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ARCHIVED - Spain accepts 60 Aquarius migrants - another 524 intercepted off Andalucía on Wednesday
Immigrant breakout in Madrid as Spain struggles to deal with the flow across the Mediterranean
The topics of immigration and migrants are rapidly becoming a source of major headaches for the Spanish government, with events in the Straits of Gibraltar as well as the central and eastern Mediterranean threatening to cause more and more problems as the summer wears on.
Off the coast of Andalucía it is reported that at least 524 migrants attempting to make their way from Africa to the EU were intercepted on Wednesday alone and brought ashore in mainland Spain, most of them in the Strait of Gibraltar. Many were taken to the port of Algeciras, where a “refugee camp” has been set up, while others set foot in Spain in Motril as the immigrant detention centres were yet again filled to overflowing.
At the same time, the difficulties of providing accommodation for immigrants while repatriation procedures are initiated were illustrated by the break-out of 17 immigrants from the internment centre in Aluche, in the region of Madrid. The escape is reported to have occurred just after dinner, when a group of immigrants, most of them of Algerian nationality, surrounded a police officer and stole the card which operates the security gates and doors throughout the complex.
It is also reported that at the time of the incident only 8 officers of the Policía Nacional were on duty at the CIE centre, where at least 150 migrants were being held, and while five of the fugitives were detained on Thursday morning the others are still at large.
Meanwhile, on top of this summer’s wave of immigrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean into Spain, which has already led to the interception of aver 13,000 people, affairs further east of the coast of Libya continue to occupy the Spanish government. In June, as the new government adopted an “open arms” attitude towards the refugees and migrants picked up by NGO rescue vessels, the Aquarius was offered the chance to dock at the port of Valencia with 630 rescued migrants on board, having been turned away by both Italy and Malta after picking up the Africans from the water off the coast of Libya. The gesture made by Pedro Sánchez’s government was widely applauded on humanitarian grounds, but at the same time the EU warned that the “open arms” policy would not be sustainable in the long run, and this would appear to be being borne out by recent developments.
As recently as last week the Aquarius found itself in a similar position to that of two months ago, although this time with “only” 141 migrants on board, around half of them reported to be unaccompanied adolescents from Eritrea and Somalia. Again, permission to reach port has been denied by the authorities in Italy and Malta – the ship is currently approximately half way between the two countries – and again a request for help from an EU country has been issued.
But this time the Spanish government’s response is that the situation was very different, and no offer was made to the Captain of the vessel on the grounds that “Spain is not the safest port because it is not the closest”, according to government sources.
Now, however, a compromise solution which has been reached by five EU States regarding those on board and another 114, making a total of 255. The Aquarius was finally allowed to dock in Malta after five days of being unable to set a course for land and 60 of the migrants included in the agreement will be brought to Spain, with the remainder to be relocated to Germany, Malta (up to 50 each), Portugal (up to 30) and Luxembourg (5): France also took part in negotiating the agreement.
The 141 migrants are reported by SOS Mediterranée to be exhausted, and include 2 pregnant women and 73 minors (almost all of them unaccompanied by adults). They come from mainly from Eritrea and Somalia, although there are also natives of Bangladesh, Cameroon, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Senegal, Egypt and Morocco.
So, another crisis situation regarding those fleeing Libya has been averted, but the EU is still unable to draw up a common policy regarding the problem due to the refusal of Italy to accept any more migrants and the similar standpoints adopted by Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland. In Spain, meanwhile, Pedro Sánchez’s government struggles to strike a balance between accepting “not enough” migrants and allowing “too many” into the country in the eyes of the public, and matters are not helped by some regional governments, including that of Catalunya, declaring that they are willing to welcome all refugees and migrants at all times on humanitarian grounds.
Main image: Guglielmo Mangiapane / SOS Mediterranée
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