that appointment was announced, Morocco also proclaimed a jubilee year granting amnesty to some of the 25-45,000 illegal migrants in the country.\u00a0 Trafficking expert Terry Coonan, visiting Ifrane a week after our trip to Oujda, called the pair of announcements a process of \u00a0\u201cimproving human rights practices by increasing Morocco’s visibility.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSo,\u201d Karen concludes, gathering us together to leave for the camps, \u201cthere is new hope for the migrants\u2014not that they will achieve their dreams of making a new life in Europe, but that their experience in Morocco might be something less of a nightmare.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Today\u2019s trip–joining\u00a0a group of mostly AUI faculty and students who have come to distribute blankets to migrant communities around the Moroccan city of Oujda–has been preceded by a fair bit of soul-searching.\u00a0 A member of the migrant community here, a man known as El Adj (say the newspapers, or perhaps El Hajj, the boss) was … Continue reading Migrants in Morocco: background<\/span>
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\n<\/a>A Moroccan friend back in Ifrane will later suggest that Algeria intentionally decided to cause trouble for Morocco by sending the migrants west instead of east. \u00a0Clearly, as these journal covers of the weekly Maroc Hebdo<\/em> suggest, the issue of migrants raises many issues in Morocco. \u00a0Racism, anyone?
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\n<\/a>But note too that Morocco is being pressed by the EU to patrol European borders–to be the bad cop for European interests.<\/p>\n
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\nAssociated Press image of mass grave in Niger, published in itv, October 31, 2013<\/p>\n
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\nA documentary by Sara Creta (Number 9: Stop violence at the borders!)<\/em>\u00a0released in late spring 2013 recorded the testimonies of migrants in the Gourgourou forest (near the Spanish enclave of Nador) who had suffered violence in their attempt to cross the borders.
\n<\/a>\u00a0Screen grab from “Number 9”
\nThe film is named for a migrant who died during the filming–a man known as Cl\u00e9ment, who liked to wear a Number 9 football shirt.
\n<\/a>Screen grab from “Number 9”<\/p>\n
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