At this very moment, barbarism is happening against African refugees in southern Spain, and the mainstream media has not given a note. It is the narcissistic pact that Cida Bento brings us as a conceptual framework. The empathy and emotion with blue-eyed white Europeans will never be the same when we see refugees from Afghanistan, Libya or Morocco. But we have to inform you that this barbarism that takes place on the southern borders of Spain is not something new.
This is a recurring process that has racism and xenophobia as the structuring basis of immigration policies that criminalize African refugees and prevent them from entering the Spanish borders that border Morocco, a country that, alongside Libya, Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt, is located in the northern sub-Saharan region of the African continent.
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In recent days, the international press has been covering the war in Ukraine, highlighting Ukrainian refugees who are in diaspora to some European countries such as Poland, Romania and Hungary.
O expansionist project of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) towards eastern Europe, has intensified in recent decades. Russia’s war against Ukraine has drawn the attention of the global press as a central issue in Western news and has already chosen one side to be acquitted and the other side to be condemned.
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The geopolitical chess game has intensified, in recent years, a dispute between the warlike and economic superpowers and has generated tensions in the global north with structural impacts on the countries that make up the global south region.
This is yet another war of power and hegemonic control that puts more tensions on the debate about human rights in the migratory process of thousands of civilian victims of wars between nations that hold military, political and economic power.
According to the United Nations (UN), as of October 31, 2020, there were 282,571 refugees in Iraq, including 241,738 Syrians (85.6% of the total), 20,610 Turks (7.3%), 10,813 Iranians (3.8 %), 7,964 Palestinians (2.8%), 766 Sudanese (0.3%) and 680 others (0.2%).
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Of the 665,000 Afghans who were displaced within the country in 2021, 80% are women and children. Families report that they were suddenly forced to flee, even at the risk of being attacked by armed groups as they fled. Afghanistan’s children are growing up in the midst of this crisis.
When we talk about countries in conflict on the African continent, the reality is even more shocking and depressing. According to Spanish Parliament deputy Maria Dantas, a Brazilian who fights for immigration issues in Parliament: “Spain externalizes its borders, some countries pay for controlling its borders, Morocco is one of those countries”.
And categorically, the deputy reports that there is a process of buying segregation by the Spanish government that limits the access of African refugees on the borders of Spanish colonies in the region of sub-Saharan Africa. “The last amount that Spain paid to Morocco was 320 million euros so that Morocco does not let any immigrants pass. Spain, in this case Ceuta and Melilla, which are the Spanish cities on the African continent, within Morocco.”
Unlike the reception process organized to receive Ukrainian refugees in dozens of countries, the European Union has not opened its borders to fully welcome the thousands of refugee families over the last few decades of intense conflicts in the Afghan and Palestinian territories.
“The 1951 Geneva refugee statute says: the return of the refugee is prohibited, it is prohibited under the law of asylum, it is prohibited under international law. When a foreigner steps into this country that signed this statute, and basically all the countries that make up the United Nations, that country cannot return that refugee”, explains the combative deputy.
Systemic racism and xenophobia are intrinsically amalgamated in the truculent extradition policies of African refugees who seek protection and better living conditions in some of the countries that form the economic bloc of the European Union.
Other forms of separation of Africans are used to prevent the diasporic process of hundreds of men and women who find themselves in territories of social conflict and even because of dictatorial governments that persecute and torture civilians who oppose local governments.
According to Maria, cruelty has no limit, and she reveals: Spain illegally returns these refugees at the border. But in Spain in 2015 it was legalized, the right was in power and they passed the gag law, the organic law of citizen security. And it has a unique exposition that says that foreigners who enter illegally will be returned at the border.
The deputy, who in her mandate defends human rights and the protection of refugees, is a lawyer and has lived in Spain for almost three decades. The Sergipe from Aracaju, who has dual citizenship, was elected in 2019 by the Republican Left of Catalonia. For her, fighting for the causes of people in vulnerable situations is a matter of empathy, of understanding that everyone has the same rights.
They are people, mostly young men, who flee conflicts on their land, many of these conflicts are sponsored by European countries that seek to profit, for example, from the sale of weapons that fuel these political conflicts.
This causes a significant increase in physical and psychological violence, leaving part of the population in a very poor condition and totally vulnerable in the midst of the most devastating and degrading conditions of those territories in conflict, seeking a new life and risking when trying to cross the Spanish borders.
Russia’s war against Ukraine has opened up the debate on systemic racism with global dimensions. The coverage of the conflict in Europe is receiving wide coverage and conditioning public opinion to see this crisis generated by the dispute of a war hegemony with magnifying glasses aimed at Ukrainian refugees.
In addition, the hegemonic press created sensationalism around this conflict in Eastern Europe, outraging the world with the narrative that it is unacceptable for a nation of white, blue-eyed and European people to be in the condition of refugees, but the same does not occur while thousands of human lives of African refugees are taken every day at the borders of countries that are part of the European Union.
*Tadeu A. Matheus is a sociologist, master and doctoral candidate in social change and political participation at the University of São Paulo (USP).
**This is an opinion piece. The author’s view does not necessarily express the newspaper’s editorial line Brazil de facto.
Editing: Vivian Virissimo
