In the August 12 edition, the main European headlines included a full-page advertisement with the slogan “Good things happen in Spain.” The dazzling astronomical eclipse that crossed the Peninsula from west to east that day tried to cast its shadow over the other serious humanitarian and geopolitical eclipse of Ceuta, the Spanish city in Africa occupied between July 30 and 31 by more than seventy thousand people mostly from neighboring Morocco.
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The Minister of Industry and Tourism, Jordi Hereu, opened the checkbook to face the international discredit of Spain that someone has organized with the purpose of demonstrating the weaknesses of a country, one of the few in the European Union that, for now, had not succumbed, at least not completely, to the tyranny of fear of the neighbor next door.
Someone has tried to expose the weakness not only of our sovereignty in the African square, but also of our convictions, and has done so by organizing an unusual gathering of thousands of young and not so young Moroccans who received on their smartphones – on their WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok accounts – an exceptional invitation to cross the border on the Tarajal beach on the 30th with the promise of reaching a Europe as idealized for them as America was for millions of Europeans a century earlier.
Who was it? Who deceived them in that way? Anyone can speculate. We do know one thing, no Spanish or European authority has dared to give a name. Not even to suggest it.
Unfortunately, if those 141 victims of the human avalanche were, for example, Spanish, Italian or American, drowned while stepping on each other under the water, as some witnesses have reported, we would be talking about days of official mourning, trials, investigations and even summary reprisals.
Will we ever see someone answer for the death of the 141 victims of Tarajal beach?
The companies providing the messages would be sued and surely condemned to pay large compensations to the families, while the authors of the messages would be imprisoned accused of homicide.
Will we ever see in the dock any person responsible for this crime answering to the families of the 141 victims of the jump at the Ceuta border? It is hard to imagine.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism (Alianza Editorial, 2006), the German philosopher and historian Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), exiled in the United States along with many friends, Jewish intellectuals like her who fled Nazism, emphasizes the indispensable condition of being a citizen to exercise one’s own rights, among them, the right to justice.
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“It seems – writes Arendt based on her own life and political experience – as if a man who is nothing more than a man had lost the true qualities that make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow human being.”
In other words: if you are not a citizen of a country, if you lack a homeland and do not have a passport, your life risks simply not being taken into account. That is what totalitarianism did to millions of people in Europe in the 20th century. Denying them rights and being. It was the century of the stateless.
Now, on the beaches of Ceuta, in the squares of some neighborhoods on the city’s periphery, hidden in the nearby hills that surround it, there are some thousands of people who face that same ordeal, the possibility of not being, the cancellation of rights that Arendt speaks to us about.
They are the young people who jumped the fence in search of a new citizenship and have been left halfway in the limbo of the
apatriates
What will we do with them?
On the surface, we are very far from the experience lived by Hannah Arendt’s generation. Ceuta has nothing to do with that past and it is indisputable that the citizens of Ceuta have every right in the world to reclaim their streets, their beaches, their businesses and their peace.
But we must not forget that today the world is moving at a dizzying speed towards the normalization of contempt for rights. Contempt for the pariahs, the different, those who have no place. Acting hastily today to resolve a difficult situation to bear can be lethal for many of those young people in a world in which, barely without shame, we hear some politician – none other than a national deputy – talk about going hunting for immigrants. We hear it and move on to the next screen on TikTok, as if nothing.
Rights demand time, serenity. If we unjustly resolve the humanitarian crisis on the streets of Ceuta, those who caused this crisis will have won.
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