Ceuta, crossroads of geopolitics and domestic agendas

The Mediterranean Sea needs to regain some unity of purpose to confront the present and future migration waves that could scuttle Europe forever

Recent events in Ceuta, where many thousands of migrants breached Spain’s borders (and thus also those of the EU) after swimming across the stretch of sea separating Morocco from the Spanish enclave, are just like the 1975 “Green March” – and more.

On that occasion, a peaceful march of just under four hundred thousand people, organized by the royal house of the Maghreb country, forced Madrid. It had to choose between using violence against an unarmed mass — which was nonetheless committing an illegal act — and ceding territory, that of Western Sahara, which had long been under Spanish sovereignty.

On that occasion, Spain chose the path of non-violence — as it will probably do again today by taking in those seeking entry — ceding that part of the desert to Morocco. It went so far as to clear mines from all the required areas to avoid possible incidents.

The handover was therefore a peaceful one, although — to speak plainly — this did not spare Morocco all the troubles that later stemmed from that action. The toll was roughly fifty years of Saharan guerrilla warfare and a rupture with neighboring Algeria, which has worsened over time.

Back then, the “Green March” had, at least officially, no victims. Today’s swim — the sea is quite different from sand, and the waves almost always demand a terrible levy — risks instead having cost the swimmers dearly.

How much? We will never know precisely, both because local official sources will tend to minimize the number of missing as much as possible, especially if this time too the Moroccan move was inspired by the sovereign or the royal court, and because of the terrible organizational chaos that always characterizes events of this kind.

Let us, for now, content ourselves with mourning all those who did not make it, and try instead to reason about the motives of dissatisfaction or even desperation that may have inspired this collective, almost lemming-like act.

Today’s act is nothing other than a symptom of the colossal level of dissatisfaction and frustration that currently pervades the youth of virtually all the Maghreb countries on the opposite shore. They are confronted with the prospect of a life utterly devoid of any possibility of improving their current condition.

Among the five countries in the region, the differences, where they exist at all, are not substantial. First of all, all of them are victims of galloping demographics that, for above all religious reasons, cannot be slowed. This ends up nullifying any progress, however notable, in terms of gross national product and the country’s modernization.

When he was still in power, Egyptian President Mubarak confessed something to the effect that there was little he could do: that the year’s GDP had grown by 8% and the population by the same percentage, so nothing had changed economically. Moreover, religious constraints prevented him from promoting any contraceptive measure or practice — the most he could do was keep repeating on television how much better off they would be if theofre were fewer in them.

After Mubarak, the Muslim Brotherhood’s momentary triumph in Egypt was followed by a corresponding rise in the birth rate, which President Al-Sisi has only partially managed to remedy.

As a result, the average age of Egyptians is very low. It is unclear what job prospects the government will be able to offer its young people in the medium term. For now, a series of pharaonic public works — carried out under the aegis of the Armed Forces and financed in large part with Saudi and Arabian Peninsula capital — are driving the development, but sooner or later it will come to an end.

If Yemen’s Houthi action aimed at blocking passage through the Suez Canal were to become decisive, depriving Cairo of the substantial revenues, then conditions could rapidly trigger a migration flow of uncontrollable scale.

Algerian hub

Let’s examine the condition of Algeria.

Of the other Maghreb countries, Tunisia is the smallest and already the best connected to Europe. Libya is largely paralyzed by its internal partition and by the perpetual instability of the two state factions that emerged from the elimination of Gaddafi. Mauritania has always been so peripheral that it exerts — and only sporadically at that — minimal influence on the rest of the region.

Algeria, on the other hand, is a different case, both because its stability, after decades of civil war, remains only largely apparent, and because of its role in supplying hydrocarbons to Europe.

There, too, in any case, a youth entirely without prospects, with an average age under 20, makes up the majority of the population.

Frustration grows day by day, forcing the government to provide housing for young people to contain widespread discontent. Having a home is, in fact, considered by young women’s families an essential requirement for consenting to their daughters’ marriages.

Widespread discontent and lack of prospects throughout North Africa, then — conditions that moreover affect an extremely young population, one thus inclined toward adventure and willing to accept its risks.

Faced with all this, Europe is doing absolutely nothing, perhaps with the one commendable exception of the Italian Mattei Plan, along with the work of a Catholic Church necessarily concentrated in a few specialized sectors such as education and healthcare.

Far too little, not of the scale suited to the task, and the Church, operating in Islamic countries, finds itself facing enormous difficulties.

All the efforts we Europeans made at the end of the last century, all the initiatives — some of them quite valid! — that we undertook, now seem, unfortunately, completely and irreversibly forgotten.

But what are we waiting for? For the storm to break before we run home to fetch an umbrella?

It is plain that the countries on the southern shore of the Mediterranean urgently need support and initiatives if they are not to collapse and unleash an unstoppable, uncontrollable migratory flow on our shores.

African countries are shouting this at us at the top of their voices, with episodes like today’s collective Moroccan swim toward Ceuta — an extremely clear symptom of how advanced the progression of the ailment already is.

And let us remember that the southern Mediterranean shore could, in the near future, play two very different roles for us.

On the one hand, it would have every quality needed to become, by greater cooperation with Europe, part of an effective bulwark containing more massive migratory waves, far harder to integrate, that will come from the heart of the African continent.

On the other hand, however, if Europe continues to turn them away now, the Maghreb peoples might find it more convenient to turn southward in search of allies. They may not be especially powerful, but they are very numerous, and with them they can try to solve today’s and, above all, tomorrow’s problems.

In one way or another, on both shores, we are already more or less all caught up in that piecemeal world war which Pope Francis foretold years ago with almost prophetic vision. This piecemeal war will probably end up inevitably drawing us all into its vortex. Then we’ll truly grasp the gravity and scale of the problem now before us — one which, with sheer obstinacy (God blinds those He wishes to destroy!), we stubbornly refuse to see and confront.