Embodying Borders Everyday Realities at the Euro-African Frontier

Embodying Borders Everyday realities at the Euro-African Frontier

Renee Middendorp Supervisor: Dr. Bram Jansen Second Assessor: Dr. Alberto Arce Thesis International Development Studies Sociology of Development and Change Wageningen University and Research Centre August, 2016

Embodying Borders

Everyday realities at the Euro-African Frontier

Major Thesis Renee Middendorp Student number: 890529570060

Supervisor: Dr. Bram Jansen Second assessor: Dr. Alberto Arce

International Development Studies Wageningen University and Research Centre

Wageningen, August 1st 2016 Word count: 39304

Picture on front page: graffiti wall art made by an Italian artist in Melilla, Spain. Translation: ‘the essential is invisible to the eyes’. Picture taken by the author. All pictures depicted in this thesis have been taken by the author, unless indicated differently.

Clandestino

I come only with my punishment There comes only my conviction Running is my fate In order to deceive the law Lost in the heart Of the great Babylon They call me the clandestine 'cause I don't carry any papers

To a northern city I went for work I left my life behind Between Ceuta and Gibraltar I'm a just a rake on the sea A ghost in the city My life is prohibited Says the authority

I'm the sell-out of law Black clandestine hand Peruvian Clandestine African Clandestine Marijuana illegal

I come only with my punishment There comes only my conviction To run is my fate In order to deceive the law Lost in the heart Of the great Babylon They call me the clandestine 'cause I don't carry any papers

Algerian Clandestine Nigerian Clandestine Bolivian Clandestine Black illegal hand

Manu Chao, translated from Spanish

Content Acknowledgements ...... 6 Introduction ...... 9 Research questions ...... 10 Research setting and positionality ...... 11 The role of the anthropologist ...... 13 Note on “illegality” categorizations ...... 14 The quest for traces and ‘elephant paths’ ...... 16 Structure of the thesis ...... 16 Chapter 2 - Theoretical Framework...... 18 Embodiment ...... 18 Intra-action ...... Fout! Bladwijzer niet gedefinieerd. Border studies : studying bordering ...... 19 The securitized border ...... 21 Conclusion ...... 22 Chapter 1 : Rise of the Valla ...... 24 The walling out of unwanted outsiders...... 24 Rise of the fences : three major turning points...... 26 Legitimizing fortification practices ...... 28 Externalization of the migration question ...... 29 The fine line between care and control : legitimizing militarization through humanitarianism ...... 30 Concluding remarks : setting the stage for the border spectacle ...... 31 Close-up: Mapping the enclave ...... 32 Chapter 3 : The journey into illegality ...... 35 Oujda ...... 36 Migrant as modern day homo sacer? ...... 37 Conclusion: bordering in the borderland ...... 40 Interlude ...... 41 Chapter 4 : Facing the Valla ...... 42 The transformative power of the border crossing ...... 42 The ‘show of enforcement’ at the border crossing ...... 43 Militarization put into action : asaltos ...... 46 ...... 47 The visual economy of the border crossing ...... 47

Beyond the spectacle: off-scene realities ...... 49 Guardia’s ambivalence ...... 51 Conclusion: bordering at the border-crossing ...... 57 Interlude ...... 58 Chapter 5 – Stuck in limbo ...... 59 The CETI ...... 59 Make-believe documents, waiting and phony freedom ...... 60 Return of the camp...... 64 Outside the CETI ...... 65 Conclusion ...... 67 Conclusion : Embodying borders ...... 68 Bibliography ...... 72 Appendix I ...... 75

Figures

Figure 1: Map of Melilla I………………………………………………………………………………………………………………7 Figure 2: Map of Melilla II……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..8 Figure 3: Guardia Civil group posing below Franco’s statue………………………………………………………..26 Figure 4: Graphic of the vallas between Morocco and Melilla…………………………………………………….44 Figure 5: Snapshot of video footage October 2014…………………………………………………………………..…49 Figure 6: Fence flora……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………52 Figure 7: Porteadores at Barrio Chino …………………………………………………………………………………………56

Boxes

Box 1: Border transformations in light of securitization………………………………………………………………21 Box 2: 2005 asaltos ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………28 Box 3: Visiting the migrant camp in Mount Gurugu…………………………………………………………………….39 Box 4: Video: Expulsion of migrants in the border spectacle……………………………………………………….47 Box 5: A social worker’s story …………………………………………………………………………………………………….63

Acknowledgements

This thesis is the final assignment of the master International Development Studies at the Wageningen University. Doing research in Melilla was a wonderful experience.

Special thanks go out to my room mates Fran, Mili and Pana who showed me their “Melillan life-style”. Because of them I felt at home.

I want to thank Dr. Bram Jansen for his supervision and guidance as my supervisor. His enthusiasm and interest in migration issues are contagious and I admire his strong analytical skills. I also would like to thank Dr. Alberto Arce for devoting his time to be second-reader.

To my parents, Tom and Lilian, who have had a difficult year but nevertheless show great resilience and positivity. I am grateful for their sincere interest in my thesis.

Most of all, I thank the many people in Melilla, in the CETI, the harbor, the border posts for sharing their stories with me. Not only did they assist me in many forms in trying to grasp and understand the social world of the enclave, but also for many moments of their company. I will not mention them by name to safeguard their identity. I hope this thesis can show the humanity and strength of the people I interviewed and work towards a more sensible and humane debate regarding bordering. I hope this work reflects my gratitude towards my informants who have allowed me into their lives.

Finally, I would like to thank Tim, for exploring Melilla together with me by bike, and his (non-academic) support while writing this thesis.

Figure 1 : Map of Melilla I

Source: UNHCR, Global Insight digital mapping

16 15 1. Harbor (departure) 2. Light Tower in Ciudad Vieja 3. Franco statue 4. City Center 5. Guardia Civil Comandancia 6. Barrio Hipocamo 7. CETI 8. Center Menores 9. Beni Enzar international border post 10. Melilla airport 11. Barrio Chino border post 12. Golf course 13. Farkhana border post 14 14. Los Pinos 15. Hitherto 18 16. Moroccan army base --- Land border

7 2 4 3 1 13

12 8

10 6

11 9

Figure 2: Map of city of Melilla Source: modified from google maps

Introduction Making of the Euro-African frontier

“If space is genuinely the sphere of multiplicity, if it is a realm of multiple trajectories, then there will be multiplicities too of imaginations, theorisations, understandings, meanings. Any ‘simultaneity’ of stories-so-far will be a distinct simultaneity from a particular vantage point” - Doreen Massey 2005:89

In the current age of transnational mobility, territorial and national boundaries and borders have received renewed political-, and academic attention. Especially in the past decade in response to “Europe’s migration problem”, a proliferation of images, policing measures, border enforcement technologies have been characterizing Europe’s external borders. In the case of this research, the land border of Melilla proves to be iconic as its rough landscape is pressed to serve as the elusive, practical - and increasingly virtual - border of the EU. For many, Melilla has become a symbol of futility of the fight against illegal immigration and for me and several others an interesting research site as they are the only segments of the EU external border in the African continent. Why, how and by whom is the border erected? Whose interests are served, and whose interests are hurt by the existence of these borders? Such questions become highly interesting in the context of Melilla, as it is a site with a high level of ‘borderness’, a term I use to refer to the symbolic and physical power and presence of bordering mechanisms. Still though, the Spanish-Moroccan border has attracted less critical interest than its ‘‘extreme’’ nature would seem to invite. It has not been scrutinized as much as many other borders have been – such as the U.S.-Mexican or the Israel-Palestinian border – although a growing number of studies have dealt with the border affairs at this particular site1. This research presents a tripartite theoretical lens that explores the functional, geopolitical and symbolic dimensions of the Spanish-Moroccan bordering process, which has fast-tracked after Spain’s EU accession in 1986. As will be shown, the level of ‘borderness’2 is the result of bordering processes carried out by specific policies, discourses and practices. This theoretical framework is derived from the scrutiny of critical border theorizations, and is shaped in accordance with the particularities of the border I have been studying. This thesis then is set out to analyze the main factors of this bordering process. First, certain political choices – for example the establishment of temporary holding centers, the employment of patrol boats, and the dispatching and involvement of a wide range of border actors – suggest that the border can be seen as the result of the placing and interaction of ‘spatial bodies’, as well as of legislative measures and international relations resulting from the securitization of migration. Further, I will argue that the bordering processes of Melilla’s border is a ‘spectacle’, a staging. In line with scholars such as Nicolas de Genova (2002, 2012), Paolo Cuttitta (2014) and Ruben Andersson (2014), I regard how Spanish migration policies and bordering practices at the Spanish- Moroccan border are a case in point. While de Genova refers to the US-Mexican border, and Cuttitta

1 Ferrer-Gallardo (2008); Andersson (2014) 2 This concept is used by Cuttitta (2014) who argues how borderness of the island of Lampedusa is the result of both its geographical location but especially a bordering process carried out through specific policies, practices and discourses 9

considers Lampedusa’s bordering process as a “theatre performance”, Andersson already drew lines between Melilla’s fortification practices and the border spectacle. This thesis will follow the workings of the bordering spectacle in Melilla and bring together into a single frame the three sectors of the border machinery I derived from four months of fieldwork. These sectors are the practices of border security, discourse and imagery, and to a lesser extent humanitarianism. Each of these sectors and their functioning’s play their part in the spectacle. Describing the border system as such made me touch upon the political and academic focus on a dramatized border image but I will do this in a rather oblique manner. Therefore I will move back and forth between the spectacle and the backstage area, from fence to sea, from border post to private home, from drama to ordinary, police officer to local tradesman, from public space to my own home. The mundane aspects of everyday reality and narratives will give the analytical push in order to describe the border machinery and its sometimes extraordinary aspects. This thesis then is set out to analyze both the fascination and obsession with the bordering practices, as well as its abstractness and uncertainty. Furthermore, this thesis will be an exploration of looking at borders, as matter (its concrete materialization) but especially its lived experience. One could argue that, borrowing the words of Massey (2005), it is a “simultaneity of stories so far”. At any one moment, that what constitutes space is the outcome of multiple relations, unpredictable happenings and everyday activities. This thesis is a collection of those stories, like “articulations within the wider power- geometries of space" (2005:130). The idea that space is something lively leaves the possibility open for multiple stories.

Research questions My aim is to study the processes of and the intersection between formal/territorial borders (formation) and the everyday, embodied experiences. To capture both the tangible, physical features and the subjective, embodied experience of ‘the’ border the research question that will be answered is how and to what effect do processes of embodiment shape the everyday realities of the EU-African border in Melilla? The question is not aimed at one reality particular -which is always contentious and political- but rather aims to explore other kinds of realities, as reality is always socially constructed. In other words, I aim to explore the border as produced by human dynamics and entities, a co-production by virtue of their relationship to an evolving system of others. The question is concerned with the productive nature of Melilla’s borderization process carried out through specific policies, practices and discourses as well as every-day stories and experiences that defines reality for the people involved. Through the theoretical and methodological lens of embodiment this question revolves around the processes that turn space into border. The body forms a key aspect in this, following the understanding that an embodied engagement and perspective in research can be essential to understand the phenomenon at hand and how the body serves as a means of perception. Furthermore, by bringing together a wide range of actors, structures and materialities I will explore the intra-actions between both human and non-human aspects (i.e. the fence, border actors, migrants) that together produce/reconfigure through intra-actions a particular, perhaps supra-geographical, reality of the Spanish-Moroccan border.

1. How do bordering practices take shape? This question is concerned with how the border is constituted and how it is related to the workings of the border’s machinery3 in Melilla. The question is aimed to grasp both the formal and the day-to-day workings of the border and is an approach to explore the physical and practical presentation of the border zone. It is an introduction to the bodies, language, images, movement and practices. Furthermore, this question is concerned with both the dominant border discourse – which will be called the border spectacle – and the deconstruction of this. How are formal (e.g. state) and informal (social) processes of border-making related to each other? 2. How is the border machinery related to specific spaces, people and structures? This question is concerned with the relationships and dynamics that can be observed between bodies, material and immaterial environments and action. It is focused on becoming in relation to others and the environment and on experience as a process of relationality (intra-action). These intra-actions are guiding in finding out what new social configurations and subject positions are being created. 3. In what ways do these dynamics and interfaces influence the socio-spatial configurations of the enclave? Putting everything together in one analytical frame, it enables me to explore how these intra- actions and encounters give new meanings/functions to the enclave in the borderland and how and which subject positions are being fought, forged, transformed, produced in these encounters.

In the end, this thesis will touch upon the following issues. First, it digs into a major challenge of the current modern world, namely “illegal” immigration, giving insight in Europe’s/Spain’s response to and its effects on the ground in a particular section of the EU-African frontier. Second, it captures the nature of the border materiality and its embodied effects on the surroundings, in order to comprehend the complex features of the border machinery and the multiple subjects created thereby. Issues of mixed migration – as a complicating feature in the system – are produced by these developments and challenge the spectacle’s very existence as ‘new’ travelers are part of the migratory route into Melilla. Further, the thesis will carefully problematize the idea of a “humanitarian border”, stressing the fine line between care and control. Moreover, I like to regard this thesis as a ‘border poetics’4, as I will argue that narrative representation is a central element in border formation and experience.

Research setting and positionality Studying processes and systems associated with migration –and globalization for that matter- have moved anthropologist more and more in the direction of multisided research. Especially within migration studies, researchers follow people on the move. Such studies have changed the ethnographic focus on a “local community”. However, methodological and ethical concerns have been ousted by various anthropologists whether multisite fieldwork goes hand in hand with anthropology’s relationship to locality. For example, Raelene Wilding (2007) points to a tension between a methodological focus on social relationships tied to particular places, and an anthropological assumption of the migrancy of the researcher. Moreover, while researcher move from place to place,

3 In this thesis, a border machinery is defined as the means - or system - by which the border is kept in action and certain desired results are obtained. Stressing its productive nature, containing inputs and outputs, profit and loss, products and excesses. 4 This term is borrowed from the Border Poetics / Border Culture Research group at the Faculty of Humanities, Social Science and Eduction of the Arctic University of Norway (UiT). The group sets out to develop theoretical and practical strategies –which they call “border poetics” from examining the function of forms of representation in the intersection between territorial borders and aesthetic works. 11

their informants are ‘anchored’ to specific places and identities. There are various reactions to this dilemma. For example, Gregory Feldman goes beyond the traditional anthropological focus on local ethnography – which implies a privileging of evidence obtained through direct sensory contact – and instead focuses on intangible social processes. Others have returned to the single field site. Andersson (2014) poses yet another option, he calls it the “extended field site” in which he brings various voices, settings, locales and geographies in one analytical conversation. I chose Melilla as single field site for several reasons. First, as my research was only fifteen weeks I did not want to lose the thick description and sense of ‘being there’ that are so cherished by anthropologists. Sticking to this single field sight allowed me to focus on one particular section of the Euro-African border and grasp the day-to-day workings of the border in this specific geographical setting. This proved a challenge as processes of securitization, bordering and migration- and refugee flows stretch from sub-Saharan countries to and beyond European borders and control posts. I don’t ignore the wider system and underlying mechanisms that underscore, influence, and are part of this embodied experience in this single site. Second, in a more practical sense, I don’t speak Arabic nor Tamasih Already in the early days of border studies, Cole & Wolf (1973) argued that those people who live their everyday lives generate the border as much as any formal legal or political entity does. I asked a wide variety of people to recall their experiences with the border, used my own field notes on border crossings, and asked people who have recently crossed the border to describe their experiences. I interviewed around ten Guardia Civil officers, five police officers, five journalists, a dozen migrants (both irregular and refugees) and many ‘regular’ citizens; I have also talked informally to many more, while developing close relationships with key informants whom I met on a regular basis while “hanging out”, walking around and discussing life in Melilla. I visited the Red Cross, three nongovernmental organizations working with migrants in the CETI5, and two outside. I went to Nador to visit a catholic church who does charity work in the mountains of Gurugu. I spoke with a high Guardia Civil commander, albeit under rather “controlled” conditions in the comandancia. Together with the many conversations with officers on duty it provided me a gradual grasp of the Guardia’s border work and their thinking on migration in Melilla. I spent a lot of time at the border crossings, especially the harbour area and the international border crossing Beni Enzar6, and I visited Moroccan border villages, a migrant camp in Mount Gurugu and the city of Nador on various occasions. I don’t necessarily include these in this research although these visits have provided me with some interesting contextual information. I was only permitted to be inside the CETI for a couple of weeks. However, I could speak with residents and staff members outside the centre. Especially regarding the latter, it turned out that they could speak more freely about their experiences. Most of the time we spoke in Spanish. Talking with people from Syria proved a challenge, as most of them could not speak English and I could not speak Arabic. With many sub-Saharan people I would speak a mix of English, French and Spanish. I was not allowed to take formal interviews with, make pictures of nor record conversations with Guardia Civil officers. Instead, by staying around long enough –at times balancing between being accepted and triggering annoyance- allowed me to partake in daily routines, conversations and frustrations. Moreover, due to the smallness of the enclave I encountered many of my informants outside ‘office hours’ which led to some interesting encounters (as argued above, staff members from

5 Centro de Estancia Temporal de Inmigrantes (temporary reception centre for immigrants) 6 This is the biggest border post between Melilla and Melilla, where hundreds of people of both Spanish and Moroccan nationality cross on a daily basis. This is also the only border crossing where I was allowed to exit and enter Morocco as the two other posts – Farchana and Barrio Chino – are only meant for regional residents 12

the CETI for example would speak more freely). However, I refer to all people anonymously to safeguard their privacy and safety. The main research population concerns men, simply because they occupy most of the spaces I was interested in: the border area, the CETI, the harbour. All the street children are boys, 90% of the CETI consists of men (although now an increasing amount of Syrian and Palestinian families), the majority of the Guardia Civil and national police are men. Hanging around with men had some advantages research-wise. As a female researcher it proved easier to access certain settings and I was generally considered less ‘threatening’ which enabled me to ask specific questions (for example, many Guardia’s would brag about their work, especially the ‘tough’ parts, but were also willing to share with me their personal feelings). Other times it felt uncomfortable, as if I was some kind of intruder, messing with the controlled culture. Why should I bother walk around spaces where I would be the only woman or where I knew that being seen with certain people (an Algerian minor; a Cameroonian man or a Moroccan man) would trigger oblique faces. Being seen with particular informants became a challenge and on numerous occasions I was asked (most of the time out of curiosity, but sometimes in a more hostile manner) to explain what I was doing with a particular person or what I was talking with him/her about. I learnt that I should take into account any influence my particular presence might create in the field. Furthermore, at times I was given the impression that open-heartedness should be rewarded with particular ‘favors’, even though we had a clear understanding before. There was a fine line between amicable behavior (hugging for a greeting, going for a beer or dubbing each other guapo/a (handsome)) and making an advance. Whistling and clamoring insulting things at women on the street was something many encountered daily and it started to annoy me with the day. During my interview at the Guardia Civil commandancia the highest commander glanced at me before he turned to the officer next to me and said “how nice right? Such a beautiful, young girl doing her research here”. It was an offensive comment of the kind that one cannot do so much about. I was struggling with being invisible, thorough, curious, female and a researcher at the same time.

The role of the anthropologist The first anthropological book I ever read was Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco, by Paul Rabinow (1977). In his book he reflects on his experiences as a doctorate student and expressed the pressure he felt to subordinate his own ethical standing and simply record the events that he observed. Although the distant, observing anthropologist-position has been challenged by many critical researchers such as Paul Farmer (1992) and Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1992), the degrees to which a researcher should involve oneself still triggers different approaches. How to balance objectivity as a researcher, accountability towards the society in which one conducts field work and engage informants in the construction of one’s ethnography? Can we fit in with people’s own socio-cultural understanding, a key strength of the anthropologist, while involving oneself in forms of local activism? I tried to adopt an anthropological distance, but I was forced to question my position as an ‘observing’ anthropologist under particular circumstances, such as when the police showed up at our house accusing me and my room mates of illegally refuging undocumented children. Or when I saw the Guardia Civil indiscriminately beat up somebody at the border crossing while later joking about it to me. Obviously, every researcher is subjective in his/her research observations, but as Burr nicely writes: “at what point, if any, should we be able to meddle in, and ultimately alter, the research environment in which we find ourselves?” (2002). Merely seeing, beholding, and analysing border

practices and cultural differences was quite a naïve thought I had beforehand. Doing in-depth research, embedding oneself in the local culture(s), being part of daily life and to a certain level own the circumstances, meant that I started to live (in) it myself. Is it sufficient to address concerns about my ethical role as a researcher or challenge the practices of the people I have studied if I merely bring these concerns back to my home country and write about them behind the safety of my desk? It seems contradictory and dishonest to gather information among people who have openly shared aspects of their lives, while at the same time –or afterwards- concealing concern about certain cultural practices. In fact, it was the case that the everyday reality of border practices hit me hard at times and it proved difficult to set aside my personal opinion and emotions. Legal and illegal became very tangible concepts. I wanted to stay in the grey zone, be a ‘fly on the wall’, but everything around me was black and white. Furthermore, interviews with, and participant observation among, migrants also went some way towards addressing the sense of unease I felt about being the privileged westerner, celebrating my ability to explore the world, crossing borders that are impossible to enter or exit by many, in the meantime observing people from a different culture to my own. The unease I felt sometimes towards the bordering regime was perhaps – at least partly – a reflection of my personal feeling of guilt. In the end though, I incorporated some of my personal feelings regarding the practices in the field in order to differentiate between the events as observed by me and the lens through which I observed them. I tried to discuss everything as much as possible with the persons concerned and occasionally put me being a particular cultural product under the microscope. Being open, non-judgemental and asking a lot of questions not only helped to interpret my data, but also to safeguard the relationships I had with people. In the end though, I met a lot of people who, despite holding conflicting ideas, turned out to be very valuable. Furthermore, as my aim was to study a realm of multiple stories and experiences, my interpretation and final results are also –using Massey’s words again- a distinct simultaneity, a snapshot from a particular point in time and space.

Note on “illegality” categorizations Although there is “more to Melilla than migrants” – as one local resident said to me one day – I did not move away from those that are subject to circulation and categorisation as they are prominent actors in the border system they find themselves in. Everything is built around migrant movements: the very reason the fence is built the way it is; the amount of circulating Guardia Civil officers guarding the fence; the officially sanctioned crossings of the porteadores7; the Syrian refugees caught in the system of ‘illegal’ border crossings ; the stigmatization and double-exclusion of the menores ; the imagery of the border spectacle by media and academics. This is the reason why, despite the fact that this is an ethnography of the border space, migrants do have a prominent place in this research. Important to note is that I wish not to define this research in law or practice categories of identity to be used to classify and sort individuals. I want to prevent what Alejandro Portes wrote almost 40 years ago: “irregular migration is one of those issues in which the interests of scholars and of government agencies converge”. I was following the footsteps of many researchers, journalists and politicians interested in the happenings of Europe’s southern borders and those knocking on its doors. I had access to a huge amount of predefined categories, identity categorizations, labels, stereotypes and I had to be aware to keep stay critical. I caught myself for having both a romantic and dramatic picture of the Euro-African border and the migrant approaching it. I was fascinated by the question “how does

7 Moroccan women from surrounding areas who cross the border daily to carry packages of goods back into Morocco 14

one become illegal”, seeing illegality as a transformative process of making and becoming. I soon discovered – despite being cautioned by Andersson’s book who held a similar feeling of “helpless romantic fascination” (2014:11) – that this figure of the migrant contained various moral, ethical and analytical drawbacks. As Nicholas De Genova argues, studying undocumented migrants, taking their experience as an object of study, in an isolated fashion is a form of “epistemic violence”. With this he means how ‘illegality’ may only become relevant in certain contexts, when “legal reality is superimposed on daily life”(Corcoran 1993:144). It is like reducing a wide array of people to an ethnographic gaze beholden to a state-centric vision (Andersson, 2014:12). By making them an epistemological and ethnographic "object", I, as a social scientist, become an agent in an aspect of the everyday production of "illegality" myself. As an effect, I accomplice to the discursive power of immigration law and the taken-for-grantedness that bedevils much of scholarship regarding migration (De Genova, 2002:432). In the worst, he argues, scholars naturalize the category of “illegality” and treat is as a transparent and self-evident fact which makes the explanatory power of one’s work “dulled”, and its critical potential “inhibited” (ibid.). Similarly, within refugee studies, Michel Agier argues that “studying these in their role as refugees would mean confusing the object of research with that of the intervener who creates this space and this category – that is, the humanitarian government that runs the camps and manages the lives of their inhabitants”. Being aware of this and also losing the bijvoeglijke naamwoorden altogether in my own writing, I chose to stick to the term migrant. This allows me to point to the embodied experience of traveling (in this case through the borderlands), instead of being a negative legal inscription that is often included in adjectives like undocumented (sin papeles), illegal, clandestine and irregular. . In this regard I follow Andersson (2014) and Willen (2007) in that an ethnographic use of illegality can have material and symbolic consequences and impacts migrants' own experience of everyday life. Within this thesis I will clearly state when it carries a certain claim or reference towards the institutions that declare them so. The migrant's own articulations of notions and their embodied experience of being on the road may offer an analytical tool to overcome some of the pitfalls of other concepts Furthermore, certain categories (whether scientific or political) are not just discursive constructs but rather “create new ways to be a person” (ibid:16). The targeted travellers participate actively in their making as migrants. As will be shown, the “illegal migrant” is not merely a categorisation conveniently labelled by politics, it also becomes an ascribed, negotiated, lived-in identity in the (borderland of) Melilla. “On the road, the traveller comes to inhabit the category of migrant illegality, incorporating such contradictory traits into his bodily self” (Andersson,2014:8). While being on the road, the migrant evades border checks, disguises himself through false documentation and secretive behavior. Some call themselves “adventurers”, as will be described in chapter 3, taking pride in their skills of travels; others protest loudly against their immobilization and incarceration as protest against the distressing lens of homo sacer that many commentators of the border regime use; yet others actively use their categorization to seek funds. In other words, people negotiate their identity and status vis a vis their surroundings. Furthermore, I soon found out that other actors that were not necessarily labelled as “illegal migrants” got caught in Melilla’s bordering practices: menores (minors) from Morocco and Algeria, and the Syrian refugees use similar clandestine routes of sub- Saharan migrants. I soon realized I had to make a distinction between the subjects, discourses and the context by moving away from the “illegal immigrant” as the central actor, target or victim. However, to avoid confusion, I make a distinction between migrants (travellers from sub-Saharan countries that migrate via land and sea towards European space), asylum seekers (those that are fleeing war and seek refuge in European space) and the menores (youngsters from Algeria and Morocco that are trying to

make their way into Europe before they turn 18). These are not clear-cut and exhaustive, but rather subcategories of migrants. Furthermore, as Hastings Donnan has argued, while many border studies have focussed on migration and minorities, one must not ignore the majorities, for whom the border was not something to be challenged or transgressed, but instead something to be defended and shored up against any possible fragmentation or possibility of disappearance (Donnan, 2005). So, the key social, economic and political aspects that keep borders in place, are important elements to look at.

The quest for traces and ‘elephant paths’ On my first day in Melilla I walked to the light house in Ciudad Vieja. While I was observing its steep edges and the sea water roughly pounding the weather-beaten walls, I noticed a small path-like mark on the slope, right under the tower. I looked closer and wondered how it got there since the rough surface and especially its steepness seem to make it impossible to come even close. A small misstep would definitely lead to immediate death. The thought alone gave me an uneasy feeling. I walked to the fence right above the strange imprint and saw a graffiti text on the wall: Osama Libertad. The strange imprint, the fence and the graffiti text were one of my first traces I followed when I set foot on the enclave. In my notebook I wrote the following words: ‘Elephant path’? An elephant path is a name for a path that is formed in space by people making their own paths and shortcuts. It is an unofficial route, perhaps an anarchist way of moving in a city, a town or a village. It is an alternative system of going from a place to a place in a space regardless of the city plan. Still, it is connected to the streets and the architectural forms. A large part of my fieldwork consisted of looking for traces and following ‘elephant paths’ – little fragments of the whole entity, things that have long gone but still have their imprint in space. Porous and temporary, leaving room for doubt and speculation and prone to change over time, these traces turned out to be valuable, and at the same time insecure information sources. Thinking in elephant paths is in fact understanding the story behind the official story; an agentic perspective without losing the grand narrative and discourses out of sight. For example, how the line between the visible and the invisible is so easily taken as expressing political relevance; strips of plastic bags and pieces of fabric clinging on to the barbed wire fence were mistakenly taken for the traces of past border-crossing attempts. Seeing the myriad of ways of ‘illegally’ entering into the enclave, either in the spectacular manner that was portrayed by media and politics or through silent back entries. After two weeks the graffiti I saw at the light house was cleaned. A new fence was installed on the spot. The former menores route to the harbour has now formed a semi-legal adventurous path, proscribed but tolerated, as it is now used by other Melillan kids in order to reach the prohibited rocky beaches.

Structure of the thesis The first chapter will provide the theoretical framework. I was searching for ways to study both the visible – or ‘real’ – and more conceptual visualizations of borders. I derived certain themes and methods from various studies as ways of analyzing the various dimensions of the Euro-African border in Melilla. Especially salient were themes of relation (intra-action), securitization and the body. The theoretical concept of embodiment as methodological orientation - how reality is lived, felt, made – will be used to explore how these features materialize on the ground and are made and felt at the border area. Further, I will go into the very meaning of the concept of borders and bordering as found in literature and that will guide my research. Chapter 2 will explain how Melilla’s ‘borderness’ consists in: the arrival of irregular migrants and the changing landscape of border fortification measures. I will provide a short historical overview as well as some features of Europe’s migration response and

(re)bordering practices as this is part of the ‘making’ of the border space. It is important to deal with these developments as the transnational reach of securitization and refugee crisis is highly localized in Melilla. There is a certain social complexity of the border and some historical issues that are intrinsic to this, because as we will see throughout this thesis, the enclave has its disputed sovereignty. This proves the basis for analyzing the border spectacle unfolding at Melilla’s border which will be explained in the empirical chapters 3 and 4, analyzing the narratives prevailing in- and outside this spectacle that serve to govern and manage human mobility. Chapter 5 will serve to analyze the phenomena the spectacle produces within Melilla. Furthermore, the last two chapters will provide alternative ways of bordering and differing narratives of what constitutes “the” border.

Chapter 2 - Theoretical Framework

In this chapter the theoretical concepts will be discussed that I will use to analyse the data collected in Melilla. Two main theoretical genres are guiding in this thesis: border studies and embodiment. First, I will explore how various border scholars have looked at borders and boundaries in relation to migration. The field of border studies has opened up possibilities for questioning the rationales behind everyday border-making by understanding borders as socio-political processes. Two aspects will be dealt with. First, the evolving reconfiguration of state borders in terms of territorial control, security and sovereignty and second, the nexus between everyday life-worlds (the informal/social) and the (formal) power relations processes of border-making. Then, in order to bring these various actors and phenomena related to bordering in one analytical frame and explore its mutual process of shaping, I will use the lens of the enactive approach and its phenomenological background. I will follow the notion of actants. This provides a useful theoretical understanding for analyzing intra-actions among and between materialities, spaces, borders and bodies. By putting everything together in one analytical frame, it enables me to explore how these intra-actions and encounters give meaning and functions to bordering of the borderland, and inquire into the production of new social configurations through the encounters. Embodiment The process of embodiment is a development of a concept in the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty (1964/2006). Drawing on phenomenological insights, it attempts to bring body and mind together8, a way of being-in-the-world, or existence, as the body is “intervolved” in its environment. He proposed starting neither from the reality of objects – following realists – nor from the primacy of ideas – as the idealists do – but from embodiment. Phenomena are re-centred on the body, making the body point of departure of studying things. The concept of embodiment thus underscores the importance of the body as a physical and biological entity, as lived experience, and a center of agency, “a location for speaking and acting on the world” (Low, 2003:10). Embodiment then can provide the everyday grounding and a more 'emotional' understanding of the intersection and interpretation of body and space. The location where human experience takes on material and spatial form is referred by Low as 'embodied space' (ibid.,1996,2000). Following Massey (2005) the idea that space is something lively and embodied leaves the possibility open for multiple stories and experiences. There has been an increasing interest in theories about the body as an integral part of spatial analysis. The theoretical notion of embodiment – the bodily aspects of human beings and subjectivity - proves useful in understanding the differing meanings and practices of bordering, since these are human made. Park Lala & Kinsella (2011) point to how attending embodiment in research can illuminate embodied dimensions in participants’ responses and can offer a more in-depth perspective on their lived experience. According to Leder (1990), becoming conscious of the body and, at times, feeling disembodied is an important dimension of embodiment. Taking seriously the notion that the body is a path of access to the world, a mode of perception, can contribute to increasingly rich understandings of human perception. A second dimension of an embodied perspective is how the body may be seen as entailing a “skillful, embodied intelligence”. This bodily intelligence point to a “felt” knowledge that exists even

8 moved away from the realist-idealist mind-body problem (the dismantling of the person into subject and object) 18

before symbolization and language. Merleau-Ponty has given three interrelated concepts that contribute to understanding the bodily intelligence (1945/2006). First, bodily schema which refers to its ability to know and engage the world, and to retain and develop skills over time. Second, meilleure prise, which can be understood as the maximal grip on the world meaning that the body prefers to be in an optimal bodily state. Third, motor intentionality involves the body tacitly adjusting to maintain a best grip on the world. This means attending to a emotions of rightness and wrongness through tacit, directed and self-adjusting skill seek a state of bodily equilibrium. Taken together, these three concepts help us to better understand how we live through skillful and knowing bodies without actively thinking about how we do it (Lala & Kinsella, 2011:80). Such an embodied interpretation proves to be a challenge in research, as it is focuses on what words cannot say but rather on the junction and meanings that emerge between words and bodily felt sense. Important to take into account that whatever is being said can never reflect the entirety of a phenomenon, but an embodied perspective can contribute to deeper embodied interpretations of what is occurring (ibid.). A third dimension proposed by Lala & Kinsella is intercorporeality, highlighting the space between individuals, and the experience of being with the other. These interactions with others – our lived relations – are an important dimension of how we experience our everyday lives (van Manen, 1997). Barad (2003) approaches the interrelations between humans as 'actants'. In addition to analyzing the border and the lived experience of various actors in the field as embodied space, the notion can deepen the understanding of the relational aspects of this embodiment. Furthermore, this notion might be useful in exploring the material context of the border meaning that the non-human aspects of bordering should not be considered as 'passive background' phenomena but rather as in 'active interplay with human actors' (Dijstelbloem & Broeders, 2015:26). From this vantage point, fences, radars, cameras, control posts as well as border actors, discourses and media messages can be seen as 'actants' in a network made up of human and nonhuman links. It is not only about who participates and where, but also what and how these intra-actions develop in co-contiguous ways.

The notion of embodiment and intra-action lends themselves quite well for studying bordering: how people are engaged in bordering practices; the intra-actions between materialities and bodies; the influence of ‘external’ factors and discourses. Embodiment illuminates the role of the body as a medium for lived meanings, and through which I might better understand the border realities at hand.

Border studies : studying bordering Borders have been a key category for social scientists since the 19th century when modern state- and nation-building processes began to intensify. The sociologist Georg Simmel argued more than a century ago how the border is not a “spatial fact with sociological effects, but a sociological fact that forms itself spatially9” (1908:467). The understanding that borders are themselves understood as dynamic functional processes has been adopted widely ever since. Theories of the social construction of space have contributed to a transformation of analytical approaches, emphasizing that borders are something contrived by society and “always in the making” (Popescu, 2012:21). The manners through which borders mark difference have been studies from a range of different angles. As part of this constructivist turn, the notion of bordering or borderization have emerged as understanding borders

9 Freely translated from original: “Die Grenze ist nicht eine raumliche Tatsache mit soziologischen Wirkungen, sondern eine soziologische Tatsache, die sich raumlich formt” 19

as something that is continually being made and molded through daily interactions and discourses (Kolossov & Scott, 2013; Cuttitta, 2013), or a “social practice of spatial differentiation” (Megoran, 2012:488). Van Houtum similarly argues that “all political borders are human-made products” (2005:675). One of the central aspects of such a bordering perspective – and simultaneously posing some paradoxical issues - is the question of state territoriality, its constitution and its contestation (Kolossov & Scott, 2013). Modern nation-states are still understood as the highest form of social organization and as main foundations of political, cultural and social identity10. “Through borders, difference acquires a territorial expression” (Popescu, 2012:8). In other words, bordering is a power practice that determines membership in society, a matter of who belongs where, of insiders and outsiders. “Bordering space becomes a matter of ordering space” (van Houtum & van Naerssen, 2002).

While the walls of Cold War Europe were crumbling down and ideas of post-nationalism, neoliberalism, globalization and a ‘borderless’ world appeared on the agenda, there has been an increased emphasis on the ‘border’ resulting in a frenzied building of new walls. “Not everything has become liquid, fluid and de-territorialized. Empowering practices themselves - both materially and mentally - have not lost their territorial ordering and bordering functions” (van Houtum, Kramsch & Zierhofer,2005). Wendy Brown argues how nation-states all over the world “exhibit a passion for wall building”, one that features both universalization as well as exclusion and stratification (2010:20). The vast land borders between the US and Mexico proves to be an iconic example of fortifying and protecting nation-state territoriality. Post-apartheid in South Africa now features an internal maze of walls and checkpoints, including electrified security borders at the Zimbabwean border. At the Indian border, barriers have been built to wall out Pakistan, Bangladesh and Burma (and to wall in disputed Kashmir territory). All with differing stakes, struggles and bordering practices but with the similar rationale of safeguarding ones sovereignty. The fences appear – in the words of Brown - as “monuments to the waning viability of sovereign nation-states” (2010:34). As Europe’s current “migration crisis” exemplifies, increased efforts to manage human mobility has complicated struggles over territoriality and intensified crises of state sovereignty.

Acknowledging territories and national sovereignty important in conceptualizing borders and their significance, territorial borders have underwent significant transformations regarding their shape, the places where they are manifested and their operational modalities (see box 1 for some key developments). Balibar (1998) suggests that state borders now take many different forms and have become so diffuse that whole countries can now be borderlands. Instead of having borders, they are borders. This understanding of border making proves especially interesting in the field of migration controls. Sovereignty has been severely compromised by growing transnational flows of ideas, capital, goods, people and political and religious fealty. These flows knock on the borders, transgress them and “crystallize as powers within them” (Brown, 2010:23). Another way to theorize borders then is to theorize them as biopolitical tools to govern mobilities in the “war on terror”. Securitization theories prove useful in analysing the processes that turn specific places into borders, increasing their degree of ‘borderness’.

10 Territorial borders are not the most important of borders. Religious-, gender-, class- boundaries for example transcend the simplistic inside/outside divide and affect people’s lives in manners that go beyond territoriality. The state border then, in relation to these other borders, is part of understanding the central role that all borders play in the spatial organization of modern societies. 20

Box 1: Border transformations in light of securitization

Dijstelbloem & Broeders (2015) have identified several consequential border transformations and its practical consequences. First, the border is found in various locations, both virtual and tangible, at the edge of nation states and abroad. Border control contains a variety of procedures and practices which are incorporated in the bureaucratic systems of members states. Second, border control is carried out not only by governments but also by other actors. There may be cooperation’s with private industries that provide technological solutions like the defense contractors in charge of the fences. The ‘deterritorialization’ and ‘reterritorialization’ of the border, the shift in border controls to governance structures including cooperation with private companies, and the increasing emphasis on risks and information management, detach border control from physical and bureaucratic structures managed by public authorities to more virtual structures operated by private firms. Furthermore, other partners in the border control chain include border guards and military forces with boosted status and resources and the ‘non-profit’ sector which, along with international organizations, often collaborate with the security forces. Furthermore, externalization of the migrant question has led to a gain for countries like Morocco and Libya who use Europe’s anxiety. Border control is both in professional, public and private hands. Third, border enforcement practices are increasingly targeted on the body. The new borders of Europe are now almost fully biometric as well as digital. Remembering Simmel’s statement that ‘people are boundaries’, scholars have again noted how people become borders (Balibar, 1998) or, in other words, how human bodies are key sites of borders in the current, biometrically managed world (Amoore, 2006). If borders are about achieving power through the ordering of difference in space, then the dispersion of border-making strategies to the smallest and most personal of spaces – the body – appears natural. In this logic, bodies are imagined as spaces to inscribe borders on. They become “border bodyscapes” (Popescu, 103). Embodied borders present obvious advantages as it is the “promise of unmitigated power over the movements of the human beings” (ibid.). They are highly mobile and utterly individual, allowing constant and accurate movements control on the smallest spatial scale. The body makes the ideal border, as it is always at hand, ready to be performed whenever circumstances require. The body is the subject of bordering practices and their bordering agent. The border has been embedded in the body (Sassen, 2008). Identity plays a key role in the process of embodying borders. The underlying assumption is that a person’s identity makes a good risk predictor (Popescu:104). Therefore, the identity of the individual provides the basis for identifying the risk it poses to society. All that remains to be done to secure space and society is to find an efficient way to check people’s identities at all times when they move through borders. To solve this problem, European policymakers have increasingly put their faith in monitoring technology.

The securitized border As argued above, the blurring of the inside-outside territorial distinction characteristic of modern states has not led to the disappearance of border-based power practices. Moreover, borders lend themselves symbolically and physically for exploitation of fear, exclusion and negative cultural stereotypes. In understanding border making in the field of migration controls, securitization studies show how migration can be turned into a security issue, dramatically increasing the degree of bordering. In thinking about security, the Copenhagen School – and in particular the work of Barry Buzan, Jaap de Wilde and Ole Waever (1998) – have developed a body of concepts in order to rethink and broaden the concept of security, and in particular to analyze how a certain issue becomes (de)securitized. Meaning that a certain removal from the political process to the security agenda. In this framework, the School identifies five general categories of security: military, environmental, societal, economic and political security. Each of these categories are determined by securitizing actors “who securitize issues by declaring something, a referent object as existentially threatened” (ibid:36). Referent objects are “things that are seen to be existentially threatened and that have a

legitimate claim to survival” (ibid.). Especially in the European context, the policy of exclusion and securitization emphasizes border- and mobility management and has submitted state boundaries within Europe to general policing and security policies. Border-making discourses play active parts in the production of societal and human security risks, for it is at the crossing of border that someone or something can become a security risk. Othering continues to take center stage in these discourses, with the warning that the Other has shifted from the neighboring nation to mobile phenomena. The framing of migration as a risk to both human life and to border security lead to some concerning developments. De Genova argues that in the current state “official prohibitions, officious policing and sanctimonious acclamations of the state’s sovereign privilege to exclude - everything is possible”. Less subjective but with similar connotations, Giorgio Agamben’s state of exception is a relevant paradigm for understanding recent developments in European migration policies. He claims that today Europe’s (but also other Western countries like the US and Australia) political model is more the camp than the city-state, and that people, particularly “illegal migrants” are increasingly subject to extrajudicial state violence, preferably in extraterritorial spaces (Goldschmidt, 2016). Anxiety over 'national security' justifies the formalisation of the camp: 'The importance of this constitutive nexus between the state of exception and the concentration camp cannot be overestimated.... The camp is the space which is opened when the state of exception becomes the rule. In the camp, the state of exception is now given a permanent spatial arrangement, which as such nevertheless remains outside the normal order' (1997:108). As a result, the border spectacle is embedded in the very foundation of such a state of exception. In this state of exception human bodies are displayed naked of their political rights. The image illustrates a depoliticised body, explicitly represented in the notion of citizenship, a homo sacer, or ‘naked life’ (Agamben, 1998). The camp's inhabitants are those deemed to have no claim on the nation but, paradoxically, are brought even more firmly under its control by virtue of their exclusion from its laws.

In the words of Khasravi we live in an era of “world apartheid”, constantly the subject of racial profiling at the border, pressured to live up to ones passport. (2007:331). While for some the border is a ‘surplus of rights’, for others it is a ‘colour bar’ (Balibar 2002: 78–84). Violation of the border regime becomes a violation of ethical and aesthetical norms. In other words, an ‘illegal’ border crossing challenges the sacred feature of the border rituals and symbols. It is seen as a criminal act deserving punishment.

Conclusion This chapter has shown how the securitization of migration has led to a renewed emphasis on bordering, leading to all kinds of digital, material and discursive bordering practices. As a result, the focus on borders and borderlands as lived spaces and the implications of bordering on local populations have emerged as an important area of border studies research. While not ignoring formal state boundaries in that they are key in the discussion of territory, identity and Europe, it are rather the various representations of the border that are at issue. The above described insights and focus points in border studies enable me to point out the material, geopolitical and technological as well as symbolic and embodied dimensions of bordering practices that occur at the Melilla-Moroccan border and how these influence the perception of the border. This understanding proves even more interesting in the light of the emerging Mediterranean border where migration has speed up the process of border-making at Europe’s southern frontier. In order to understand these processes of border-making I will use a embodiment approach. These include the ways people experience bordering

through the body; the bodily and mental effects of control; how the body is used as a resource; and what the relations are between body and discourse. In the end, the border comes about as a product of the grand narratives of border formation and the minor narratives of day-to-day bordering practices.

Chapter 1 : Rise of the Valla11

The border between Melilla and Morocco has been part of life in the region since a very long time and has developed significantly. It has a big symbolic character as it is built on an amalgamation of clashes and alliances: those between Europe and Africa; Christianity and Islam; EU and non-EU territory; prosperous North and impoverished South; former colonizer and formerly colonized (Ferrer-Gallardo, 2008). In this chapter I will give a historical contextualization of the construction of the border. It provides the context of transformation in which the fence has emerged in the last two decades as a protection against new transnational ‘threats’. Taking the general EU-African border as the point of departure, I will gradually move towards the scenarios constructed around Melilla. It will become clear that the militarization of Melilla has continued throughout the century, influencing the cultural make- up and bordering practices along the way. I will trace this process beginning with the Treaty of Lisbon, followed by the importance and effects of rebordering aspects since Spain joined the European Union in 1986. Melilla’s militarization will be placed within the larger picture of the recent securitization of Europe’s borders. As will be shown, Frontex’ thought-work on the concept of risk plays a key role in this. It is to this background that current bordering and the degree of borderness unfolds. The walling out of unwanted outsiders The six hour trip was as if travelling on a ghost ship. While having a capacity for about 1000 people, the huge Transmediteranea was carrying the weight of maybe forty passengers. The average tourist would likely not set foot on this ship, but rather stay at the sunny beaches of the costa del sol or travel to the touristic islands of Mallorca, Ibiza or the Canaries. Instead, there were a few Muslim families with full packed Primark and Ikea bags, the rest consisted North-African looking men travelling alone. It gave me time to adjust to the huge contrast between tourist-blown Málaga and the small, dark city in front of me. Approaching the African continent by boat has its advantage: unlike travelling by plane it allows one to experience time-space more gradually, giving the mind the opportunity to adjust to the change of scenery. At about midnight, the ship enters the illuminated harbor of Melilla. I imagined how this first experience of seeing the outer edges of the city would be like. And there it is: a light cord draped around the city, in the West climbing the hills of Melilla and the foot of Mount Gurugu, its luminous fences against the dark sky. We sail past the northern fence, which abruptly ends in de sea, small waves bumping against the invisible border. As we wait to disembark, I try to listen to the conversations around me. Despite my moderate Spanish speaking skills, I cannot understand a thing of the mixture between Tamazight, Darija (both Moroccan Berber, I hear later), French dialect and some Spanish expressions. The boat trip has made me unsteady, and with a shaky pace I walk down the entrance hall into the dark night. My passport stays untouched in my bag. After ten minutes the parking lot is empty and I glance at the renovated old city walls of Ciudad Vieja. Once I get off the harbor area, I am welcomed by somebody I did not expect, standing in front of the large walls. Next to the sign “Welcome to Melilla”, accompanied by both the European and Spanish flag, stands Francisco Franco Bahamonde – in the traditional Spanish Legion uniform from the time before his controversial dictatorship. His binoculars ready, his glance sharp, as if guarding Ciuad Vieja as he did when he heroically defended the city against the Rif tribes. And so it begins12.

11 I have chosen to use the term valla, as this Spanish word for fence is used by both migrants, residents, Syrians 12 Personal note, 01-06-2015 24

The statue of Franco, the renovated old city walls at the harbor, and the cultural and lingual mixture grasp Melilla’s history in a – somewhat simplistic – nutshell. The leftovers of Melilla’s past continue in current relations between local populations and in the statue of Franco. Melilla today has become a place where the past visibly presses on the city: a mixture of pride, nostalgia and controversy.

The border between Spain and Morocco is essentially a maritime border. It is comprised by the waters of the Strait of Gibraltar, which separate the Iberian Peninsula from the African continent and it consists of the fragment of Moroccan Atlantic coast that lies opposite to the Canary Islands (Ferrer- Gallardo, 2008). Apart from Ceuta (19.4 km2), Melilla (13.4 km2) and the Canary Islands (7,446.6 km2) there are several other islands that complement the contested geography of the Spanish-Moroccan border13. Essentially, Ceuta and Melilla are found on Moroccan territory since the end of the Reconquista14. Ceuta fell in Portuguese hands in 1415 (it became Spanish in 1668), whereas Melilla was conquered by Castile in 1496. The territories developed into dynamic trading posts – they acquired free-port status in 1863 - and later into bases for colonial garrison posts (presidios) during Spanish colonization of northern Morocco (1912-1956). This permeability led to the establishment of an indigenous-Spanish force in 1911: the Regulares Indigenas, consisting of both Moroccan soldiers and Spanish officers. The Rif war was fought in the early 1920s. Within the medieval city walls, the Spaniards organized attacks on Riffian Berbers, the original inhabitants of the region, who in turn attacked and besieged the enclaves. During the Battle of Annual about 20.000 Spanish soldiers died but as time went on collaboration with and belief in the Regulares was starting to increase. Spanish officers were supposed to learn Berber and started wearing the Jibalah and the Tarbuch. Fransisco Franco used Melilla as one of his staging grounds for his attempt at a coup d’état in 1936, starting the Spanish Civil War. Together with the assistance of the Spanish Legion and Regulares and the military and technical assistance of Hitler and Mussolini Franco could win the war and safeguard its dictatorial power until his death in 1975. Interestingly, the last remaining statue of dictator Franco is found in Melilla, right beneath the old city walls of Melilla. His figure, dressed in his army clothes reflecting his pre-dictatorship, is something the Melillans are proud of. “It is dedicated to Franco as commander, not as a leader”, is what the museum guide tells me. The military museum holds a detailed display of the heroic actions of Franco during the war in Northern Morocco; not a single picture or text refers to the imposition of military and political sieges he dogged during his dictatorship. A few years ago, critiques from the peninsula questioned the display of his violent past but were ignored as the local government of Melilla decided to keep the statue. During my first week in Melilla there was a small riot, especially among leftist politically engaged groups, after a group of the Guardia Civil posted a picture on twitter posing with the Spanish flag at the feet of Franco’s statue (see figure 3). It provoked amazement and critique (albeit mostly from the peninsula) not only questioned the gesture of the agents but again wondered what the incentive of the local authorities was in holding the statue of the dictator in such a public space.

13 Alborán Island (7.1 km2), Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera (2.2 km2), Peñón de Alhucemas (1.4 km2) and the Chaffarine Islands (Congreso 4.5 km2, Isabel II 2 km2, Rey Francisco 0.6 km2) 14 A period of about 800 year during the middle ages in which Christian empires succeeded in fending off the muslims (Mores) of the Iberic peninsula. 25

Figure 3: A recently arrived Guardia Civil group posing below Franco’s statue. Source: twitter, June 2015

After Morocco's independence in 1957 a part of the Regulares remained part of the Spanish army and to this date has a strong influence on the military character of the city. Many young Melillan Muslims serve in this unit. In 1985 the Muslim community living in Melilla - most of them used to work for the Spanish army - did not officially belong to any country which made them foreigners in their own land. After weeks of riots, they acquired Spanish citizenship which was recognized to approximately 30.000 Berbers. Ever since, the growth (by birth) of the Muslim population has been the catalyst for dynamic cultural interactions and the blooming of family ties between the local and Moroccan population across the border (Ferrer-Gallardo & Planet-Contreras, 2012). The cities’ boundaries have long delimited different linguistic, religious and national imaginaries, but now it has created a situation in which cross-border relational continuity expand, challenging the rigid symbolic marker which the traditional border has been representing until that time. The establishment of the Regulares and the relatively peaceful coexistence of both Christian and Muslim communities are cases in point. The Moroccan state however was, and still is, not content with this arrangement. Spain never considered Ceuta and Melilla to be colonial territories, but simply part of the wider Spanish territory, calling the perimeters “North-African territories under Spanish protection” (ibid.). Morocco however considers the enclaves as part of Moroccan territory, still to be decolonized. This disputed sovereignty proves to be an ongoing tension between the two states, not rarely used as negotiation leverage. Rise of the fences : three major turning points The first important shift that changed the border scenario is Spain’s accession to the European Union in 1986, and Schengen in 1991. From this time, the border between Spain and Morocco has set limits between the EU and non-EU territories and thus constitutes the external border of an emerging political spatiality (Ferrer-Gallardo, 2008). A second shift occurred in 1995, when the fortification of the enclave’s perimeters started. Before, the Melillan-Moroccan border was just a fence made of poles, nettings and some barbed wire. Just a little rupture in the landscape, where only a single step or small climb through the weed strewn hedge marked the EU-African boundary. Some people I spoke to recall their memories of being a child, collecting rocks and sticks and building tree-houses on both sides. Then, in 1995, the land perimeters of the two cities were fortified in order to halt the increasing

flows of immigration from sub-Saharan countries. The first fences were “easily cut open”, as a retired Guardia Civil officer told me, but as more migrants arrived the amount of galvanized mesh, sensors, cameras and lights increased, thanks to European funding. Paradoxically, with the fencing of the enclave’s perimeters the path towards Euro-Mediterranean commercial liberalization was paved, and hence a process of what Ferrer-Gallardo calls “economic debordering” followed (ibid.:305). This process had already started since Spain’s presence in norther Morocco and Melilla’s important position as trading post. As geographic proximity to Morocco, Melilla has an ideal position for introducing goods to Africa without paying the tariffs that the Moroccan government imposes. Asian, American and European products arrived in large containers and smuggling – unofficially allowed – lead to the introduction of cheap goods throughout Morocco and other African countries. Nearly everything is carried on foot, as the law states that anything that can be carried by hand across the border is classified as luggage and is therefore duty free. For years, thousands of Berbers and Arabs from throughout Morocco, have been gathering around the border in the city of Nador, to collect the crumbs of this feast. This small border town has become a big city surrounded by slums with people waiting to transform their lives through the new border arrangement. Some use the opportunity to sneak into Melilla and move further into European territory, hidden underneath a truck or the ferry to the peninsula. Others cross the border daily to sell cigarettes, cannabis or salted nuts. They constitute a large workforce, apparently "invisible" to the authorities of each side, but the interaction with its hinterlands makes Melilla highly dependent and important for economic stability in the region. This is reflected in the exemption of visa requirement to citizens of the neighboring Moroccan provinces Tetouan and Nador which fuel irregular cross-border trade15. This rather interesting and unique implementation of the Schengen rules enable that many job positions in the cities are filled in by Moroccan citizens from the region and proves to be an important economic pillar of Melilla. The fortification of the fences had, and still have, quite some impact on the population in the region. Being the first potential candidates to migrate to Spain (and beyond), North Africans – Moroccans in particular – have been mostly affected by restrictive border control policies as will be argued in chapter 5. As they were able to move freely across the border before, now they are obliged to enter at the official border posts where the waiting can take up to hours and borders such as Barrio Chino and Farchana are only open a few hours a day. Furthermore, while the illicit trade has become a lifeline of the enclave so it did for the bribe-extracting Moroccan officers and Moroccan mafias in the borderland.

The 2005 asaltos clearly marked a new stage in EU’s bordering practices at the fences of Ceuta and Melilla (see box 1). A hardening of the EU-African border occurred through a series of policy mandates and military operations and a third fence was installed. After the asaltos, Spain followed the European Union’s so-called global approach to migration and became a key actor in advancing, developing and implementing its own goals as well as feeding into and developing the EU’s overall border geography and securitization (Casas et al,2012:75)16. The cities became globally known icons of so-called "Fortress Europe", a paradigmatic example of how the EU tries to seal off its outer perimeter against irregular immigration (Ferrer-Gallardo & Planet-Contreras, 2012).

15 This exception was incorporated into the Protocol of Accessions of Spain to the Schengen Agreement in 1991 with the commitment to maintain tight documentary controls to those wanting to travel to the rest of Spanish territory 16 as well as other member states such as the case of Italy 27

Box 2 : 2005 asaltos

Ceuta & Melilla, October 2005. Almost every national newspaper in Spain headlined it: the asaltos (attack) of the sin-papeles (those without papers) at the gates of Ceuta and Melilla. Around 600 migrants tried to cross the border fences into the enclaves at about three o'clock in the morning. Armed with sticks, knotted rubber tires and makeshift ladders, the migrants stationed themselves at the gates where the fence was 3.5 meters high. Journalists called it asalto massivo (massive assault): news stations and papers showed the black migrants, many ‘violent’ or ‘desperate’, ‘attacking’ the fences. Both the Spanish and Moroccan security forces tried to stop the horde. Then, they started shooting onto the crowd, leaving fourteen dead. Hundreds were injured.

The border crisis came hours before the start in Seville VII High Level Meeting between Morocco and Spain, in which one of the key themes was the bilateral cooperation on illegal immigration. During the press moment after the meeting, the Prime Minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and Moroccan Prime Minister Driss Jettou announced the opening of a joint investigation into the events of Ceuta. It never became clear who was responsible for the shootings. The border was cleaned up and the controls were tightened: The Spanish Government decided to allocate three army companions to both Melilla and Ceuta to patrol the border perimeter. Meanwhile, Rabat strengthened the border area outside Ceuta with 1000 soldiers and Melilla with 600. Six companions of the Legionnaires and Regulares with 720 troops were mobilized in order to monitor the fences of the enclaves. The government further allocated three million euros to improve the borders of Ceuta and Melilla. The military would be armed with rifles, regulations and supported by BMR armored vehicles to be "highly visible" and have a “deterrent effect”. They received orders not to use their firearms and restricted to patrol the road between the double border fence in order to "prevent the jumps”. More preventative measures were done by its Moroccan counterparts: the encampments outside the enclaves, from which the attacks were organized, were razed and burned by Moroccan soldiers. Its inhabitants were detained and put on buses destined to the Sahara. The front line was quiet again, the media moved on.

Derived and adapted from http://elpais.com/diario/2005/09/30/espana/1128041201_850215.html; & http://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2005/09/29/sociedad/1127968660.html, Andersson (2014)

Legitimizing fortification practices The symbolic power of the ‘new’ border sharply transformed the border landscape in visual and functional terms. It was reconfigured into a regulator of flows, with differential filtering effects. On the one hand, the border was becoming more permeable to the flow of goods and capital, due to the logic of globalization and the prospective Euro-Mediterranean Free Trade Area (what has been called economic debordering before). On the other hand, in the context of ‘Fortress Europe’, the border now became less penetrable to the flow of some types of migration via the implementation of securitization measures such as the SIVE (System of Integrated External Surveillance) and Frontex (European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders). Frontex’ thought-work, its conceptualization and trickle-down effect of risk bespeaks Europe’s fixation with border control and has helped redraw the patchwork of borders in southern Europe. Identity of the individual provides the basis for identifying the risk it poses to society. All that remains to be done to secure space and society is to find an efficient way to check people’s identities at all times when they move through borders. Digital information technology has provided the vital medium for articulating the body- border-identity connection. The outcome has been the emergence of a vast array of sophisticated technologies – of which those in Melilla have its origins in military applications that are used to embed borders into bodies in order to detect them, identify them, and track their movements. At a border- crossing point, a person has to present the body together with the travel documents in order to be

identified. The person’s identity will be digitally read from his or her body and checked against the data stored in databases or on chips. If a match is found, this verifies their identify. The securitization of the border and the new governing of human mobility has also been characterized by both a policing- humanitarian nexus and the externalization of the migrant question (of which Frontex is the key initiator) which lend legitimacy and prove characteristic to Europe’s bordering processes. Externalization of the migration question Increasingly there came a demand towards non-EU countries to hold the task of border control and migration management. These collaborations in managing migration routes envisioned a new spatialization of border control, redesigning the institutions and practices of border management (Casas et al., 2012; European Commission, 2007b). Delocalized, often far from the European public, the EU is extending its geographic boundaries and relocates its immigration policy to the borderlands. Partnerships and cooperation’s between EU and non-EU countries were formed in a diverse spectrum of areas including interdiction, border control, readmission, diplomatic benefits, military equipment and development aid (Van Criekinge, 2008; Betts, 2006; ECCHR, 2015). This proved easier now that the EU had extended its external border onto the African continent. As In the case of Morocco, the country was asked to hold back irregular migrants and prevent their entry into European territories in return for financial aid. This request has been made explicit under foreign policy programs such as the European Neighbourhood Policy Instrument (ENPI, currently being reassigned following what the EU calls a “European migration crisis”) and the Mobility Partnership signed in 2013 with “combating illegal migration” as one of its objectives17. The agreement outlines further mobility benefits for Moroccan citizens, especially in the context of travel, work or education while at the same time encouraging “the return of Third Country Nations, in particular Sub-Saharan Africans.” In addition, the Spanish– Moroccan Readmission Agreement enables the return of individuals who entered irregularly. Europe continues to find new legitimations and actions to continue exportation of EU anti-migration policy to European borderlands and remain military present in the Mediterranean18. The boat crisis in 2006 in the Canaries is a case in point. After the asaltos of 2005 at the gates of Ceuta and Melilla (box 2), many migrants found themselves stuck in Morocco, surrounded by sea and sand. They were pushed to alternative routes, across the Strait and into the Canaries. As Andersson notes, “border controls perpetuate, thanks to their very success, the “problem” they are meant to combat” (2014:130). The huge amount of migrants that appeared on sea posed a new incentive for Spain to fortify its outer perimeters and scramble for EU funding, with success. Spain signed secretive border patrols and readmissions agreements with Mauritania, Cape Verde and Senegal (ibid:70). Further, the Spanish- Moroccan maritime border was sealed electronically by the SIVE19, which allowed the monitoring of illegal immigration towards the Iberian Peninsula and the Canary Islands. Parallel to this, Spain also had Frontex onboard patrolling the sea routes between West Africa and the Canary Islands and monitoring the area between Malta, Lampedusa, and the Libyan and Tunisian coast. For the first time, European and African states were patrolling the external EU borders together, drastically reducing irregular migrant arrivals in this part of the Mediterranean (ibid.). Spain-Morocco, but also Italy-Libya and Greece-Turkey, now became the frontlines in a common European endeavour.

17 In case of Morocco, in exchange for – among other things – “ensuring efficient and secure border management”, the ENPI has assigned 654 million euros to the country over three years, of which 40 million euros were earmarked for security (EMHRN, 2010:61). 18 This can be traced back to the 1999 Tampere Summit. During this summit the EU’s High Level Group on Asylum and Migration was created who emphasized the idea of transforming Morocco into a buffer zone to reduce migratory pressures at the EU’s southern border (Goldschmidt, 2006). 19 The integrated system for external surveillance. It received E.U. funding once it shifted focus from drug control to illegal migration 29

The fine line between care and control : legitimizing militarization through humanitarianism As more than thirty thousand migrants landed in the canaries in 2006 the situation became more chaotic. A proliferation of images started to emerge of (nearly-) dead boat migrants washing up or swimming on shore among European sunbathers. The islands were overrun with Red Cross volunteers, journalists, police and other actors willing to have a stake in this new migration tragedy. The emergence of the “humanitarian border” has been stressed by William Walters, who notes how on the Italian island of Lampedusa, migrant boats have been greeted since 2005 by a joined-up effort from the police, coast guards, the Red Cross, the IOM, and UNHCR. This uneasy alliance mixes reception and rejection, care and coercion, much as in Spain’s joint operations at sea. In her paper on border policing in Evros, Greece, Polly Pallister-Wilkins analyses the relations between humanitarian responses and border policing where “humanitarianism is used for framing and giving meaning to institutional and operational practices” (2015:53). She addresses a development that is also been cited by other writers and researchers (see Andersson, 2014; Ticktin, 2015). As Western states have increasingly shifted their attention from war fighting to crime fighting at the borders since the end of cold war, the division between civilian and military means in the fight against illegal migration have become increasingly mixed and blurry. Humanitarianism provides a legal justification for interception on the open seas and lends a preemptive rationale to the controversial policing of African territorial waters. It is to this background, the humanitarian-policing nexus legitimizes and lends efficacy to migration control operations in the Mediterranean and at the Spain-Moroccan border. In Spain, the military-status police force – the Guardia Civil – proved to be suited for this job. Without undermining their role as a dissuasive force, they endowed the border spectacle with an impressive collection of rescue images. Pictures, videos and performances of sea rescues by journalists, Red Cross workers and Guardia Civil boats have circulated widely. Important to note however, is that the “hand that cares” (Agier, 2011:5) becomes less apparent at the land borders of Ceuta and Melilla. In order to prevent from stepping into the fatal footsteps of Italy and Greece, where the “tough” and “humane” sides to the border spectacle are blurry and mixed up, the Spanish state tried to endow its land- and sea borders with distinct military and humanitarian logics. As a result, militarization took on a violent pretense at the fences of Melilla, modified by the enclave’s military past rather than by Red Cross humanitarianism. Again, the migration control operations proved effective: migrant arrivals in the canaries declined significantly. However, the success in halting irregular migration did not only reside in the smooth Frontex machinery but rather was to be found in the Sahel and the Sahara, where African forces had been subcontracted to carry out migration controls (Andersson, 2014:99). The Maghreb is pushed – through a powerful incentive structure - to become what Van Criekinge (2008) calls the “new gendarmes” of Europe. Mohamed Khachani writes how transit countries like Morocco are known as “subcontractors” to become "advanced sentinels", deployed to play the role of containment hub (2006:53). The migrants became part of a political game, as Morocco inconsistently influences unwanted migration into Europe by either restricting or stimulating migrants from breaching Europe’s borders20.

20 while also pressing the larger claim that in order to find a solution to the problem of illegal migration, the recovery of Morocco’s occupied territories is necessary 30

Concluding remarks : setting the stage for the border spectacle The fences of Melilla and Ceuta incongruously emerged in the past two decades as a protection against new transnational “threats”, the result of a securitization process that has taken hold of Europe. These developments can regard the current Melillan border as an ad hoc constructed border where images and discourses about the dangers lurking at its fences are spectacularized, providing a privileged stage for the border spectacle. As this chapter has dealt with the measures that have contributed to the bordering of Melilla, the narratives prevailing in and the effects of the ‘show of enforcement’ at the Melillan border will be topic of the next chapters. The spectacle, represented by migration control policies, systematically and purposefully disqualifies and converts migrants into “illegal” and deportable migrants.

Close-up: Mapping the enclave The renovated city walls arise when one approaches the enclave by sea. The harbor is like many Spanish provincial transit stations: a café serving coffee and tapas, some counters, a car rental and a souvenir shop. Businessmen walk by in dark suits and briefcases in their hands; people drink coffee or make phone calls. When one arrives by sea one gets welcomed by a big sign “welcome to Europe”, accompanied by Spanish and European flags. After walking passed a national police station and Franco’s statue one can either walk to the commercial center or to Ciudad Vieja, the old town, on the right. Here, on top of the walls, a lookout has been installed. As you can make a panoramic picture of the surroundings, a Guardia Civil officer follows your movement, visibly bored of the silence and eager for small talk. The practice of circulación is a perfect way to understand Melilla’s geography. It is practiced during sunset, when local youngsters in possession of four-wheel-drive ‘circulate’ around Melilla, the practice of pushing the gas, pulling down the window, playing raggeaton ,and drive for four times around the city: from the harbor area in the east, to the southern border roundabout and then up north to Los Pinos, a small forestry area, and then back to the city center. Leaving Ciudad Vieja to our right, we take off to the left. Before we follow the main road parallel to the eastern sea coast, we take a small detour into the city center. Next to Barcelona, this is the second city in Spain with most Art deco and Modernist buildings. The city center further resembles much of a southern Spanish city, numerous palm trees and tapas bars dot the streets. Melilla is celebrated for its multi-religious character, reflected in the main plaza called ‘plaza las cuatro culturas’ (plaza of four cultures). However, Muslims and Christians make up the majority of the city’s population (the former 45% and the latter just below 50%)21. The old city walls are recently renovated with European money, every few meters marked with a “una manera de hacer Europa”-sign (a way to make Europe) . Melilla’s military past is reflected in the many statues that mark the city, starting with generalísimo Franco at the harbour. Following the main road parallel to the sea coast one reaches the boulevard, a small stroke of sand for about two kilometers. The sea view does not provide the paradise-like shores of the costa del sol, but is rather a bay, the low standing troubled water enclosed by the harbor on the left and a pier with the Melillan fence on the right, to the background the port of Nador with huge steel devices. During summer the beaches of Alcazaba and Port Noraj are full packed. In the weekends the bar district plays salsa and reggaeton music, where soldiers and civil guards –some of them locals, most of them from the peninsula stationed here for a couple of months - hook up with local women. Alongside the boulevard small stalls with Moroccan sellers, Melilla’s “Soul Beach Café” and some döner kebab restaurants. Moroccan and Melillan youngsters compete each other in self-organized soccer games. You will find a mixture of veiled women and tiny bikinis, bare torsos and djellabas, Guardia Civil officers, soldiers, national- and local police officers. At times, groups of Syrian children go for a swim with volunteers from the CETI. Once we approach the end of the beach, we find a military compound. We go passed it, take a left and follow the pier, parallel to the fence. Then, the road ends in a small roundabout, the fence abruptly disappears in the sea: the end point of the circulación. Entering Melilla from this side is visibly designed for tourists and wealthy citizens. Every night, the streets get brushed clean, pots with palm trees get a splash of fresh water, litter bins are emptied.

21 Furthermore, before World War II 20% of the population was Jewish, which has now dropped to 5%. The Hindu population counts about 100 members but is commercially important for the city, therefore often included in the enclave’s cultural make-up.

One can visit museums, make a ride on a banana boat, dine at a fancy fish restaurant with sea view. During summer the local government organizes many (Spanish) cultural events. Although it is common sense that the city is surrounded by fences, one will not have to see the frontiers materialization in this part of town. But something is lurking below the surface of this sunny paradise. Moving to the edges of this holiday spot it becomes more clear that it was all some kind of pretense. The occasionally placed maps carved in wood only include the beaches, the port and the commercial center. Driving the route for 10 minutes and you have seen it all (the practice of circulation derives its name not for no reason, the average circulator does at least three rounds). When one takes a closer look to the medieval walls one can maybe find an anti-border graffiti text. Near the harbor strangely placed iron fences are installed. A Guardia Civil car is nonstop guarding the light tower in Ciudad Vieja. Enjoying a beer on top of the old walls, while the lights of the fence are lurking into the hills at night, as part of a beautiful scenery, and one hardly notices the police car rushing by, chasing the under aged, undocumented youngsters in the street. An early morning run and one soon bumps onto the steel fence where men are fishing on the point where Spanish meet Moroccan fish. Leaving the city centre in the west and you might get lost in Muslim barrio La Canada, where trash is stacked on the sidewalks and no wall has been spared from graffiti. The barrio is a supposed hotbed for radicalized Islamists. If we turn right at the military compound in the south the scenery changes with every block we pass. After a few blocks of checkered streets, we turn left and head to the main road to the international border post Beni Enzar, a suburb of Nador. Here, no “welcome to Melilla” sign and the modernist and clean streets that characterize Melilla’s center are replaced by a dusty border market, a mixture of bikes, motorcycles, cars and trucks honking to get priority, litter and weeds-strewn sidewalks. The main street, Avenida de Europa – marked with a huge Spanish flag – has been asphalted only a few years ago. The border post itself has a maze like lay-out, the locations of both Spanish and Moroccan customs change every now and then, so do the regulations regarding passage. The right sidewalk is reserved for traders on foot. Goods are carried in and out, rarely checked by the border guards. In the no-mans-land between the two state’s Moroccan men hang on the sidewalks and try to get some money out of the waiting practice by selling custom forms, removing road blocks, showing directions or talking into border guards to speed up the line. Scents of mint tea, gasoline, garbage and bodily odors mark the air while a cocktail of dust, sweat and sea-salt stick to the skin. It requires practice to understand the waiting routine, the distance to the person in front of you, the gestures and looks that are more likely to be answered with passage, getting accustomed to the glaring sun, standing in each other’s armpits. The border lies in hilly terrain and is traced by the Guardia’s’ closed perimeter road in the North. Following the fence road in the west, back up North will bring us to the Barrio Chino border post. Next to Beni Enzar this is the second entrance point where an International Protection Office is installed in 2014, i.e. where asylum can be requested. Unlike Beni Enzar, we are not allowed to cross into Morocco here, as it is only reserved for residents from the region. Melillan citizens will probably not be seen in this part of Melilla, which seems only reserved for Moroccan salesmen and Guardia Civil officers. A path towards the exit is marked with some army nets and rope. In the mornings the crossing is overcrowded, while past midday traces left behind by the busy morning routines wave quietly across the street. In the background lies Mount Gurugú, you can identify some old ruins from Spain’s presence in the past. Some hundred meters further uphill lies Melilla airport. During summer, one can easily distinguish the departing crowds: European families visiting relatives in Morocco, journalists, some business men. Here, the road undulates down into the hill again and brings us to a valley of green: the Melillan golf course, which has caused a media wave after a picture that was made by a local journalist

of white-capped golfers quietly teeing, while in the background sub-Saharan migrants are sitting in the glaring sun. Most of the time the well maintained golf course is empty, but with the fence glistering in the vibrating hot air the controversial image is almost solidified, as a fata morgana projected on the background. Following the coiled road uphill, past rubbish-strewn slopes, a long climb and some heavy steps in the humid African heat, one reaches the hilltop gate of the CETI, Melilla’s temporary immigrant holding center. To avoid the bustle in the center and the midday hotness near the sun-flecked entrance, people reside in the shadow of the eucalyptus trees near the dry river d’oro bridge, cooking food for several euros. Next to the security booth, a sign indicates who is in charge inside the reception center: the Spanish Ministry of Labor and Immigration and the State Secretariat for Immigration and Emigration, with financial support from the European Union. Migrants would walk up to the gates, swipe their cards and rest their fingers on a reader. The entrance consists of two concrete offices with a small archway in-between. The freshly painted red and yellow, the bright green gate and the palm trees that are symmetrically placed on the other side almost appear as an bungalow park entrance. Inside, the peaceful yellow has trouble competing with the high amount of rough concrete and military tents. Ten blocks of living quarters are shaped in a square in the middle of the compound. Laundry racks, trash bins and plastic chairs are scattered on the small sidewalks. Some children play on the street, a pop-up barbershop is installed in front of the latrines. Offices, classrooms, a health center, showers and a canteen with metal wipe-down tables lie in extension of the entrance. The sun indiscriminately pounds down onto the asphalt. At night, some people sleep outside in donated sleeping bags. Occasionally we will see Accem-staff, recognizable through the identification key cords draped around their neck. About ten paid staff members and a dozen of volunteers and interns organize counseling, reception, return, training and (re)integration programs. Outside the CETI, down the road next to the Lidl, another Accem office is stationed at the Centro de Menores la Purísima (center for unaccompanied minors). In the background, the Melillan border fences tower above the inner center’s bars. Back to the main road we follow the ML-300 up North alongside the fence. We pass the smallest border crossing, Farchana, similar to Barrio Chino only reserved for regional residents and open a few hours per day. On the other side of the fence, behind the sand ditches and military boxes, one can easily identify the colourful houses of the Moroccan border town Farchana. We continue our way up North, on our right side a dry hilly landscape which is both used as park to make small walks and as military training ground. We might cross a Guardia Civil vehicle, that drives back and forth alongside the fence. Finally, after about two kilometres, we arrive at Los Pinos, a forestry area where families gather to picnic beneath young pines, circulación practitioners drink canned beer at night and young couples secretly meet. Here we come to the north-eastern edge of Melilla, also the highest point of the enclave. A Guardia Civil lookout post is installed on top, further to the edge the border fence suddenly is forked in two and then ends abruptly at a sheer drop down to the waves and coastal road far below. On the left side of the fence, on a small plateau near the edge of the sea a small Moroccan military camp is stationed. The wave crests have left the fences rusty brown. This section is known as boundary post 18 – referring to the official border radius traced by cannonballs fired in 1862 from central Melilla. Despite the visible presence of the two nation’s forces, it is one of the few points in Melilla where one can ’s glance can get lost in the sea view and where the sea breeze mixes with the land wind.

Chapter 3 : The journey into illegality trudging the borderlands

Before turning to the border spectacle as operation that has emerged from Europe’s securitization practices (chapter 5) I will describe how the border becomes to be lived already in the borderlands. It shows a process of making borders of people, and how migrant “illegality” is developed and later at the border-crossing activated in an imposing and emphatic gesture of exclusion. The testimony of Walters will be guiding. Walters is a Senegalese migrant I met two blocks down the road of Barrio del Hipódromo, where I lived at the time. He has been in Melilla for one year, making a living of cleaning cars to remove the dust blowing in from Morocco. His presence is notable as most migrants stay in and around the CETI. His is story exemplifies the arbitrariness of the journey and how intensely the border can be felt throughout the journey. It is a story about the embodied experience of bordering and illegality in the borderland.

“I stood in the bushes beside the road and in the distance I could see the fence separating Morocco from Melilla. It was around midnight. Deadly silent and pitch-dark. ‘If I take these steps,’ I thought, ‘I will be somewhere else. When my foot touches the ground on the other side of the fence, I will not be the same person and the world will never be the same again. Who will I be?22”

That night, in the summer of 2014, Walters prepared himself for the final step his journey has building towards. His journey of “illegality” already started when he left Senegal six months before, with nothing on him but the clothes he was wearing, some money and the all inducing desire to go to Europe. Since then he tried three times to cross the border. Twice in Tangier, where he paid human smugglers to bring him through the Strait by boat. The first time, the boat sank a few minutes after departure, but he managed to swim back to shore. The second time, the smuggler collaborated with the Moroccan police. In exchange for the “big fish” he gave “small fry” to the police. Walters got arrested, staid in a small cell with other undocumented migrants before getting deported to the closed Algerian border. As many migrants find themselves stranded in Morocco, caught in the web of Europe’s externalized immigration practices, the road towards southern Europe becomes more challenging. It is in places like Tangier, Rabat, Nador and Oujda where they gather, organize their trip, scramble for money, seek fellow-travellers, find reliable smugglers, get deported to, detained and start over again. Facing the risk of potential deportation or detention, migrants are forced to become more cunning, creative, bold and resourceful in order to proceed their route without losing focus on their main goal: reaching Europe. Along the way they are dependent on a kind citizen who can drive them somewhere or a police officer turning a blind eye. I ask what it takes to survive this kind of lifestyle. To be always on the run, insecure of what lies ahead. I soon figured that it was not about reflecting, there was no space for remorse or doubt. There was no present or past, only future. As Abba, a Nigerian migrant told me: “Crossing the border is what counts, you have to feel it. Breath it. Memorize it. Your whole body has to be set to this goal”. His friend added: “You must feel no insecurity in what lies ahead and there is no turning back either. You have to be dead sure: crossing the border means Europe. The rest is just means to an end”. The whole body is attuned to the journey ahead, it is set to cross the ‘border of borders’. Their whole existence is now based on that goal.

22 Interview, Walters, July 2015 35

Oujda As a Dutch journalist visiting Oujda in 2014 told me, the no-man’s-land at the Moroccan-Algerian border breathes “violence and despair”. It is both a point of entry as a site of expulsion, various times called by the migrants and street children I spoke to in Melilla. It is an odd place packed with petty gangsters, drug dealers, (fe)male prostitutes, poor Algerian migrant workers and a mixture of west- African migrants. Nigerian gangs and Moroccan forces dominate this town. This is the place where many get deported to after being detained in Morocco, more so when one gets closer to the Spanish borders. A rare visit of the Spanish interior minister to Rabat in 2009 has steered a renewed crackdown of sub-Saharan migrants in Morocco, resulted in a deepened migration cooperation (Andersson, 2014: 126). Oujda has developed in what one ngo worker called the “dumping places” of these new measures. Many sub-Saharan migrants and Algerian teenagers I spoke to in Melilla who made it to the enclave have passed in this area and share the story of the no-man’s-land between Algeria and Morocco, fearing being robbed and violated, some multiple times. I was warned by journalists and researchers like Anne for going to Oujda myself. Therefore I was dependent on the spoken accounts of those in the enclave. Amadou, a Cameroonian migrant, recalls his experience. “They [the Algerian soldiers red.] took everything away from me. My money, my clothes. They asked me and my friends what we did here, where we were going and where we came from. In fact they did not care. I was not scared, only when we had to strip down our clothes. They left us there in our underwear, with no money, in the middle of the night”. Andersson – in his study on migratory routes from the Sahel to Europe – talks about Oujda as a “mythical” and “terrifying” place in the adventurers’ world, where migrants are psychologically affected by the paranoia that gets hold of them, himself to a lesser extent as well (2014:126-128). Ngo workers told me horrible stories about rape, homicide, kidnapping and blackmail of persons by smugglers, local gangs and police officers. The travellers find themselves in a space of lawlessness, without protection. There are no official records about the incidents happening here, human rights organizations work in the dark, fearing persecution themselves. The stories are relegated to the margins, literally, and what makes them horrific and alive are the bodily reactions in recalling their experiences: the sudden eye movement as they glance at something invisible behind the trees; their distanced glaze, avoiding eye-contact. Walters told me that it was especially the not-knowing who to trust, the fear of expecting something bad to happen any moment that made the experience dreadful. “I felt desolated and confused, as if I was not living this life myself. Every step I made is crushed by one or another. I was not defeated, not weak, but I felt numb inside. The insecurity feasted on me23”. In a conversation with Laura, a German psychologist who works with clandestine migrants throughout Morocco, she expressed how with each deportation, with each loss of all their possessions, with each mental and physical abuse, their psycho-social unrest increased, often expressed in physical symptoms24. She saw how people who returned after being deported, often multiple times, changed. They became more twitchy, alert, constantly on guard. In its latest and last report on the situation in Morocco, Medicín Sans Frontiers similarly write about the bodily effects of continually adjusting to the different stages of the migration process – including severe stress, anxiety, and physical malfunctioning. These bodily effects I saw in the mountains, and Walters’ vocabulary point to the somatization of migrants’ desolation at an impinging illegality. However, these stories also point to something else, they showed body’s skillful intelligence. The people I spoke to talked about learning safety from experienced travelers and stories, and over time from their own experiences. They described the most important aspect of their embodied learning of safety as having a “sixth sense”,

23 Interview with Walters, July 2015 24 Interview with Laura, July 2nd 2015 36

learned by the experiencing body in interaction with the physical and social environments of the borderland. When “applying” the sixth sense, all the senses are employed in complex interconnected ways to provide information about whether the body-in-place is safe. This includes sounds, touch, smells, and kinesthetic sense, but also senses without a special name, such as the particular feeling of the air on the skin, the heaviness of the air, human smells or the mysterious feeling of being uncomfortable. These are ways of knowing that were felt and experienced through the body, similar to Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of bodily schema, meilleure prise and motor intentionality.

Walters’ experience of deportability left him broke and alone. He thought about going back to Tangier, where he could maybe find a job to save money to hook up with a smuggler. Then he heard about the less expensive route, via Melilla. This time he did not turn to a smuggler. A Senegalese cellmate he met back in Tangier put him in contact with this guy who had lived clandestinely in Morocco for years. He could bring him to the mountains of Nador, for less than half of what his first smuggler had demanded. As he was an undocumented migrant himself, Walters did not consider him in terms of a smuggler. According to immigration law, he was a human smuggler, a law breaker and a criminal. But for Walters, it was a service, a facilitation for his “escape from an undesired life”25. He saved his life, under the rule of ruthless criminal gangs, corrupt border guards and “crazy Moroccans”. However, the route via Melilla turned out the be a cheap but dangerous way to Europe. Besides the fortified border at Melilla, the border militarization was present all along the borderland. Migrant as modern day homo sacer? Walters was brought to Nador where he took off with his new companion into the mountains. He had to make sure to keep close, it was pitchdark and he had heard stories of how smugglers just disappeared in the night and left their clients alone, which meant certain death. After six hours of walking they reached a camp. As I would see with my own eyes later (see box 3), Walters had reached one of the migrant camps of Mount Gurugú: scattered around the area reside approximately 2000 migrants, often gathered and sorted per nationality – mostly sub-Saharan countries like Senegal, Nigeria, Cameroon and Sierra Leone - having their own assigned chairman. The camps are isolated, its existence only to be secured by the help of a Spanish priest and his team from Nador. Padre Esteban is a devote believer, working in the name of God, his catholic church grants them existence and some space to work, semi-tolerated. Still, as it is ‘illegal to aid illegals’, their presence must be low profile and their work is dependent on volunteer donations. Although he travels all over Europe to tell “the story nobody wants to hear”, his “hands are tied” and his work on the ground doesn’t reach much further than basic service provision. As the years passed and Morocco received more European money to safeguard its migration policy, many of these camps have been burnt by the Moroccan army, making it increasingly more difficult to track and help the camp residents. Juan – a volunteer working for the Spanish priest – tells me how the Moroccan army makes weekly visits to the improvised camps, with each visit and each burning further moving away from the Melillan border into the mountains. “They cannot do much more than rebuild their camp from scratch. We give them tents and blankets but it’s not enough”. He cynically calls them “marginalized illegals”, as they carry a double burden to their already vulnerable position, having no money to travel by boat and therefore are obliged to seek their unfortunate chances at the land borders of Melilla or Ceuta where their only way in is either by

25 This is an interesting point, as human smuggling is recurrently misrepresented by the media and politicians as an entirely mafia- controlled criminality. Human smugglers do not make up a homogenous group. Alongside the criminal ones there are local people living in the border regions who might facilitate an “illegal” border crossing for a low price 37

climbing the fences or hide insight cars. Unlike fellow travellers like Syrian refugees or Moroccan and Algerian youngsters, they are an easy visible target. Furthermore, they are pretty much abandoned as many ngo’s and civil society organizations are having trouble upholding their right to remain present and work in the grey spheres of migrant illegality26. MSF decided to close its projects in Morocco, to “protest at the plight of African migrants allegedly abused by Spanish and Moroccan police”27. Juan sighs when I ask him how he manages to continue his work. “I keep myself motivated fighting for the good cause by giving them back their identity. I try to let them feel worthy as a human being, recognizing their existence. I oblige myself to remember every name, even if they made it up and even when they have been long gone. It’s all I can do”. His eyes look sad when he admits that they are collectively being moulded into the illegal category, also by them. The almost ritualistic burning of the encampments by the Moroccan forces, the physical abuses, the fear for deportation can be understood to be part of a larger sociopolitical production of migrant “illegality”. The clandestine traveller is disqualified in systematic ways, converting them into “illegal” and deportable “migrants”. Some talked about being transported in cattle trucks across the desert, stacked like livestock, bumping from side to side and feeling every bump in the road. Their vulnerability and anonymity can also be demonstrated by their animalisation as many migrants speak of being “hunted’ for, like “prey”. “We live like animals, a plague that has to be controlled. Like cockroaches! Am I a cockroach, huh? Maybe yes, we don’t die!”28. Khosravi (2007) writes how illegal border crossers are often represented in terms of animals, “sacrificial creatures for the border ritual”. In Morocco, sheep are at the mercy of wolves.

26 See Anne Jacobs (2012) for an in-depth study on human rights organizations in Morocco 27 Strangely, according to MSF the decision to close the Morocco programme was “based on the fact that access to healthcare for sub- Saharan migrants has improved”, and that “local organisations have emerged to help ensure that migrants get the healthcare they need and that their rights are respected” (http://www.msf.org/morocco & http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Middle-East/2013/Mar- 13/209967-msf-quits-morocco-protesting-anti-migrant-attacks.ashx) 28 Interview with Aba in the camp 38

Box 3 Visiting the migrant camp in Mount Gurugu

We meet at the roundabout in the centre of Nador. Two four-wheel-drives pick me up. Squeezed between boxes of food and blankets we leave the city in the west and drive through the small towns of Ihadaden and Segangan. I was told that the route often changes in order to not raise suspicion by the local authorities. During the trip we drive past a Moroccan army camp, a dozen of green tents stand quietly between the bushy trees. “We never know if and when Rabat orders them to come into action”, Ana tells me. “They have been stationed at this place for almost three weeks now without doing anything”. After 1.5 hours we switch to a small dirt road and eventually park the cars in the bushes. We start walking up into the forest, and I finally see a couple of tents that the organization has given them as shelter. I made a similar trip a few times before with some friends. I was explicatively told not to go look for the camps myself. Beside the fact that I would probably get lost, the residents are very suspicious about the wannabe visitors, not knowing what the purpose of their visit would be. Furthermore, you could get in serious trouble if the Moroccan forces found you.

The camp is located in a bushy terrain, ten similar green tents are scattered around the surface. Here and there are the traces of small camp fires. Clothes are drying on lines. Scattered around the small surface sit groups of men and women of different ages, some of them teenagers. It smells like pines, fire and sweat. Garbage is enclosed in plastic bags to avoid rats and wild boars. This Nigerian camp is predominantly from the Yoruba ethnic group; a second camp, a couple of miles north seemed to house people mostly from the Edo state. I feel like an impostor and somewhat ashamed for my desire to visit them, knowing the stories about journalists, aid workers and ‘undercover’ migrants who have passed on information about their whereabouts, migration route and strategies in exchange for money or some other form of leverage. I introduce myself to everyone, shake their hands and answer a bunch of questions about who I am, where I am from, who I work with, if I am married, if I have kids… I answer honestly, while knowing that my questions would be answered with silence. Their past is not important now, they are the men and women sitting in the forest of Nador, and their assigned illegality at least gives them some form of anonymity. They do talk about the ‘tough’ and ‘inhumane’ conditions they live in, sleeping on rocks, having no food or water. Many of them have visible scars, one man has an oddly shaped elbow, as if it has been broken but not properly healed. I am offered a piece of foam to sit on and watch how a young man is swiftly braiding a women’s hair. They each tell me how long they have been living in the forest: 2 weeks, 4 months, 3 years, 1 year. I hear every time frame. There is one woman that catches my attention in particular. She is younger than me and I can’t help but feel a vicarious fear at the look of her pregnant belly. I feel exposed under her sharp glance and strong voice when she asks me the heart wrenching questions: why didn’t you bring more supplies for all of us? How can you help me? I was from a wealthy country, couldn’t I make a deal with someone at the UNHCR? Above all, she seems fearless. Actually, they all did. The police, the racism, living in the forest, barely eating… That’s life, they tell me. They look bold and courageous, and when I ask them about Spain, the conversation dynamic changes all of a sudden. They look like they are ready to leap just at the sound of the word “Europe”. They ask me to show them my passport and we compare each other’s routes: my route from Amsterdam, via Madrid to Melilla. The stamps for entering Morocco via the Beni Enzar border post is interesting in particular. Theirs, from Nigeria to Mali, Mauritania and Morocco, often with some detours and preferably ending in Spain or Sweden. Then we talked about soccer, the proven universal language, suitable in every situation.

Later I talk to the chairman of the group. While I was talking with the others about Europe, I noticed his silence. He tells me that he has lived in these forests for almost four years. He knew better. They were new and had not yet experienced how Fortress Europe drains the hope, not all of the sudden and sharp, but overtime… when the hardness of the borders and the police become clearer and clearer each day. He laughs and says “they will see. Overtime it will torment them from the inside”. He meant not just the police who set fire to their tents, or chase them at the border, but also the forest itself. The fight against the elements, the endless climbing up and down to go to Nador and beg for food, water, and the climb back up again. The taxis who refuse to take them or the aggressions they endure in the city. It all slowly, but surely, drains away the seemingly endless supply of hope.

Many commentators, especially international journalists, researchers and ngo workers, have looked at Europe’s border regime through the rather distressing lens provided by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben and his reading of the ancient Roman figure of homo sacer: the banished, “sacred” man who can be killed but not sacrificed. Like a modern-day homo sacer, it could be argued, the clandestine traveler is subject to a state of exception in which the sovereign power to “let die” is exercised. The border-regime exercises its power not only through the right to live or die, but predominantly through ‘the right to expose to death’ (Mbembe 2003; Perera 2006). In the words of Rajaram & Grundy-Warr “the border-regime exposes transgressive travellers to death through consigning them to the zones of exemption where the sovereign power cease to function” (2004:38), like what is seen in the borderlands. De Genova argues how the legal production of illegality provides a tool for sustaining migrants’ vulnerability and tractability. This profile is far from consistent, and changes alongside alterations in Moroccan-EU cooperation, the signing of new accords, a visit by a European official, resulting in a new wave of raids, forced displacements and harassments29. However, it does not mean that the traveler readily gives in to the imposed category of migrant illegality. By adopting the role of the adventurer, some forge a distinct presence for themselves through clandestine skills honed on the margins of the law. Conclusion: bordering in the borderland With each year of EU-Moroccan collaboration in border policing, the mental and bodily effects of the border are deepening. By the time migrants reach the Melillan border, many of them had already gone through a cycle of arrests, violence, backup plans and losses. As Andersson faced himself moving around and across borders, “the border regime was producing mental and bodily effects in those it drew into its orbit, forcing the free lines of flight of the adventure into a tunnel of state-controlled movements and surveillance” (2014:128). It is a process of making borders of people: the unwanted are not just excluded at the border but are themselves forced to be border. “Illegality’’ in Morocco is lived through a palpable sense of deportability, which is to say, a conscious state tactic that holds the possibility of being removed from the space of the state. The migrant, caught in the web of immigration law, comes to embody illegality, fomenting into it as he approaches the European border. This illegality and the close proximity of the Melillan border are felt intensely by the clandestine travellers. This part of the migratory journey, an off-scene reality is one of the byproducts of the border spectacle at Melilla’s fences. Important to note is that the label “illegal” wasn’t just accepted as de facto. They were participating in this game themselves, using their imposed position to receive recognition30. They knew what journalists wanted to hear, but above all: they wanted to share their story with the rest of the world. They knew about the impact of the border crossings, the images circulating in the media. The journalist visiting the migrant camps all return with the exact same story: the image of a timeless situation, a black, desperate migrant of unknown origins, stripped from hope and identity, and the only thing they wanted was to cross that border into Europe. These were the people that would later appear

29 His argument goes that by “illegalizing” migrants, a scene of inclusion is created: the large-scale recruitment of illegalized migrants as legally vulnerable, precarious, and tractable labour. Their presence, inasmuch as it is deportable, becomes an “eminently disposable commodity” (De Genova, 2002) 30 Increasingly so, a searing criticism on Europe’s bordering practices and disillusion with the European dream is growing. The shared story of the Euro-African borderland is changing. As Andreas Kalyvas calls the “rebellious immigrant”, politicized and public, claiming a political life, the migrant is neither a naive fortune seeker nor an apolitical homo sacer.

again on the front pages, taking their chances at the fences where they would become part of the border spectacle.

The next chapter will move from the invisibility of the borderlands to the immigration law enforcement at the Melillan border, where a spectacle is produced that enacts a scene of exclusion and where illegality is made visible by and to a wide range of actors. At the border crossing the migrant - until then remained hidden behind the border - comes to be known to the European public, ‘attacking’ the walls of Melilla. Here, the border becomes ever more visible, especially through its personification in the figure of the “illegal migrant”, border guards, the helping hand of the ngo worker, the anti- bordering by the activist, the discursive news articles by the media and other unforeseen border actors.

Interlude It was a dark night in july 2014. It was Walters’ final attempt at the Melillan fence. By now he knew everything. The weather had to be right. Rain or cold were the best, since the soldiers were then less likely to be out. Wind from the north-east, so the dogs would not smell you; and preferably foggy, to reduce the guard’s visibility. After a few hours of climbing, hiding, waiting, he saw the fence near Farchana. This is the point where every catch of breath, every crunching of dead wood and every movement can mean game over. By now, Walters and his four comrades understood each component of the border crossing. Previous experiences at the fence; conversations with other migrants back in Tangier; numerous observations have made them accustomed to the fence’s materiality: the Guardia’s routines, the yielding razor wire, the placement of sensors, poles and doors, the guard dogs. They knew it all depended on speed and skill. They went one by one. Their hand gloves proved useful in pushing the concertina, then you could put your foot on top of it, to avoid snagging your clothes. Blades might cut into your arms and legs, as long as it did not catch you in the stomach or crotch. The crucial next step was to find a pole along the inside of the fence. There is no room for nerves, as it might tempt you to jump, the six-meter-fall would likely break your bones. Walters slid down. He couldn’t speak or turn back to help his friend how was stuck in the razor wire. In the prison in Tangier, other adventurers had told him about the green doors in the inner fence and how the guardias had entered through those doors and expelled them back to Morocco. There was still no enemy movement. The trick was to find a small opening. Walters crawled through and found himself on the other side. His heart was pounding as hey silently ran into a rocky field. Finally, he was in Spain. He had crossed the most difficult of borders.

Chapter 4 : Facing the Valla the spectacle and beyond

“I wondered what one experiences when one crosses the border. What does one feel? What does one think? It must be a moment of great emotion, agitation, tension. What is it like, on the other side? What does it resemble? Maybe it resembles nothing that I know, and thus is inconceivable, unimaginable? And so my greatest desire, which gave me no peace, which tormented and tantalized me, was actually quite modest: I wanted one thing only – the moment, the act, the simple fact of crossing the border”

Ryszard Kapuściński, in Travels with Herodotus

This chapter is focused on the border spectacle as operation that has emerged from Europe’s securitization practices. As argued in the previous chapters, the material practices of immigration and border policing are enmeshed in a dense weave of discourse and representation and together form the main narrative of the border. It is revealed in a ‘show of enforcement’, the performative ways in which the border becomes militarized and solidified, and as a result activates the reification of migrant “illegality” in an imposing and emphatic gesture of exclusion. Describing the border as a spectacle, or staging, will show how the body becomes the site onto which the border is ascribed. This spectacle is revealed and enacted at the border crossing, this is the point where the border becomes evident, tangible, to matter. Here, individual experiences of the border are connected with the larger border narrative. Hence it will be argued that the border crossing reveals an interesting mixture of narratives, encounters and experiences that are linked to the spectacle in unpredictable and unforeseen ways. Although the story of the border is highly visible in the spectacle, other actors and off-scene realities are revealed. The second part of this chapter moves beyond the visibility of the spectacle to the rather invisible backstage world and side effects: the day-to-day narrative of the border crossing, the noises, smells, the backstage violence. It will address the role of eye-to-eye encounters in the formation of bodily and social space. How does embodiment take shape through the border encounters? It shows how remembering dramatizes the operation of othering, of bordering on the body, in the violence of its particularity. As this chapter will show, the border is continuously and performatively being renegotiated.

The transformative power of the border crossing At the border crossing, the border spectacle is activated and appears in all its glory. The triple, six- meter-high fences that have been closing in Melilla in a perfect armoury, seem like a materialized memento of the events of 2005, like a scar etched into the hills. The awe-inducing fences seem, at first glance, a show for researchers, EU delegates, migrants, the media and other visitors that they are unbeatable. For the clandestine migrant this is in a very concrete sense. The fences are surrounded by lethal prohibitions, its steel divide appear as an invincible force. According to Guardia Civil commandant Ortega, besides protecting it, its main function lies in its “deterrent effect”31. Getting closer to the border crossing points and the spectacle becomes real and tangible. The tension seems solidified in the air, border guards stand everywhere and the fences indeed send out off-putting signals. Here, the workings of the border machinery becomes visible, the rituals of policing, border

31 Interview, 9-62015 42

practices and the fence reproduce the meaning and order of the state system. Here the securitization of migration which flows through Frontex intelligence networks, is assigned to police forces and other external actors on the ground.

The ‘show of enforcement’ at the border crossing As we drive the Guardia’s route alongside the fence, the patrol car swerving through the hillside road, we make a quick stop at a look-out post near Barrio Chino. José quickly and routinely checks the parameters around the green fence door. To the left, the fences undulated down into the valley, in the distance I can see the concrete buildings of the Beni Enzar border post. To the right, the fences make a swift turn before it disappears behind the hill. Thermal cameras and invisible sound-and-motion sensors track movement in Moroccan territory, I am told. At this side, Guardia Civil officers patrol the Melillan border. Through the steel mesh, I can easily identify the Alis32 at the EU-funded lookout boxes, just about 15 meters on the other side. A couple of them are playing with a soccer ball, their green army uniforms dry on the line. Despite its transpicuous appearance, the valla seems unconquerable. After the 2005 asaltos (see box 4) Melilla’s new valla became a symbol of advanced security solutions in order to prevent such tragedies to happen again. The Socialist vice president commented at the time that it was not only “more efficient” but also “less harmful”. As a result, the fences are inclined outwards, making climbing more difficult and limiting the need for razor wire (see figure 4). The final detail was installed a few months ago and its successors are still present in the scenery: parallel to the fence several excavators stand quietly beside the road, as still-life spectators of their own work. Deep ditches, a channel surrounding Melilla, makes it impossible to get to the high tech equipped Spanish fence in the first place. Those who still manage to climb the outer fence face a moveable upper panel that, once movement is detected, descend and trap them underneath. If the climbers make it into the middle section, they soon find themselves snared in an intricate mesh of metal cables: the sirga tridimensional José tells me. The sirga tenses upon contact in order to immobilize the migrant. “Like an insect in a spider’s web”, I can’t help myself thinking. I ask if the fences were indeed made in such a way that it would not harm those who manage to climb it. José replies somewhat defensively that “those who have had to make sure was not the Guardia Civil, but politicians and Proytecsa”33. If against all predictions the intruder got past this mesh, next is the inner fence, again, six meters tall where the intruder awaits a pepper spray shower. Before asking what was humane about this, but José already says it has never been used thus far, “gracias a dios”.

32 locally known as Moroccan soldiers and auxiliary forces 33 the Spanish security company who is in charge of installing and fixing the vallas 43

Figure 4 Graphic of the fences (vallas) between Morocco and Melilla. Source: http://www.eldiario.es/desalambre/Grafico- valla-Melilla_0_198780906.html

The more advanced and invisible protection, the ‘heart’ of the border security, is found in the Guardia Civil headquarters. Sensors and cameras – 104 in total – detect any movement along the fence as Guardia Civil commandant Ortega shows me later in the communication room. In this room the border is made visible, legible, and operational. Walk into the control room, and you will see rows of computer terminals manned by a couple of Guardia’s staring at wall-mounted monitors that project a real-time electronic map and camera shots of the coastline, fence and sea. The operator monitors his terminal, looking for signs of migrants approaching the border. Suddenly something might appear: a pixelated boat, with a vector attached indicating its direction and speed. The Guardia brings the map up on the wall projection, takes a closer look. It could be nothing, he knows. Maybe the radar has just detected the crest of a wave, a small fishing boat or the Moroccan forces. Determining signs of a patera34 or approaching migrant(s) relies on experience. What is the weather like? If the hard, eastern wind blows across the Mediterranean, migrants rarely set out from Algeria and Morocco. How does the object move? A sinuous zigzag path, represented by a trail of pixels, means it could be a patera. If there was something stuck in the sirga, the alarm would set off immediately. Guardias would use binoculars to see whether it is an animal, a “negro”, or Alis. With a click on the mouse, the operator can identify the subject and track its movements. As it approaches the border, he steers the camera with his joystick into line with the object, as in a computer game. If it is indeed a patera sighting, he activates the protocol, asks the headquarters in Madrid for permission and a Guardia Civil patrol boat shoots out. If he suspects migrant movements on land, they reach out to the Alis, so they can check the bushes with their patrol dogs. The four steps of an intervention are about to be completed: detection, identification, follow-up, and finally, interception. Broadcasting the border, stopping pateras in their tracks, 24/7 visual, sensors bleeping and cameras switching. A show-off of Spanish technology, aimed to defend against hidden ilegales. This is

34 Small boat 44

where the border becomes touchable and operational. The fences grasp the intruders via the smallest bodily signs – footsteps, breath, odors, noises, hands on wire. These physical signs are part of the border machinery. Its visual presence became digitalized and appear in small red lights on the screens in the control room. If risk analysis is the brains of Europe’s border regime, the screens and surveillance machinery that secure Melilla’s borders are its eyes, promising migration controls shorn of violence and politics. The fences are materialized in the form of the steel mesh, the barbed wire, the expensive technology and the Guardia Civil’s presence and their eyes watching every movement near the border. The fence technology and its networked manpower make the border a living system. For the guards, the border is their work place. As they scan the horizon, they know success depends upon reaching out to their Moroccan colleagues across the border and to aid workers, journalists, and politicians within. In these interactions, the border becomes a resource in which the main business is to make sure no one enters. In this endeavor, the militarization of the border incorporated not just the Guardia Civil and the Moroccan forces, but also the Spanish Legion and the Regulares35. “Zero tolerance to ensure its effectiveness” is what Alfonzo, an ngo leader and one of the biggest enemies of the border regime in Melilla, told me. Its effectiveness can only be ensured when Melilla is sealed off completely because “there is no point for Europe to protect its border if it is already failing here36”. As a result, the fences are the dark side of the spectacle at the border: militarization took on a violent appearance, inflected by the enclave’s martial past rather than by humanitarianism, as it does on sea. So lad with a heavy historical baggage, the Guardia Civil were “reinventing itself within the framework of a state- sponsored emergency imaginary” (Andersson, 2014:149). Their bordering practices have become especially apparent, meaningful and emblematic during the asaltos where the clandestine migrant have become the subjects of such interventions. To Peter Andreas (2009), border policing is an “audience-directed” and “ritualistic” performance. He draws from sociological insights about the role of images and symbols in public interaction. Comparing the border with the social drama depicted by Erving Goffman, he argues how state actors continuously engage in “face work”. The border actors, so he argues, are involved in a double performance as they both have to ensure that the border is opened to certain type of audiences (legal flows) while reassuring the rest of the audience that the border is being sufficiently closed (to illegal flows) (ibid:10). It is performative in the sense that it is a political-economic game with defined rules, enmeshed in a dense weave of discourse and representation, in which the border actors are constantly busy to bring about a “convincing impression” that certain moral standards are being realized (ibid.). The ways Europe has securitized the migrant question37, systematically disqualifying migrants and converting them into “illegal” and deportable categories, supply the rationale for the spectacle of enforcement at the border. Here, the migrant is not only declared illegal but actively and visibly made as such. The performative nature of border policing is revealed in that it defines the Guardia’s identity - through securitization discourse - as border guards. The manner by which this identity is brought to life is revealed in the consistent use of authoritative speech enforced through law. It lies in statements such as “it is my job to protect my city”. These statements, just by expressing them (repetitively), carry out a certain action and exhibit a certain level of power. In these statements are declarations of ownership, and a shared militarism of the border language. The following paragraph will exemplify this embodied militarized role by the Guardia’s which is especially apparent during the various incidents of the asaltos.

35 During the asaltos of 2005, both these forces were mobilized to seal the border. 36 Interview, june 12th 2015 37 the sociopolitical production of migrant “illegality” that are uphold by discursive formations 45

Militarization put into action : asaltos José shows me the spot where the grand assault of October 2014 took place. Migrants were waiting in the bushes on the Moroccan side of the fences. “It could be hundreds of them. We did not know”. It was his first month in Melilla and despite his training he did not know what to expect. “I was told that they could have weapons. Sticks, stones, knives. It might get ugly really fast”. Some Red Cross vehicles teared out and waited just outside the Guardia Civil convoy. Jakab, a Senegalese migrant who could recall the event when I spoke to him in the CETI, told me that the Moroccan forces sometimes came to talk to the chairmen in the mountains. That particular night they were drinking whiskey together, and the chairman would “give them Nigerian women38”. They were told that the next day the coast would be clear. However, by the time they were very close to the fences helicopter were circling above them and “guardias popped up everywhere”. Many migrants fanned out, into the forest and border villages, later to be caught by the Moroccan forces and deported. It is unclear who warned the Guardia’s. According to Jakab, during the fuzz, a few dozen still decided to “attack the fences”. “They came at once and climbed very swiftly. The whole fence was bending under their weight”, José tells me. What happened then was caught on camera by Prodein, an activist ngo (see box 4). The movie clearly shows the expulsion of a migrant which is not a standalone incident. The stories and video point to some interesting things. First, there are various degrees of interaction between Moroccan forces, migrants, Guardia’s and the Red Cross. Many point out the proneness to various forms of abuses by Moroccan forces throughout Morocco (as what is seen in Oujda and written about by Jacobs (2012) and Andersson (2014)). At the same time, there seems to be mutual agreements and favors taking place between the Moroccans and migrants, in which the intelligence of Moroccan forces is ‘bought’. Moreover, similarities can be drawn between this and the financial favors Spain and Europe gives to Morocco (as argued before in chapter 1) although speculation have often been prompted in the Spanish Congress and media about Morocco letting migrants through (Andersson, 2014:167). The relational terms with Spain at that particular moment were likely to be deteriorated, although I cannot verify this. Furthermore, the migrant’s planned their trip to Melilla in collaboration with the Moroccans. Further, as the Guardia’s task was to prevent the migrants from breaching the fences, the Red Cross stood out of sight, waiting for any casualties to happen. One Red Cross worker expressed how the experience of standing there “just waiting for casualties to happen. It is weird, we are observing the whole thing from a distance, we cannot do anything. Not reach out to the migrants, not say something to the Guardia Civil”. The asaltos also show that while border controls and discourses have become militarized in Melilla, so did migrant’s response and tactics. As I talked with Melillan “veterans” within the enclave, their choice of words in describing their border crossing attempt points to the militarization of language among migrants. Sites of departure were called striking points, migrant camps came to be known as bunkers. Many called themselves “soldiers”. Seeking refuse in small border villages is referred to as “attacking the town” and breaching the valla is referred to as “attacking the fences”. Various Guardia’s noted how with the fortification of Melilla’s fences, migrants became more cunning in their crossing endeavors. They have gradually lost their fear, their tactics changing along with those of border guards and the gradual growth of the fences. In the comandancia, commandant Ortega shows me some self-made metal hooks that they would attach to their feet and hands to ease and speed up the climb. For the Guardia Civil, the migrants communities in the hills outside Melilla were

38 46

generally known as training camps. Their organizational expertise was diverted towards the border since the 2005 asaltos. Here the very materiality of the fences helped trigger the big assaults, since a horde was now needed to climb them. “It is like this”, commandant Ortega recalled, “because they only way to enter is on mass scale”. In order to prevent similar incidents like the ones in 2005 and 2014 to happen, more fortification measures were needed to keep the promise of migration controls shorn of violence and politics. The show of enforcement then became the fence in itself, its tall steel divide as a promise of absolute separation.

Box 4: Video: Expulsion of migrants in the border spectacle

Together with Sara, a young ngo worker, I watch the video footage. We see a few dozen migrants sitting on the inner border fence. Some hang halfway up the fence, dangling and clinging onto the steel mesh; others balance quietly on top, one leg on each side. “I was hinging like a sandwich board“ Jakab tells me later. We silently watch the video, it goes one for hours. The indistinct voices, the duration, the direction and height from which the camera takes the scene suggests an air of detachment but also shows a more elaborate reality of the border crossing events then the short videos I watched online. About twenty patrol cars are parked alongside the fence and groups of officers and police men stand spread beside them. I cannot help myself making the comparison with a silent film. While there is no spoken dialogue – only the loud sounds are heard – it is transmitted through muted hand- and feet gestures. A couple of ladders are placed against the fence, with baton-wielding officers stand on it. At times they make a move, raise their batons, pull at flopping feet or find themselves in small struggles, awkwardly balancing one leg on the ladder, the other kicking in the air. The migrants spit, kick and shout back. At a certain moment, a migrant falls down the fence but before a Guardia Civil officer can grab him he swift-handedly climbs back up. The others cheer and two manage to tip over the ladder which is reacted upon with laughter. While the officers try to hit the migrants, the occasional successful entry is celebrated loudly by the migrant crowd chanting ‘bosa bosa’. “A victory cry”, Sara comments. We see how a short guy swiftly slaloms between the cars, slips through police hands and runs out of camera sight. “He probably made it to the CETI”, replies Sara when I ask her what happened to him. Then, we see how a black African is beaten down the fence. More officers enclose him, but their gestures and pacing up and down reflect their indecisiveness. Officers stand beside him, occasionally pulling his arm and legs, and after been carried like a wheelbarrow – appearing unconscious – dragged back through the green door in the fence. We can see how he gets handed over to some Moroccan soldiers before he is moved out of sight in a dark minivan. Sara sighs as she pauses the video. “Joder. This is a real human tragedy (…) Look at them, they [the Guardia Civil] don’t know what they are doing. They act in accordance to a state law that is controversial as hell. Meanwhile, they can kick and beat as they like without being prosecuted. No one asked these men who they were, where they came from, or why they were there”.

The visual economy of the border crossing The show of enforcement at the border is accompanied by a proliferation of other border actors that have become part of the spectacle. With the strengthening of Melila’s borders, the language and discourses changed. When talking about migrants who cross the Spanish borders illegally, different metaphors and terms to describe these events are used by politicians and in the media – not rarely with the potential to evoke negative perceptions of threat and own helplessness. In 2000, the then secretary for immigration and emigration Consuelo Rumí, pictured the situation at the Spanish borders as ‘at the heat of the immigrant waves that push to access our country’. From then, but especially after the events of 2005 representatives of both, the conservatives and the Socialists, followed by the media

fell back on the use on such ambivalent terms like ‘avalancha’ (avalanche), and ‘oleada’ (wave). The use of the metaphor ‘oleada’ underlines the impression of a threatening invasion – framed as a frightening horde assaulting the fences of Melilla. For the European public, the border crossing offers a first glimpse of the migrant who has until then remained hidden beyond the border. This is the point where illegality is transformed into something different, something bigger. Ever since, these metaphors are used regularly after events and are a popular message by the local PP party in Melilla. Furthermore, a flurry of images has brought the misery of migrants and the dramatic and sometimes violent features of the border practices to a global audience. The production and distribution of images and videos visualize and strengthen the spectacle and are circulating wildly among ngo workers, journalists, researchers and border guards. Although the footage is the same, each commentation is different, depending on the person telling it and the audience receiving it. Discourses and images that During and short after an asalto journalists would gather around the crime scene to capture the spectacle. Their photographs and news articles were added to the already existing imagery of migrants sitting on the fences of the Spanish enclaves. The racial profiling at the border and the border categorizations were brought into sharper relief by the border imagery. Whether in Prodein’s videos or in news reports, it were the subsaharianos who were the main subjects. The pictures that acquired high iconic, symbolic, and financial value in what Andersson calls the “visual economy” were those of a concentration of black men on the fences of Melilla, looking dehydrated, leaning on each other to rest for a moment, their hands and feet bleeding from climbing the razor wire. They seemed captured in this very moment, stuck in the image of people straddling the wire, bare and proved to be iconic for ‘Fortress Europe’. In the aftermath of the border crossing events journalists would trail the migrants who did not manage to cross the border, trying to record their forced removal. Some of them entered the hills of Gurugú with provisions in exchange for sharing their experience. Migrants tactically used these opportunities to express their distress and scramble together enough resources to take their chances at the fences again. When the crossing attempts started to reach their denouement in 2015, journalists were already part of the spectacle and in order to keep up the imagery, they found new ways of visualizing it. I was told that there was a Spanish cameraman who had asked migrants residing in the mountains to attack the fence so he could film it in exchange for money. Although I cannot verify the truth factor in this - for instance, I did not come across this specific journalist, nor did I hear this story from others - it does underline a message that I found among many people, namely, that the media were constantly demanding images and pictures and became part of the spectacle itself which was based on visualizing illegality. Looking beyond the story, these camps were more than just a desolate waiting places. The migrants in the mountains told me they met dozens of journalists, but little had come of all this attention except broken promises. In this story lies also something else: the migrants were very occupied with their crossing attempts, all their efforts and energy lies in the act of the crossing which was exaggerated, sometimes even encouraged, by reporters. Increasingly so, they were getting tired of the media attention, of journalists taking pictures and leave again. Journalists, as well as the European audience, were more interested in the odyssey, the explorer than in the backstory of their plight. After the journalists, the academics and researchers came. A bit more slow-footed then the journalists, they started collecting data around the events. Mapping migratory routes, complexities of migratory flows, motivations for flight, stories about their life in the forests or post-crossing

experiences. “Dozens of researchers have come here in the past couple of years”, I was told very often. I noticed it myself, people would sigh and say “ah yes, the valla …”39. The spectacle unfolding at the border violation described above show that how it was not the spontaneous African mass departure of media fame: rather, it was a calculated move, a staging of policing, story-telling and cooperations. A spectacle in which journalists, Red Cross workers, Guardia Civil officers, and migrants all played their converging roles. The material practices help to generate a constellation of images and discursive formations, which repetitively supply migrant ‘illegality’ with the impression of an objective fact. In other words, it is the visual grammar that upholds and enhances the iconicity and the fetishism of the figure that represents “illegality”. It appears as a digitalized risk on the screens in the control room, or as haunted prey in the borderlands, or as the men sitting on fences. Through the interplay between enforcement and an excess of discourses and images the border spectacle “yields up the thing-like fetish of migrant ‘illegality’ as a self-evident and sui generis ‘fact’, generated by its own supposed act of violation (Genova, 2012:492). As a result, the extraction of such images are but a part of the complex realities that are at heart of this border spectacle.

Figure 5 Snapshot of video footage October 2014 Source: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/ Beyond the spectacle: off-scene realities What happens out of sight, when journalists leave, the backstage world of violence that the state shields from view is revealed in the backstreets of Melilla where the unwanted trespassers reside (chapter 6), the trading activities that take place at the crossings of Barrio Chino and in embodied experiences of what happens in the spectacle. In part, this rhymes with Debord’s notion of the society of the spectacle – that is, replacing the real world with a narrow selection of images that “succeed in making themselves regarded as the epitome of reality”. Ngo’s knew the power of imagery and media attention, but were not happy with the slick images churned out by news organizations and local newspapers. They got tired by the foreign journalists and researchers always wanting the same simplistic pictures of migrants stuck in the wild in Morocco, or sitting on Melilla’s fence. “It’s but a

39 During my time in Melilla I met three other research students, one focussing on geopolitical aspects of the border, one on migrant experiences on their way to Europe, and one on the relation between bordering and ‘Spanishness’. It is a small city, so everybody knew who was doing what. 49

small part of reality”, Alfonzo tells me. “There is no room for their humanity. Not in their treatment at the fences, nor by the journalists looking for a juicy story. You want to know the real juicy story? Talk about the amount of killings and violations on Moroccan soil. If silence reigns here, there’s always thunder elsewhere. You know, Spain talks about having great cooperation with Morocco, but this cooperation is really just about paying morocco to do the dirty work for Spain, just like what Europe used to offer Qaddafi to get him to stop migrants coming from Libya”. Such stories were relegated to the margins, occasionally written down by an in-depth journalist and cared for by human rights organizations that are trying to keep their head above water in the borderlands. A few critical journalists and ngo’s like Prodein tried to capture the off-scene violence at the border encounter, like what is shown in box 4. The video was placed on YouTube, where it became visible to a broader audience. Both ngo workers and lawyers use these images to make political claims against the Guardia’s actions at the fences. In the words of Sara, “Spain doesn’t care under which horrible circumstances those people will be received by the Moroccan army. The world has to see this!”. The local government, backed by Madrid and national immigration law, tries hard to limit these types of exposure. During an incident in September 2014, three ngo’s filed a complaint accusing the police of illegal expulsions of migrants and of allowing the Moroccan police to detain migrants on Spanish soil40. The head of Melilla’s Guardia Civil, colonel Ambrosio Martín Villaseñor was out of the country, and as commandant Ortega was second in charge he decided to send 21 immigrants back to Morocco. It was filmed and both national and international newspapers, lawyers and ngo workers like Sara used the event to claim that the migrants should have been handed over to the national police who is in charge of applying the national Aliens Act. However, according to Spanish state law, the images and videos of this incident do not comply with what is stated in the readmission agreement between Spain and Morocco. Under the agreement it is said that Spain can return immigrants to Moroccan who have illegally entered from the neighboring country. Colonel Villaseñor has been supported by the Ministry of Interior, the Directorate General of the Civil Guard and National Police, the Government Delegation in Melilla and the Executive of the Autonomous City of Melilla, arguing that by acting in this way, the current law was respected41. In fact, the Spanish authorities claim that third-country nationals in Morocco do not have to cross the land border irregularly in the first place, as asylum can be requested at the International Protection Offices installed at the Beni Enzar border crossing. However, the Spanish interior ministry only inaugurated this office in november 2014. More troubingly, the office continues to be inaccessible to sub-Saharan asylum-seekers as they are systematically prevented from reaching the border post by Moroccan authorities42. The vast majority of the asylum applications at Beni Enzar since the establishment have been from Syrian asylum seekers. Furthermore, it was said that reaching or even crossing the three fences is not enough to claim asylum. Instead, as commandant Ortega explains, migrants must cross what it calls an “operational border” — set wherever the last line of police security stands43. This practice is known by civil rights organizations and the media as ‘hot returns’ or ‘push backs’. As this border is not strictly defined, it is moved from case to case, allowing the authorities to argue that the person in question has not entered Spanish territory44. The use of “hot returns” has been heavily criticized by international institutions

40 New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/25/world/at-spanish-enclave-a-debate-over-what-makes-a-border.html?_r=0 41 http://www.elmundo.es/espana/2014/10/03/542e4a86e2704eab518b4574.html 42 Also stated in report by Migreurop/GADEM http://www.migreurop.org/article2666.html?lang=fr 43 Interview, July 7th 2015 44 Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights, Nils Muižnieks ; EU Home Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmström qualified the practice as a “violation of EU legislation”. These concerns were shared by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and by the Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture, which highlighted the associated danger of ill-treatment in the hands of Moroccan security forces during and after “hot returns”. 50

and NGOs, especially after the Spanish government announced it planned to give the practice a legislative basis. Furthermore, in response to the video of Prodein in box 4, the Melilla representatives of the Spanish government criticized it as partial and justified the Guardia Civil’s actions as proportionate in the context of their work “in securing and defending Europe’s southern border”. They described the event of October 2014 as “an extremely tense massive assault” marked by violence by the migrants45. The Interior Ministry accused the migrants of acting with "unusual violence", saying some were armed with knives, sticks and stones, while others set pieces of clothing on fire and hurled them at police, adding that five Guardia Civil officers were treated for their injuries that day46. Again, this points to the rationale for the spectacle of enforcement, the justification for using force as necessary evil to defend the border. Images that question their duties are received with counter measures. During the summer of 2015 the local authorities tried to halt the flow of negative images and the visualization of violence at the gates all together by prohibiting any form of capturing the Guardia Civil in Melilla on camera without permission. I was asked many times if I was not recording or filming at the border because it would ‘obstruct’ their work.

Guardia’s ambivalence As shown above, although the fortification measures have proved to become more effective in halting asaltos, it did not remove violence away from the border, it was actually contained and hidden from view. Border guards proudly showed me the advanced machinery installed, yet admitted the barriers were rather ‘useless’. After all, undocumented Africans kept clambering across the barbed-wired barriers – or else diverted towards more dangerous sea routes or the official border posts. Further, while showing it off, a visceral reality - the darker workings of the valla and the embodied experience of the Guardia’s - would replace the visual splendor of the fences once the audience departed. The Red Cross carried the wounded to the CETI; journalists started typing their articles and moved on to other story loaded sites; migrants disappeared in the borderlands or in the CETI and Guardia’s positioned themselves at the fences again. What remained though was the smell of migrants, the touch of hands on the cool steel mesh, the sound of their advance, the heavy breathing which became incorporated into the very fabric of the fence. So were the memories from the asaltos – especially the 2005 assault - of black men running into central Melilla with gaping wounds from the razor wire. And so was the Guardia’s’ ambivalence in their double role as guardian angel and gatekeeper. The violent backroom of the border encounter, removed from the visual realm, was relegated to the visceral backstage world of smells, touches, and noises and the embodied experiences. This world both reinforced and undermined the forms of “bare” migrant life seen in the spectacle.I discuss the video footage with commandant Ortega to recall the events from his perspective. Sitting in his office, he presses play, and familiar images flick by on-screen. Even though he does not dispute the authenticity of the footage, he claims – in line with the formal comments presented above – that it gives a partial and biased account of the difficulties faced by the police in the “face of severe migratory pressure”. He shows me a paper with three images. The first shows an immigrant hanging on the inner valla, below him a Guardia Civil officer. “This is what the world sees: a helpless man getting violently chased by the Spanish border guard. But if you zoom out, and we have the full picture here, one can see the other officers standing below, waiting to catch him so he doesn’t smash on the ground, to give him water as he probably is dehydrated. We work closely together with the Red Cross you know. They stand right

45 http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/spanish-police-beat-migrant-unconscious-melilla-border-fence-shocking-video-1470405 46 https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/10/21/spain-excessive-force-melilla ; interview, July 14th 2015 51

beside us ready to act in case of unfortunate events47”. It seems as if he is trying to put the record straight. The Guardia Civil is doing their job as told, put in place to secure the border, searching for a way to make the border practice humane but confronted with an uncontrollable “human tragedy”. We both knew that the migrant’s hand was not to be grasped , but rather set off an alarm in the control room. The Guardia’s along the fences – unlike their Spanish colleagues at sea – could not adopt a humanitarian role. Instead, they were delegated to be the “bad guy”, what José ironically called himself. Attempts to gloss over the cracks between humanitarianism and violence took unexpected expression at times. Along the fence road, José had shown me with deep care his passion for plants and flowers (see figure 2). Similar to what Andersson (2014) had seen near the restricted road in Melilla, were cut-open water bottles have been attached to the fences for the birds to drink. These rather tender gestures – and “privileging wildlife over people” in Andersson’s words – contrast sharply with the layers of fences, the Guardia’s, the razor wire and deep ditches. The migrant who got trapped in the sirga would be easily cut open, while ambulances could not enter between the fences. It is knowing the principal function of the fences and its protectors, it is captured in seeing the pieces of fabric that are stuck in the barbed wire, brought along by gusts of wind or straying Alis that were easily confused with traces left behind by migrants. Just like having eye for flora andfauna does not remove violence from border controls, so didn’t the cables, wires, and invisible sensors and cameras.

Going beyond the spectacle and talk about their embodied experiences proved to be a challenge. However, I soon found out that the very materiality of the fence, especially its physical presence, made it easier to talk about it. Similar to the effect a camp fire has on people sitting around it, people Figure 6 Fence flora stared at the fences when they spoke, their gaze allowed me to follow them in their remembrance. Jesús, a young Guardia, took me along one time to make me experience how “different the reality of a border crossing” was from the representations on television and “those that don’t understand what we are doing”. I asked what he meant with “those”. “Ah, you know. The media. The critics”48. He showed me a point, near los pinos, where he was patrolling one time when “the migrants came”. He tells me his story, his eyes constantly moving from the fence to my face, taking me along his experience. “I did not know what was happening, we didn’t see any Alis. While they were climbing I yelled for backup in my radio. They went so fast, it was is if they were numb for the sharp razor wire. Before we knew it they were here”. He walks to a piece of weed next to

47 Interview, July 10th 2015 48 it should be mentioned though, that he was off-duty at that particular moment, because he was actually not allowed to talk to researchers and journalists. 52

the road. “It was fifteen against two, we were outnumbered”. Jesús walks to the other side of the road. “And we were standing here, all my muscles were activated. They looked us straight in the eye with this really intense gaze you know. They looked, I don’t know, amused, ready to trick us. And so focused, maybe also hate. Their nose holes and eyes were huge. I could see the white of their eyes. We didn’t speak. I looked at my partner. His face. All fear. It was really tough. Duro, duro, duro”. Jesús hesitates before he continues. “They were ready to attack us. I knew it. So we ran”49. For Jesús it proved difficult to talk about his experiences. Especially the shame seemed to bother him. For being afraid, for running away, for the breach in the system. Jesús’ description of their mirada, their gaze was something I had heard more often. “They don’t say anything, but their facial look is super expressive …” It told differing things to different actors. A red Cross worker explained me it “told you that this person has just left their whole life behind, risking many things and losing so much, for nothing”50. To Jesús, their gaze showed rather anger and eagerness. The smells was also something that came up at times. Waiting at the border to begin an intervention, José recalled, “people readied themselves, with the smells that the wind would bring”. Besides the noise, the adrenaline, and the scent of the air, the strongest memory was the smell of the migrants. “It is a special smell, everything smelled the same, a thick concentrated human smell that was brought to us by the wind”. The bodily smells haunted José’s memory and would maintain a special space in his mind, every time he would come near the particular spot. Jesús’ and Josés recollection of the border crossing, as well as migrant’s experiences, show how bodily effects are a big part of the encounter. To the Guardia’s, the illegal body must be prevented from entering Melilla’s space, often marking out the characteristic of migrants as racialized and threatening. Something is being passed between them that serve to embody the subjects. The stranger’s body – that is, the migrant – is being read and at the same time the boundaries are defined through the very gestures that enable a withdrawal from the stranger’s co-presence in this particular social space. The bodies that come together in the encounter, that nearly or physically touch and co- mingle, slide away from each other, becoming relived in their apartness. The particular bodies that move apart allow the redefinition of social as well as bodily integrity: black bodies are expelled from the white social body despite the threat of further discomfort (Jesús must run away in order that he can keep his personal safety as well as his place, that is, in order to keep the migrants at a distance). The emotion of hate aligns the particular Guardia’s body with the bodily form of the community – such an emotion functions to substantiate the threat of invasion and contamination in the dirty bodies of migrants. The gestures that allow the Guardia’s body to withdraw from the migrant’s body hence reduce that body to dirt, to ‘matter out of place’ (Douglas, 1996:36), such that the migrant becomes recognized as the body out of place. Through such strange encounters, bodies are both de-formed and re-formed, they take form through and against other bodily forms. The object – the fence – comes to stand for, or stand in for, the cause of ‘the hate’. The fence crawls up between them, as a carrier of dirt, divides the bodies, forcing them to move apart. However, the ‘it’ that divides them is not merely the fence. The valla functions as a mere distraction, crucial yes, but rather embodied by the person that is drawn in its embrace. The illegal body becomes the fence. He becomes the ‘it’, the impossible and phobic object that threatens to crawl from one to the other. Similar to Aba’s comparison with being an animal that must be eliminated, the migrant’s lived embodiment hesitates on the question ‘am I the fence?’ or, ‘am I the dirt that forces me away’? The gaze, the smells, the sounds, the bodily

49 Interview, July 10th 2015 50 Interview, June 28th 2015 53

encounters and its effects – these impression could not be neatly captured in the border spectacle or distributed in media messages. It can only be hinted at.

During the summer of 2015 the control room in the comandancia in Melilla is rather empty. Arturo introduces me to two men staring at a dozen screens. They don’t seem disturbed, sipping tea from a Guardia Civil mug, laid back into the big desk chairs. The room is dark and has no windows. The vans on the sealing are quietly turning. This then, is Melilla’s Sauron: its eye following every movement near the border. But most of the time, nothing happens. “The border system works”, replies Arturo to my question if they were busy. In the last year no attempts have been made to cross the fences. When he talks about the border encounters between his men and the migrants at the border his voice lowers, his pauses are longer and his face looks somewhat disconsolate. He seems relieved with these developments. Staring and targeting at screens leads to more peace of mind than chasing migrants with batons. Working with a clear conscience. During my time in Melilla, the amount of migrants approaching the European border has stagnated, popping up elsewhere, again in ramshackle boats in the Mediterranean sea or at the official border posts. He shows me images of bodies squeezed inside car bumpers, migrants’ bodies replacing the car stuffing; suffocated men in suitcases on the ferry between Melilla and Málaga. These images were like oddities, part of the border workers’ collection of extraordinary objects. The spectacle was under control. Most people I spoke to, whether local citizens, ngo’s or Guardia’s would sigh after I denounced I came here to study the vallas. A Melillan friend of my roommate even got a bit agitated: “In the past few years so many researcher have come here to study migration and the violence at the gates. But there is so much more to Melilla than these fences!”. And now that the migrants are further away of Melilla’s borders, media attention was decreasing. “You’d better choose another topic. This one has been saturated”. The story of the valla has lost its interest. The subject of the border became outdated, even for the people living nearby it. People would express their disconcern, but journalists, activists, migrants were disappearing from the stage. However, as did the physical appearance of the vallas and the embodied experiences of the Guardia’s did not deter the border’s workings, something else was lurking below the surface. At the off-scene corners of Melilla, the places where media attention is absent, the spectacle is played out in other manners. I wonder if he too senses the the big elephant in the room. Arturo argues how the valla’s materiality, the work of the Guardia Civil and cooperation with Moroccan neighbors has led to a significant decrease in migrant attacks. We both know this does not steer migrants nor violence away from the fences. The work is now done by Spain’s neighbors, shielded from view by the Spanish state and largely unknown to the European public. “Spain talks about having great cooperation with Morocco,“ said Alfonzo. “But this cooperation is really just about paying morocco to do the dirty work for Spain, just like what Europe used to offer Qaddafi to get him to stop migrants coming from Libya”. Sporadic pictures of the cunningness of migrants, their relentlessness and fearless attempts don’t add up to the amount of killings and violations on Moroccan soil and in the Mediterranean sea51. These voices were relegated to the margins, occasionally written down by an in-depth journalist and cared for by human rights organizations that are trying to keep their head above water in the borderlands. I wonder if this plays on Arturo’s conscience but he waves my question away by saying that that was a matter of politics, which was not in his jurisdiction, similar to José remark when he showed me the sirga.

51 See Anne Jacobs on migrant violations in Northern Morocco; statistics on 54

Other actors of the spectacle 6:30 The border area is quiet. Yesterday’s garbage waves quietly across the street. It is the silence before the storm. Unlike the Beni Enzar border post, Barrio Chino is open only a few hours per day. Thirty minutes later the gates of the fence are trembling. Hundreds of Moroccan women squeeze themselves through the small opening in order to get to the warehouse zone to collect their trading material. It takes but a few seconds before I am squeezed between women rolling, pushing and carrying huge packages of goods. It is a space of adrenaline-fueled waiting, shouting, moaning, queuing and fighting. Invisible walkways alongside the fence lead them back into Morocco. Next to the patrol cars a couple of Guardia’s observe the crowd. They seem relaxed, laughing with each other and hardly taking notice of what is happening. Then they spot me. The oldest one approaches me. “Identificación”. I show him my passport while he asks what I am doing. “Student”, I reply. To prevent a tiring discussion about my exact motives for being here alone (which led to me having to leave the border the last two times) I say that I am waiting for a friend. Which is sort of true. After I reassured him that I was really not a journalist he seemed content, although I had to repeat myself up to four times in the next hour as he sent all his colleagues to question me. As the crowd gets bigger, the invisible lines to cross back to Morocco get messier and the atmosphere more grimly. The Moroccan helpers – who get paid to control the mass – are running around hitting and pushing the porteadores back in line. The guardia’s, who seemed so relaxed, suddenly decide to come into action and spread out in the horde. One hits out with his baton indiscriminately when a young man tries to take a shortcut. At times they push the huge bundles the women are carrying on their backs, making them tip over. Despite the painful beatings and bullying practices, the women don’t seem disturbed and continue their route towards the exit. The Guardia’s at times retrieve back to their positions alongside the road, laughing with each other when people start to fight, make pictures, joke with carriers while the next moment they push them roughly back in place, kick down fridges or roll away the small skateboards that are used for transportation. They threaten people with their stick or with their stanley knife, at times they cut their bags open. “Because they are destroying the line”, the guy standing next to me says. Still though, the real dirty work is done by the seven dozen helpers in yellow jackets. They run like sheep dogs on the backs and goods of the porteadores, slap people in the face, kick and shout. I talk to an old woman who offers me her water bottle. She tells me that this is her 3rd time today. She will go on until there is no more merchandise. With a soft growl she gets up from the stone, bows her body to a 90 degree angle and start wobbling with a heavy pack on her back. Somebody places another one on top. She carefully walks to the line, eyes on the ground. She takes a shortcut and I hope she does not get hit while she makes her way through the crowd.

Figure 7 Barrio Chino. Image by José Colon

Barrio Chino is a zone of warehouses on the outskirts of Melilla. The porteadores (also called mule women by the media) daily make their way into the enclave without a visa - similar to the day laborers described in chapter 3. ‘Comercio atípico’ it is formally called. The illicit trade and big streams of people that enter the enclave daily is confusing to say the least. A huge amount of goods move out without Spanish controls whatsoever, while Moroccan forces are meant to restrain any illicit movement of people on their side. The channeling of the border trade – a result of the fortification of the fences - has boosted business. However, the point of tension lies rather in its humiliating effect on the workers. Surveilling the atypical trade is one of the other duties of the Guardia Civil in Melilla. They were occupied with other civil security matters, more off-sight, making the Guardia’s work ever more so ambivalent. The signs of amusement in some of the Guardia’s actions and facial expressions cannot be ignored, nor can their legit use of force. It is a show. While one moment the Guardia’s would hang in the shade with some carriers, talking and handing out water bottles, the next moment they raise their voices, bully and beat, make pictures of fights or showing off their power by suddenly closing the border, delaying the porteadores. One Guardia tells me how much he hates this part of his job. “You know, I am here to protect Melillan citizens. Not guarding this mess”. The disgrace in forcing people through the improvised corridors, kicking them back in line, affected the Moroccan nationals rather than the Melillan citizens. As a consequence, in 2010, Moroccan activists claimed racist mistreatment of their fellow citizens at the Melillan border. The importation of cement, bricks and fresh products was blocked and activists plastered posters across the border area, accusing Spanish policewomen of insulting its citizens. In the meantime, an influx of clandestine migrants appeared at Melilla’s fences at a rate not seen in years. Speculations were circulating about Morocco letting them through. Furthermore, Morocco accused the Guardia Civil of abandoning sub-Saharan migrants outside the coast of Ceuta52. Despite the good economic relations between the two states – at least in the enclaves – and the amounts of European aid towards Morocco, it was proved again that the status of Ceuta and Melilla, as well as of Western Sahara, remained sensitive topics. Smaller issues were added to these political issues. Next to the supposed mistreatment of the porteadores and merchants the fence was endangering the old order of “small

52 http://www.jeuneafrique.com/155236/politique/madrid-abandonne-des-immigr-s-subsahariens-pr-s-des-c-tes-marocaines/ 56

bribes and big gains, the life blood of the frontiersmen” (Andersson, 2014:167). For the protesters, the Spanish policewomen were a convenient target in representing Europeanization of Melilla’s border. Meanwhile, the migrants could serve as a weapon to enforce their aims. Since 2010, another group has started to mingle in the crowds around the border. Iraqis, Palestinians but especially Syrians fleeing conflict see Melilla as stepping stone to Europe. Many disguise as Moroccan traders, easily blended in the crowds at Barrio Chino with fake Spanish identity cards. Others buy Moroccan passports in Nador and Beni Enzar for several thousands of euros. Saleh, a 33 year old man from Sweida, travelled overland to Algeria where he met some smugglers who brought him to Nador. He got caught in a pre-defined routine of migration, meeting people along the way from various African countries. Many stories point to the use of the clandestine route. Once in Nador he bought a fake ID card and employed the benefits of the Schengen agreement which, as said before, enabled Moroccans from the surrounding regions to enter Melilla without a visa. Others who were not able to obtain a foreign passport, paid the Moroccan police to cross into Melilla. On the other side of the Melilla border crossing, in Morocco, groups of Syrian families are waiting in Beni Enzar, where the Spanish authorities have set up a consulate to process asylum requests. According to Frontex, the instalment of such offices has acted as pull factor for Syrian asylum seekers to seek asylum in Spain via Melilla. Although Europe’s asylum policies implicates that they can – successfully – ask for asylum it seems that there is something going on. Some say – especially political opposites and activistis53- that there is an agreement settled between Spain and Morocco. While this has not been officially stated rumours go around that a quota of arrivals has been set. A couple dozen Syrians are supposed to be selected each day according to how much they can pay and are allowed to cross the border. Whether or not this is true, it would explain the amount of people entering Melilla via unofficial routes. In guarding against the migrant hordes, the fences had attracted people with differing grievances. The spectacle was no longer reserved for border security and their “illegal” subjects. Other groups act in a dissonant concert across the valla. As argued above, journalist and ngo’s, but also Moroccan merchants, the Alis who placed their sentry boxes on the no-man’s-land between Morocco and Melilla, the porteadores at Barrio Chino and activists protesting against the EU border were mingling themselves onto the spectacle stage for their own purposes. The stakes became higher as more groups were drawn into its embrace. Sometimes, they would be ready to make their move into the spectacle. Some migrants would cross the border en masse creating a media fanfare where journalists stand ready to add to the existing border imagery. Others, like Walters, would silently and calculated take a backstage entrance. Unwelcome actors, Moroccan nationalists and activists, were also ready to jump onto the stage when they see their chances. Undocumented youngsters from Algeria and Morocco were gathering in groups near the port and since last year, Syrian refugees now mingled in the border crowds, entering with fake Moroccan passports. They all became participants in the network created by an ever-more intricate anti-migration barricade. The insatiable valla kept growing and the spectacle unfolding in its shadow was no longer under the control of its presumed directors. Conclusion: bordering at the border-crossing This chapter has shown how Melilla has become a space for the production of the spectacle, where its fences act as a catalyst in a militarized alignment of fence technology, Moroccan forces, Guardia’s,

53 Jon Inarritu, a Basque politician recently asked: ‘What is the reason that Morocco is preventing the access to Syrian refugees to the asylum office of Melilla? Is there an agreement between the Kingdom of Spain and the Kingdom of Morocco in this respect?” 57

journalists and migrants. Unlike at sea, the mixing of logics between patrolling and rescuing is hidden from view and the show of enforcement is the fence in itself, the promise of absolute separation. Its steel divide and the presence of force show how the fence is upholding its ability to keep unwanted outsiders out, with the Guardia’s as its big defenders. The border crossing is at the heart of the spectacle, where border policing performatively solidifies the border in a grand gesture of exclusion. It has shown how the anti-migration law dictates the Guardia’s legitimacy to act at the fences. It lies in the (legal) sentences pronounced in the readmission agreement between Morocco and Spain and the formal backup the government gave to colonel Villaseñor after sending migrants back to Morocco. Through the interplay between enforcement and an excess of discourses and images the border spectacle produces migrant ‘illegality’ as a self-evident and unique ‘fact’, generated by its own supposed act of violation. Then again, this big exclusion of a minority few – the very reason these fences were installed - has not really materialized. During my time in Melilla not a single attempt has been made to cross the ‘border of borders’. Coming back to the words of my roommate: the border was indeed a phony and the fences, in itself, are indeed just fences. There were no hordes of migrants knocking on its doors, the threat has not materialized, although the border spectacle implies something else. Furthermore: it does not seal off Melilla. While certain types of flow are actively blocked, others are allowed. A wide range of actors – whether or not playing a part in the spectacle – are continuously breaching the fences, sucked into the border’s orbit. The spectacle then – as it did in the borderlands – has some unexpected consequences. As the next chapter will show border functions continue to take place inside the border which lead to a transformation of the landscape.

Interlude It is a hot summer day when Saleh arrives at the CETI. The shower has washed away the dirt he gathered from the past couple of months since he left his home town in Syria. The donated ‘Addadis’ tracksuit smells like soap as he walks the camp but is soon replaced by the intense smell of bodily odors, chlorine and fried potatoes . An immediate sense of oppressive feeling overcomes him, of being in a space with too many people. People sit, walk and talk everywhere. Plastic chairs are placed in front of the dormitories; a pop-up barbershop has been installed near the entrance of the canteen. He looks inside one of the dormitories: four bunks, eight beds in total. Some rooms count more than eight people as children would sleep in the same bed as their mother. He frowns at the look of the women inside. “Don’t worry,” the social worker tells him, “we have separate rooms for men and women”. The canvas that functions as door is open to prevent the oxygen to run out. The room, exposed to the scorching sun, was alternately hot. Black mold stains were spread in the corners of the ceiling. Privacy is secured by sheets tied to the bunks’ poles. The room further contains a small table, metal cupboards with locks bought from cheap Chinese shops. Piled up luggage fills the floor underneath the bed and the corners of the mattresses. He looks at the children in the paved street, some of them wearing worn out clothes, undressed or walking bare feet. While residents would receive clothes from the CETI, these would likely end up untouched in big suitcases, as a preparation for the day they go. Saleh walks to his bunkbed in a room he shares with seven other men. He sits down and sighs. The green camp card that was handed over to him lies in his lap.

Chapter 5 – Stuck in limbo A never-ending present

“Don’t forget that their biggest desire is to leave as soon as possible, they don’t care about anything else” - Social worker in the CETI54

The previous chapters focused on the bordering practices and the unfolding spectacle at the Melillan- Moroccan border. The asaltos that have reconfigured the policing of the fences had also sparked a new strategy for fighting illegal migration within the enclave. A politics of containment was born as a necessary measure to avoid making Melilla a stepping stone to the peninsula. This chapter will move on to the bordering mechanisms when one hits Melillan space and will show how the enclave unfolds as a world of multiple fences. As border theorists have argued how borders and fences can shut out the unwanted, they can also keep people in. Here, migrants become part of a new stage in ‘migranthood’. The entrapment and severe tension this creates will be the focus of this chapter. This chapter will show the contradictory interplay between camp space and city space. Furthermore, the prominence of the fence’s materialisation is now of less importance: the way the border is lived and experienced now rather concerns

The CETI The majority of those who manage to cross the border usually stay in the CETI – the temporary reception centre for immigrants – which is separated from the rest of Melilla by acres of forested hills and some miles of road. It is run by the Spanish Ministry of Employment and Social Security. Here, their cases will first be processed, regardless of whether their case is one of asylum or possible deportation. In the summer of 2015 the CETI counts an amount of around 1700 residents, while having the capacity for 480 people. However, as several people have pointed out, this has always been the case. Since the arrival of large groups of migrants since 2005 the CETI has been structurally overcrowded, although now more than ever before due to the amount of Syrians (who make up almost 80% of the current population). In response, the army has been installing tents and provides “military rations” whenever the CETI management cannot keep up with the need for food. This summer, a steady trickle of new residents are entering the camp. Mostly Syrians –unclear if they were sent across the border by Morocco-, and some Algerian and sub-Saharan migrants who had been rescued on sea. Clear though was that there was some kind of tension going on at the border, and the camp was growing more and more. The arrival at the CETI always follows clear and formal procedures: a police visit from downhill, then a shower, followed by a health check. The black ink from the TB test still on the upper arm fingertips are pressed on a scanner for registration, a snapping camera –the starting material for the dossier has been collected. The unknown migrant has suddenly become categorize-able. Next, they would meet with a social worker who explains the running of the camp: no drugs, no weapons, some information about classes to attend. Finally, they would be handed over a green identity card, their only form of identification in the enclave with which they could enter and leave the CETI. Although the formal practices after arrival have not changed in recent years, the ordered welcome in the CETI soon

54 Informal conversation, 05-07-2015 59

dissipates when one enters the centre. The physical tension of overpopulation is described by a social worker:

“The whole thing is out of control. The number of people entering is huge. It’s very difficult to work with them. We have no material means, no manpower, the language barrier is enormous. When they enter the CETI, we are there. When there is a fight, we are there. When they have questions, we are there. We get all the shit over us. I am running all day, they are constantly clinging to me. I’m always leaving work with the feeling that I have not done enough. It’s so frustrating55”.

The workload of the camp staff is high, where a group of 9 social workers and an equal number of psychologist take care of the mental- and practical work of around 1700 residents. Although the camp’s capacity has been high ever since the influx of sub-Saharans since 2005 (at the time, about 600-700 people lived in the CETI), the current situation has reached new levels. Inside the CETI courses have been abolished, people are visible bored and frustrated. Occasionally there are fights between residents. One Guardia told me

“many problems the Syrians have, you get a micro-cosmos of that in the camp. Whatever they are fighting about over there they start to fight over here56”.

It now looks like the residents in the CETI have been divided in two groups: the African ‘illegal’ migrants and the Syrian (and to a lesser extent Palestinian) asylum seekers, who are now attracting more and more political- and media attention. “I guess I am one of the last morenos who attacked the fences”. Jakab sniffles when he says “my race is dying”. I meet Jakab, together with his friend Utibe, at the Lidl supermarket, which is located a few minutes down the road near the CETI. They stand near the store’s entrance, offering people to carry their groceries to the car in exchange for some money. They have been in Melilla for about two years and their story reflects the changing experience of being in ‘Europe’ since the arrival of the Syrians. Make-believe documents, waiting and phony freedom The sub-Saharan residents of the CETI are an “exclusive crowd”, as one ngo worker calls them, referring to the selectivity of the border crossing. They have survived the migratory route, while many of their co-travelers had died in the desert, have been deported to Morocco’s outskirts or found alternative ways to Europe. For many migrants, being one the road and crossing borders without assistance was something to be proud of, it defined them as “global travelers”, as Jakab called himself, similar to Utibe self-dubbing as an “adventurer”. Their success depended on luck, skill and knowing how to apply the ‘sixth sense’, the fence became the final assessment to test ones eagerness, cunningness and bodily strategies. Behind them - in Nador, Oujda or Mount Gurugú - the violence of the borderlands they have trudged through for months or years; ahead, a threshold between worlds and the promise of freedom. For many, the border crossing is the moment their journey has been building towards. The last obstacle. On the other side their prize would await them, fortune would be smiling at them, the land of promises and freedom, reserved for a small minority. Jakab takes me along his memory of arriving in the CETI. He explains how he felt “utterly and utterly happy, like arriving at an unfamiliar home57”.

55 Interview, 16-07-2015 56 Informal conversation, 17-07-2015 57 Interview, 03-08-2015 60

He finally entered “Europe”, this tucked away place with a strange, disorderly mix of African youth, European music, laundry drying everywhere, bunks, toilets, a canteen. It didn’t take long before this first experience and his idea of a “clean, neat and modern Europe” was swiftly replaced by the loud voices emanating from wide-open doors at night, the view on the CETI bars and the overarching border fence and the waiting. Especially the waiting. The road-weary feeling was diminishing together with his joy each step he took further in CETI life. Like Jakab and Utibe, other migrants soon found out that they just reached a new level in ‘migranthood’, one that unfolds in what researchers have called a limbo: characterized by waiting and a consequent all-pervasive uncertainty. The novelty of arriving in Europe wears off for many migrants and the new ‘temporary’ life in the CETI became an endless cycle of waiting and routine, characterized by paperwork, make-believe promises. “Weeks became months. Some people literally got crazy”, Jakab tells me. After arrival asylum seekers receive a yellow card that is valid in all of Spain – so the card sais – and make the paperless travelers suddenly documented. However, since Spain’s new asylum law the police no longer accepts the cards as documentation in port which make the yellow card rather a what anthropologists have called “make-believe document”, or an illusory form of state-produced certification (Andersson, 2014:218). In other words, Melilla’s asylum seekers still remained completely undocumented and contained within Melilla. This fact proved a key frustration for many residents. In the camps they would complain about it at any possible occasion: why, if our tarjetas are valid in all of Spain, can we not travel to the peninsula? Before, the yellow card was like a passport to the peninsula. Camp procedures demand clarity, categorizable identities. The work of the CETI staff depended on producing entry cards, filling in of forms, collecting data, calling out names through the microphone – which functions as a sense of daily rhythm and purpose. They would go to the reception, press the red button and call out names for classes or meetings. To great hilarity of the residents, migrants would sometimes take their chances and grab the microphone, calling out names themselves. Most of the time, nobody would answer the calls simply because they haven’t memorized their names yet. “Everybody is lying about their names, they have been assigned by their smugglers58”. I learned soon enough that I rather not ask for names and backgrounds as these questions would stay rather unanswered, the truth lying somewhere in-between the brief silence before answering Mamadou as ones name, or Cameroon as ones country. A split-second in which their thoughts and doubts were bundled. The silence was accompanied by a slight pursing of the lips, hinting at the fear of not being believed. But they all lied, they all invented names and nationality, according to what might take them to the peninsula: inventing diseases; claiming to be of a certain nationality that would likely lead to expulsion; sudden pregnant bellies. By keeping migrants inside the camp, their immobility served to collect data on them. Everything was organized to collect their names, routes, backgrounds, nationalities. But the lies and pauses in conversations, the unanswered microphone calls were symptoms of the empty time many migrants faced in Melilla. Paperwork was such another impression of progress and purpose. After arrival, they would receive a range of papers: their temporary identification number (NIP), handed over to them by the police; a medical card, listing the compulsory medical tests and some remarks by the camp clinic; some information regarding their rights to claim asylum ; a thin slip with the camp regulations; a note on compulsory Spanish class; and a protocol indicating the compulsory meetings, each to be stamp marked after attendance. The work in the CETI became a game of guessing, punishing, pushing papers. To great frustration of both the workers and the residents. It has become part of a new exclusion

58 Interview with social worker, 05-08-2015 61

strategy. With the fortification of Melilla’s outer border, to keep certain people out, “illegal migration” was now being fought within the enclave. “All I want to do is work”, Jakab sighed. He has friends in southern Spain, working in greenhouses; in Marseille, London. Like Jakab, many migrants are aware of their social value on the labor and consumer markets. In the past ten years the CETI has become a “sorting center” or labor reservoir. Many were send to the peninsula during the economic boom, with an expulsion order (Andersson, 2014:177). As critical migration scholars such as De Genova (2013) and De Haas have argued, such sorting centers regulate the flux of people according to the inconsistent needs of the European labor market. I have argued how the Melillan border can be regarded as a spectacle, one that creates a scene of exclusion. That what is ob/off-scene about this is the largely unknown, or at least unspoken, fact of active importation of “undocumented” migrant labor, under the conditions that are most favorable for capital, and excruciating difficult for migrant workers (ibid.). Melilla’s bordering practices are a staging of a need to hold back illegal migrants, while in fact undocumented migrant labor is imported. Now, the market seems closed: a politics of containment seals off the enclave.

What happens inside the CETI, the waiting, the overpopulation, the fights, are most of the time contained within the centre’s walls. Journalists and researchers are allowed only in a small numbers. The residents are hidden from view and left up to the camp’s regulations, the guard’s glances, the overworked staff. The latter has trouble dealing with the amount of residents, their questions, medical issues, legal procedures and complaints. Various psychologists and social workers express how the heavy workload prevents them from doing their real job. Penalties are filed by social workers for bad behaviour, and some days that seems the only thing they do. “They don’t want to stay here, they don’t want to learn Spanish, they basically don’t want to do anything. They want to leave”. Perhaps it is what Robert Desjarlais (1994) in his research on the homeless mentally ill, described as “the pragmatics of time that comes with living in shelters”. Camp life was triggering a bodily unease, expressed by one migrant as follows:

“I feel like doing nothing. I am so tired and lazy, I don’t know why. I just want to sleep. It’s not the heat, I’m used to the heat. Perhaps it is the food. But it doesn’t matter because I cannot do anything about it. They just give it to us”59.

Similar to other residents he complained about having too many thoughts in his head. “It’s heavy, you know”, he sighs while he lies his hands on his head. Desjarlais writes: “you need to live one day at a time and not get ahead of yourself and where nobody does anything, fixes time as a diffuse and sporadic order”. As a result, the combination between this empty, heavy time is reinforced by the fact that migrants were not permitted to join the municipal register, which meant the time they spent here did not count. Becoming socially embedded in Spain (‘arraigo social’) meant that migrants could apply for a residence permit if they were able to prove that they had lived in the country for three years. Furthermore, the endless waiting became more frustrating with the arrival of Syrian asylum seekers. For Utibe, this was his second time in Melilla and he knew the “drill”. His attempt to raft his way to the peninsula was crushed by a commercial ship who had handed him over to the Salvamento Marítimo, who brought him to Melilla. While he was telling me his story he was visibly frustrated. During his first attempt, he was deported back to Nigeria. He had set out again and was on the road for the following couple of years before ending up in Melilla again.

59 Interview, 12-08-2015 62

“You know, it took me three years to make it to Melilla. What a waste! I wanted to go to Malaga. They [the Syrians red.] can just cross the official border without anybody noticing! And now they are here maybe a few months. They can take the boat to Europe!60”

We talk about it while we are sitting beneath an Eucalyptus tree outside the center. He glances at a Syrian family nearby, a mixture of scents penetrates our nostrils. The Syrians who arrive in Melilla usually spend two to three months there before being taken to mainland Spain. Here they will wait as their legal status is being reviewed, a process that can take more than 18 months. Every Wednesday about 200 are transported to Malaga where they are handed over to the Red Cross, the Spanish Catholic Commission Association for Migration or the Spanish omission for Refugee Aid. I can image Utibe’s frustration, it must be a bitter feeling to see hundreds of people depart while you leave behind in this place that, in his words, “stops thoughts and imagination”. No one can tell how long they would have to wait at the CETI, and few know what would greet them when they leave for mainland Spain – a voyage referred to as the salida, the exit. However, the last part is not really of concern. “Here we do nothing. It eats me up inside. I am an adventurer, I am used to struggle for survival. Here it’s like, I don’t know, like Melilla is my babysitter”.

Box 5 A social worker’s story

In 2010, in response to the lack of room and privacy inside the CETI, a display of shacks have been built near Los Pinos so people could get intimate with each other, cook their meals, have a place to stay outside the camp. Sub-Saharans, Nigerians, they all started to build their own shacks from garbage and wood. Some would sleep there six, sometimes seven days a week. There was prostitution, drugs, drinking going on. It started to become the underworld basically, but not only bad stuff. You have to understand they come from their own travelling background, they have a lot shit going on. That year, in 2012, two people got locked in and burnt to death in one of the shacks. They were immigrants, so the police didn’t put much effort in finding out if it was accidentally or on purpose but we all suspected it was the latter. What happened was that one of them was punished. When I started in the CETI, six years before the incident, I was a social mediator. It was my dream job. I went from that to become a punisher. That was our role: playing police. We starting doing things we were not supposed to do: collecting their ID cards so that they cannot leave the centre. Basically restricting their freedom of movement. But it is the only punishment you can give them. So, in 2012, the guy was banished from the camp. He had a wife and a little baby and they were having an argument. It was a situation of domestic violence you know. The conflict was on a Thursday. He had done something to her, threaten her or something. So we did an intervention and drove him out the CETI. He was told to come back the next day at 6.00 pm to speak to a mediadora (mediator). That would be me. He came at 9.30 in the evening. He was at the door, drunk, standing there with his bicycle in his hand. I told him that I would not speak to him. It didn’t matter if he was drunk or not, the agreement was 6.00. So he left, went to one of the shacks and that night he got locked in with another man. They burnt together with the shack. I basically killed a guy. You know, there is a collective fever that is very easy to start within the African population. Perhaps it is common to other ethnic groups as well, I don’t know. In their collective fever they just demonize somebody. It goes from one to the next in minutes. They did that to me, because I had prevented the guy from entering the camp. One day, 200 hundred were assaulting the offices. It was a fucking nightmare. I have never looked at my job the same way after. Me and my group did not get any help, no therapy no nothing. We took our own measures and did our shifts in pares so we would never be working alone. I was terrified”.

60 Interview, 04-08-2015 63

Return of the camp The CETI – by many called ‘the camp’ or ‘trampa’ (trap) – is a machine of surveillance and documentation. To enter, one has to get passed the turnstiles, guarded by a couple of Guardia’s, show ones id-card and press ones fingers on a reader. Being a resident you can freely come and go before the gates close at night by showing a green camp card. For journalists, researchers, students and other interested access proved slightly more difficult. I had to apply for a specific camp card -a key cord with my name and the expiration date- declare that I would not take any pictures, write down names, obstruct people’s work and that I would leave before dark. I was allowed access only for a couple of weeks, because that would provide me with “sufficient time to gather my data”. Many times, migrants would laugh when they saw me discussing access at the gates. “You are more checked upon than we are”. In calling the CETI “the camp”, migrants explicitly compared the CETI to the refugee camps of Africa. While many of them have never been in an actual refugee camp, their visualization and comparison are interesting. In his ethnographic case studies, Michel Agiers explores everyday life in numerous refugee camps in Africa and the West Bank. He describes how camp life is characterized by a state of permanent precariousness and an enduring present and where care and control interact in intricate ways through what he calls humanitarian government (2011). Behind the screen of protection and rescue, humanitarian intervention borders on control and policing and closes the gate of a safer and healthier world to others, the deemed undesirables (ibid.). Humanitarian action implements a state of perpetual emergency which does not deliver a radical change. Rather, they become people out of place, an aberration in the “national order of things” (Malkki, 2012:4). Therefore, they are relegated to the margins, the threshold of their host society. It is on this threshold that camp residents come to be constituted as a refugee, that peculiar contemporary “object of knowledge and control” in humanitarian government. The CETI camp similarly works upon its reluctant residents. Unlike the segregation by nationality often common in refugee administrations (Malkki, 1995), in Melilla nationalities are purposefully mixed to avoid creating “negative communalism”. The spatiality of the camp, the assigning of non-negotiable bunks, breaking close-knit ethnic and linguistic groups, maybe was a liberal form of organizing, but also forced individualism, making residents substitutable, anonymous and replaceable. Not necessarily intentional, but this led to a crafting and reconfiguration of residents as generic ‘illegal immigrants’ often sought for by journalists, researchers and politicians. Agier also commented on what has been referred to as a “return of the camps” to the borders of Europe, as well as a worldwide “extension and greater sophistication of various forms of camps that make up a mechanism for keeping away undesirables and foreigners of all kinds – refugees, displaced, ‘rejected’” (2011:4). This is done for example through sophisticated control systems, the construction of high barriers, waiting zones, detention centres, asylum centres or through acts of expelling or sudden rights changes. As seen in the previous chapters, the sending back of ‘illegals’ to the Algerian or Moroccan desert for example, abandoned and left to die, is a case in point. While no longer serve to “keep vulnerable refugees alive”, it rather functions to park and guard all kinds of undesirable populations. As argued earlier in this thesis, the border then comes to be located wherever an ‘undesirable’ is identified. Again, as I explored in chapter 3, the clandestine migrant becomes subject to a state of exception, embodied in the modern-day homo sacer, it could be argued. While not exposing them (at least not explicitly) to the rather distressing lens of death, the border regime inside Melilla is actively producing ‘illegality’ as a tool for sustaining migrants’ vulnerability and tractability. One critical social worker took this point a bit further, arguing in almost Baumanesque choice of words that Melilla – and the CETI for that matter – has become a dumping site of “Europe’s unwanted”.

Although this discussion lies beyond the scope of this thesis, in the end, the ‘return of the camps’ adds up to the consolidating between the two greatest categories that are being reified: “a clean, healthy and visible world” on the one hand; on the other, the worlds ’residual ‘remnants’” (Agier, 2011:4), or waste, in Bauman’s words. Dark, diseased and invisible. The CETI is not creating the refugee role so many travelers aspired, but rather produces a more aberrant one, that of the illegal immigrant. As they have already been the prime objects of enquiry, intervention and pity, they would now become Europe’s most abject Other, fully formed “illegal immigrants”. This role of the abject Other, assigned through the logic of the camp, was also exaggerated by migrants embodying and confirming the fears and stereotypes of this Other that was lodged deep in the Western “geography of imagination”. Rather than being tolerated and contained, they now became rejected and deportable – a process that already started in the Moroccan borderlands. They became the incarnation of European fears of the not-so-noble savage already glimpsed at the enclaves’ fences: wild, dangerous and out of control. As in prisons and asylums their previous adventurer selves were eradicated, something that was also reflected in Jakabs words. They were supposed to confine to an institutional order and as in such institutions, their recalcitrance would be interpreted along moralistic lines suitable to the authorities’ objectives. the lines between inside and outside did not really matter. Migrants could be punished for any misdemeanour, either to be shut inside or banished from the camp ( example Box 5). Their entrapment and immobility makes Melilla a migration test site for a variety of actors. Readily available for police raids, reporters seeking stories, humanitarians in search of beneficiaries, diplomats enlisted to identify people for deportation, and researchers who view the CETI as a what Agier calls “localized social microcosm”, studying the relations between different categories of people, their histories and respective localizations on the site. For Melilla and the EU, the insecurity, the waiting, their immobility have become strategies in migration regulation. This obsession with migration and the realities it helped create, produced and controlled “illegality” and “the migrant”. Increasingly so, the influx of Syrians in the CETI has put new pressure on the camp staff. Gaby, a social worker in the CETI and her story described in box 5 argues how many officials, citizens and CETI-staff have an increased distrust in its residents. Not only do the stories of Nigerian mafias circulate widely, “bad people are very where, also and maybe especially so in times of crises”. With this she refers to the Syrians, among which are also mafia groups. “Still,” she argues, “you can better speak of them as victims, not illegals or terrorists”. Outside the CETI Maybe it was the claustrophobia that was creeping in. The very presence of the border is felt everywhere inside Melilla. It was in the visibility of the border forces all over the city. It was in the early morning runs where I would be forced to turn back after 15 minutes of running as I almost literally bumped against the southern valla. Perhaps because I took the conversation of the fences everywhere with me that the thought of being entrapped started to creep in on me. Melilla is this enclosed space where tensions between religions could easily clash; the regular scuffles on the street and the rumors about undercover police and informers among critical aid workers and migrants61.

For the migrants this feeling of enclosedness was in a very concrete sense. The CETI proved a prison in itself, but in fact, it was Melilla as a whole that functioned as a detention center. The border space extended well beyond its brick walls. Every exit and entrance is blocked, and the manners to seal it off

61 Personal note, 1-9-2015 65

was introduced in the tiniest of breaches and cracks. However, as observed by Agier “beyond the legal and political exceptionality, real life is constructed in the camps as a social life that is largely resilient, and in its own way, also transformative” (2011:86). Outside the CETI a different reality unfolds. Next to the shacks in 2012, Utibe and Jakab who make their living near the Lidl, and Walters who cleans cars in barrio Hipódromo, one kilometer further, along the Melillan coast, a similar but yet distinct situation occurs. Not sub-Saharan Africans or Syrians make up the city’s embodied unwanted, but young boys, mainly Moroccan and Algerian, residing on the streets in the old city. For both of them, Melilla is an entrapment, another step – or rather obstacle – on their way to the ‘real Europe’, as Nour – a 16 year old boy from Nador I met at the harbor - called it. As the case of the CETI already suggested, being inside or outside did not really matter, people were stuck in the tight time-space surveillance of the enclave. The case of the youngsters from Morocco and Algeria prove exemplary for this. These boys, most of them between 10 and 18 years old, unwilling to confine to the logics of the youth holding center, seek their chances at the harbor where they try to hop on the transmediteranea ships that depart to Malaga at midnight. Minutes before departure and you will see dark shadow behind the palm trees. Swiftly moving from one to the next. Then behind the police office, past the barrier of the parking lot they will move closer and closer to the huge ship. The only way in is by climbing the thick ropes that hang down. By the time they have reached this, a police officer will likely spot them, chasing them back to Ciudad Vieja.

Their situation is unknown and mostly invisible to the authorities and Melilla’s citizens. Many of them sniff glue. They sleep on the streets and in the caves near the beaches. My roommate is one out of four people who tries to take care of them, providing them with meals whenever they can afford it. Occasionally she takes them home where they would sleep on the sofa or in her bed. One time we had to clean the whole house and wash our hair with anti-lice shampoo. With the amount of migrants from sub-Saharan migrants decreasing this group of youngsters seem to be the new target of Melilla’s bordering practices. While the sounds of helicopters, wailing sirens and rubber speedboats used to mean possible threats of migrants approaches Melilla’s border, now they have become part of a conjoint between Guardia Civil, the local- and national police to localize and intercept “illegal” street childeren. The practice of “cleaning the street”, as one Guardia called it, takes strange forms. In august 2015 the Local Security Board set up an action to prevent them from wandering the street. All night helicopters were circling above the city. My roommate was taken to the police station and interrogated for the whole night. She was accused of teaching the children to steal mobile phones. They caught 70 boys who were brought to the Moroccan border. Other times, I would meet the boys who have had their well-taken-care-off Ronaldo-coiffed hair suddenly shaved or walking around shoeless, both the result of the bullying practices of the police. The situation seems absurd. On my last day in Melilla I went back to the light tower were I saw the “Osama Libertad” graffiti sign on my first day. The boy fell down and died after climbing the steel fence beside the light tower in order to reach the rocky beaches below: a shortcut to the harbor. Ever since a Guardia Civil car was guarding the light tower, and new fences were installed on both sides.

The night after the joint action, I met with a boy I regularly saw at the beach. We talked about the events of that night. “Yeah well, that’s what they do”. After a few minutes he interrupted our conversation. “If you don’t mind, I am going now”. He left me behind and walked towards the entrance of the harbor.

Conclusion Locked in or locked outside the CETI, it does not matter: the divide between inside and outside is flexible, and the police could reach both those banished into los pinos, those stuck inside or those hiding in the harbour area. Melilla having multiple fences: the high-tech valla separating the European Union from Morocco around a bend in the border road; the fence around the migrant camp (CETI) downhill and the mesh shielding the golf course next door; the strangely placed pieces of fence at the light tower and the harbor area. The cases of the refugees and migrants in the CETI, and the youngsters on the street all point to something similar. Their daily coping mechanisms with the endless waiting and insecurity about their future translated in a variety of strategies of escape. However, often they were illusory. The sub-Saharan migrants were marked by their physical appearance and could be apprehended at any time. As was the case at the border crossing where they, unlike Syrian refugees with fake passports or the swift youngsters who would just make a run for it, were forced to make the spectacularized entry by breaching the fences or in car seats. Again, the migrants that eventually stranded in Melilla has created a situation that fluctuated between indifference and fascination. A game of make-believe freedom, harassment and neglect. Melilla seemed to regulate migrants as a population and disciplining them as bodies, similar to the “biopolitical” account of Michel Foucault. Their confinement, their temporary yet inescapable life sharply contrasted with the hope and perseverance that mark their words when talking about promising Europe. The control over people’s lives is enacted in intended, all-encompassing and de-humanizing manners.

Conclusion : Embodying borders Contemporary border studies have been increasingly focusing on the scattered and dispersed characters of borders. Borders have become less dependent on their fixity in space and continuity in time. Instead, they have become more immaterial, much less visible and are characterized by an increasing elusiveness. Furthermore, as argued in chapter 1, border studies has opened up possibilities for questioning the rationales behind everyday border-making. Borders are to be understood not as a given, but as an emergence through socio-political border-making, or bordering. It is from this view point I wanted to explore the ‘border from the border’. Some borders stand out from others both for their visibility and for their fixity in space and continuity in time; both for their materiality and for the fact that a large number of border functions are concentrated and take place there rather than – or in addition to – elsewhere. The border line still remains crucially important for the (self-)representation of territorial power – whether the power of a nation state like Spain, or the supranational power of political entities like the EU. Especially regarding migration control. While the practical function of migration management may be delocalized –at least partially, the most theatrical borders of migration control are in fact located along the official demarcation line of EU borders, and as I observed, in Melilla. Issues of security and migration, which are of national importance, are found in borderlands in sharper relief. This thesis has set out to explore the bordering practices at a particular section of the European Union: the Spanish-Moroccan border at Melilla. In this thesis I set out to answer the following research question:

How and to what effect do processes of embodiment shape the everyday realities of the EU-African border in Melilla?

This question is concerned with analysing the processes that turn specific places – in this case Melilla – into border. My starting observation in studying bordering was the massive state apparatus of the boundary, and the overt presence of force at the Spanish-Moroccan border. Many commentators and viewers have depicted the Spanish border as an iconic example of “Fortress Europe”, as to the increasing prominence of images of the high seas patrols, the rugged landscapes in the borderlands and the amount of migrants breaching its fences. Its material embodiment reflects a classical, but no less misleading, definition of the border as a “fixed, inert, and non-dialectical object”, bearing the weight of control (Zaoitti, 2011). Such borders, in the words of Cuttatti, are “definitively more ‘border’ than others” (2014:212). The observations and interviews have shown that the power of the Spanish- Moroccan border lies in its tangibility, in the specific places where border functions are concentrated and made visible, the physicality of border posts, the geography of the enclave, and the supply of infrastructure and manpower.

Chapter 2 has introduced Melilla’s ‘borderness’ and the various bordering processes that underlie Melilla’s fortification. The Melillan case shows how the enclave has gradually been transformed and actively made into a border of the most typical type, the quintessential embodiment of the EU border, a monumental appearance. It is were certain political choices – restrictive immigration policies, the legal convenience of considering Melilla a ‘border zone’, externalised border controls and bilateral agreements between Morocco and Spain – that concentrated the European border on the Spanish enclave, thus increasing its degree of ‘borderness’. This process goes hand in hand with a border spectacle, transforming Melilla into a theatre, a play on which the border becomes enacted. Migration has been presented as an emergency in which migrants have been disqualified in systematic ways and converted into “illegal” and deportable migrants. The border spectacle is a

powerful display of the frontier. Its functioning materializes in the iconography of the border operations, in the technology of the fence, and in the make-believe documents of the CETI. Border guards, migrants, asylum seekers and ngo workers are caught in its embrace. The “illegal migrant”, especially when black and male, has become a massing threat at the borders, defined by the stigma and promise of mobility yet regularly rendered immobile. Their skin and clothes makes them visible, but as is the case with the menores, they are endowed with an authority- eluding invisibility. The Syrian asylum seeker, making use of the predefined routes its sub-Saharan forbearers have created, is, thanks to their visual appearance and European politics, rather an object of rescue.

The border imagery though, is limited and circumscribed. The extraction of such images are but a part of the complex realities that are at heart of this border spectacle. Noises, ambivalence, the smells and feelings which cannot be captured on-screen. These backstage features highlight how the spectacle is incomplete, conflictive, and always in excess. For the most mixing in the crossing is that which escapes the spectacle. Furthermore, I have tried to describe the staging of Melilla’s borderness, but in equal manners also alternative stories and the varying realities this helped create. Embodiment has been used as a methodological frame that takes the role of the body as a medium for lived meanings and through which I could better understand the border phenomenon at hand. Such a perspective proved insightful for two reasons. First, the bordering practices at the border are increasingly focused on the body. This can be traced to the change in focus of security concerns. These have been increasingly understood as separated from the institutions of the state and more directly connected to everyday life. There is now a more direct and personal connection between the security threat – migration – and the individual. As a result, risk-based border securitization practices have become increasingly focused on the human body, the smallest and most personal of spaces. In this case, the body of the clandestine migrant. Following this logic, bodies are imagined as spaces to inscribe borders on. The person’s identity has become a risk predictor; migrants the ultimate securitized subjects, being monitored, tracked, identified and forged into illegal categories. They appear on screens, in newspapers. As a consequence, unmitigated control becomes impossible. The body has remained a loosely governed frontier space, as it can be trespassed, tolerated or overlooked as is shown in chapter 4 where the border has opened up new possibilities for movement. There is a certain selective permeability of the Melillan border that I identified in the field. The border fences of the city does not stop the mobility of people towards the EU indiscriminately. They do so selectively. Divergent patterns of cross-border (im)mobility of people and trade coexist. When we understand the border in the context of a gated globalism (the contradiction between geopolitical (security-oriented) and geo-economic (free-trade-oriented) global border dynamics) Melilla is like a gated community, marked out as wealthy haven and potential site of protest. The fences attracted not only migrants but also groups with varied grievance that now deploy the ancient technique of the siege at the fences. This did not deter the border, however, it simply drew more groups into its embrace. The Alis’ sentry boxes snuggling up against the fences, the journalists, activists, academics, and agitators congregating near it, the restive crowds at Barrio Chino congregated along the border walkways, and the menores gathered in groups near the port all became participants in the network created by an ever-more intricate anti-migration barricade. During my time in Melilla, attention shifted from the dramatic events in 2011 and 2014 to the handling of newly arrived Syrian refugees, which number reached around 2000 in September last year. Blended in (most of them entering with false Moroccan passports) and developing new dynamics with similar logics of exclusion and their bodily presence is similarly stigmatized, albeit not necessarily as “illegal” but . The insatiable

valla kept growing; the spectacle unfolding in its shadow was no longer under the control of its presumed directors. Second, from a more analytical perspective, embodiment is the means through which bordering unfolds and gets meaning. Talking with people about their embodied experiences enhanced my qualitative research in ways I could not have foreseen. I experienced first-handed the presence of a border as a space that creates emotional landscapes of loss and control and that generates special relations between people. The role of smells, odors, gazes, sounds and bodily reactions proved very insightful. Furthermore, the notion of intra-action – the relational aspects of embodiment - lends quite well for studying bordering. How people are engaged in bordering practices and how materialities and bodies are related. It’s not just the border itself, but an intra-action of the actual, physical border, with human- and non-human actants, including human bodies, discourses, security and migration, role of politics, media messages and fears. The materialities, geographies, and social configurations that can be found ‘on the ground’ are not temporary manifestations of a predefined system but rather function as key constitutive arenas. In other words, the border comes about as a product of the grand narratives of border formation and the minor narratives of day-to-day border experiences. Through intra-action everything is brought together into the border phenomenon. Through intra-actions people become – at least temporarily – the afflicted and non-afflicted, the at-risk and not at risk, and the exposed and un-exposed. Studying these intra-actions reveals how differences get made and un-made. As Aet Annist (2015) argued in the case of Setomaa, “the process of bordering creates boundaries that are as rigid as a well-defended political border, yet they exist in the minds, discourses and practices rather than in the physical surrounding”. In a way, referring back to Balibar (1998), Melilla may be regarded as a place that is border.

The border spectacle is but one story among many, although very distressing. It is a story in which migrants become the border for a projection of European fears and visions, their bodies packed in car seats, squeezed in ramshackle rubber boats, or stripped to their underwear at the border fence. The naked notion of illegality is constantly dressed up. In the borderlands and at the fences, black skin sets off alarm bells, requiring immediate detection. In the CETI and in the harbour area, lies, trauma’s and bad behaviour ask for interrogations and disadvantages. Melilla as limbo is confined, sequestered, uncannily ordered space; but still vacant of life, extra-terrestrial in its emptiness. Melilla is a place that is, and yet is not, Europe. Not the fences that enclose the CETI, but rather the ocean and the steel border fences become prisons. More than 150 years after the presidios the enclave is again imagined as penal zone. In a way, Melilla’s history reappears in recognisable guises. The military museum shows photos from the not-too-distant past; the complex interweaving’s of kin, language and place; guards patrolling on the old fortress walls; shootings in the distant from a military training. The smallness creeps in in its lawful citizens too. The symbolic significance of the fence is daunting and for me personally, Europes hardliners, policies, the media coverage, the dramatic stories and images that circulate on our tv’s and newspapers in the least capture the real-life effects of a fence on the local community. I have conducted research in a space where anti-migration practices are colored by contradictions: a mix of neglect and preoccupation, visibility and invisibility, humanitarianism and violence, fascination and indifference. The emerging Euro-African border is an elusive creation of multiple logics and has created new and unexpected realities. It is sharply drawn through land and sea, aimed to block irregular migration into the European Union. It is fixed in place – in control rooms, patrols, and surveillance systems – while constantly bleeding outwards. At times, the border appears as an illegal entry sign:

here but no further. Other times, it appears in its guise of the frontier, ever extendable and stretchable. The closer you look the more it dissipates. The fence in the distance is like a scar etched into the mountain, Melilla’s memento after the 2005 events. Badly stitched, like a leaky football. The stories, smells, sounds, fears, became incorporated into the very fabric of the fence. Every ditch is patched up and reveals itself elsewhere. Melilla is a frontier zone of mixing, make-believe, shifting roles, giving rise to new routes, new skills, new measures, new forms of protest and adaption.

This research has shown how the border space is lively and constitutes a –what has been referred to before- a simultaneity of stories-so-far. No two borders are necessarily alike. Moreover, There is no inherent assumption in the concept that official regulations or entities such as the Spanish state or the EU are any more, or any less, important than the people who come and go daily, or those who are prevented from coming and going. In the end, the Melillan-Moroccan border is an emerging product of relations, generated from multiple vantage points. It is both the inability to get a passport as it lies in evoking of the sense of the same border that the visa-less person is unable to cross. Furthermore, the border is not located somewhere in particular – at the edges of Melilla’s territory, or at crossing points of Beni Enzar and Barrio Chino. The border can appear anywhere, and can be imagined as much as seen or drawn. The border work of all actors involved share a big correspondence: one of performance upon performance, action reaction, marking out the territory of the border in their own distinct ways - through graffiti, anti-migration signs, fences, articles - and in the process they all located and fix the diffuse border. The border regime constitutes of both physical and mental features, coming together in a medley of connections that is the Euro-African border. It is everywhere and nowhere.

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Appendix I

Photo 1: hitherto 18

Photo 2: border fence near Beni Enzar, photo taken from the Moroccan side

Photo 3: Border market at Beni Enzar border post

Photo 4 : Fence next to light tower, in the back the Transmediteranea

Photo 5 : Fence on eastern side of Melillan