As sunbathers lay on the beach beneath towering hotels and British tourists browsed in a souvenir shop called Bloody Hell Offer On Ciggies, a strange vessel slowly floated into shore past the jet-skis and Jolly Roger pirate ships of Tenerife’s prime package holiday resort.
The small, canoe-shaped African boat heaved with the weight of more than 100 people, staring exhausted at Los Cristianos, the concrete holiday metropolis that was their first glimpse of Europe. They had been on the Atlantic for 15 days with a single Yamaha motor and no cover from the sun.
This was the fifth boat of the day carrying men in various states of desperation. As supplies had dwindled some had gone without food for five days, others had not drunk for two days. The few who could no longer bear it had dipped a plastic mug into the sea and drunk the salt water, which had dehydrated them further and started to play tricks with their brain. Others had skin raw and bleeding from wet clothes rubbing against them for days on end — ”a mixture of burns from the sea salt and the petrol from the boat’s engine”, said a local doctor. The unlucky ones before them had wounds so infected that limbs had to be amputated.
”Thank you father and mother,” was painted in French on the side of one brightly decorated boat, towed into the port by the coastguard before police helped the men into a Red Cross field hospital. ”I have left my family behind, I’m scared, but I thank God I’m alive,” said a man waiting in a line for a coach that would take the group to a nearby detention camp. He had paid more than a year’s savings to risk his life by sailing for two weeks through this breach in Fortress Europe. But he felt it was worth risking the 1 920km sea-journey that has drowned between 500 and 3 000 West Africans in makeshift wooden boats this year. All he wanted was a job. The migrants’ motto in Wolof, the Senegalese language, is ”Barca ou Barzakh” — ”Barcelona or the afterlife”.
In the past week around 3 000 illegal immigrants from West Africa have reached the Canary Islands by boat, taking advantage of a window of perfect sailing conditions from the coast of Senegal and Mauritania. Around 23 000 made it to the Spanish archipelago this year, five times the total for the whole of last year. Most have arrived in Tenerife.
”This is Spain’s worst humanitarian crisis since the civil war,” said Adán MartÃÂn, president of the Canaries’ regional government. The former army barracks being used as detention centres across the Canaries are overflowing and the measures to patrol the coastlines are inadequate, he said. More than 700 teenagers who have arrived on boats without their parents have had to be made wards of the Spanish state. But accommodation for them is so full that a camp is being built at the top of Tenerife’s mountain.
Spain’s Prime Minister, José Luis RodrÃÂguez Zapatero, this week vowed to expel the ”cheating” immigrants. But almost all arrive without papers and refuse to reveal their nationality in order to avoid repatriation. Most are from Senegal which has no repatriation treaty with Spain, others are from Mali, Mauritania, Gambia and Guinea Bissau.
After the men have spent 40 days in a holding camp, the Spanish have no option but to release them, often flying them to cities such as Madrid or Valencia and leaving them on the street with a sandwich, no money and a paper requesting they leave Spain, which is easy to ignore. Hundreds have made their way to Barcelona where there is a large Senegalese community to help them. Others slip into illegal employment.
Those arriving say the passage to the Canary Islands in an open fishing boat, known as a ”pirogue” or ”cayuco”, is referred to in Senegal as the ”D-day package” after the Normandy landings. For at least $746 per person, a boat of 60 or more passengers will set out with petrol for the motor, rice, biscuits and water and gas bottles to cook and keep warm. Seventeen people died last month when a gas bottle exploded. Most of the passengers cannot swim and are scared of water so sit rigidly in one place getting sores on their backs and shoulders from rubbing against the wood.
The trip can take a week to two weeks, but there have been cases of boats getting lost and taking 20 days. Many of the boats have a global positioning device, but some malfunction. Earlier this year one boat washed up on the other side of the Atlantic in Barbados with 11 desiccated corpses on board.
High in the mountainous pine forest of northern Tenerife, Mamadou Gueye (17) who recently arrived by boat, sat at a school desk in a teenage holding centre concentrating on his Spanish lesson.
”I’m the oldest of four, I had to come here to help my parents,” Mamadou said. ”It’s just a normal part of life. At home everyone knows someone who has left by boat. I came in a pirogue with 140 people, none of whom I knew. We sailed for a week, eating rice. When the waves got high, the others said: ‘Don’t worry, as soon as we get to Spanish waters, our suffering will be over’. When I left my father said to me, ‘If you need to cheer yourself up, think about football. Say your prayers, don’t fight other boys and behave well.’ I’ll stay for five years and then go home to beautiful Senegal.”
Senegal, despite its relative stability, has an unemployment rate of 40% and half the population is under 18. Of 11-million Senegalese, around 3-million are living abroad. Most are working illegally and sending home $677-million in official remittances a year — equivalent to 9% of the country’s GDP.
In Los Cristianos, locals in bikinis line up at the port to watch as each new boat comes in. ”Soon our kids will be learning African history at school, not Spanish, and there will be no jobs for them,” said one woman. A poll by Spanish radio station Cadena Ser found 89% of Spaniards thought too many people were arriving.
A handful of immigrants whose corpses came ashore in boats are buried in Tenerife’s capital’s cemetery in graves marked ”unknown immigrant”. Many locals are sad that the blue expanse around the islands are now known as the watery graves of Africa. ”It’s not the image we’d want,” said a Spanish tourist from Bilbao. – Guardian Unlimited Â