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Introduction
On Sunday 20 February, the day before my second visit to El Ejido, there was a SOS Racismo demonstration of 10,000 people in Barcelona. Catalunya at least is repulsed and embarrassed by what has happened - racist mob violence against undefended immigrant Moroccan workers . And last Friday the European Parliament passed a motion categorically condemning xenophobia and racism. But Brussels and Barcelona are hundreds of miles away; what is happening to the victims in El Ejido, in Spain\\\\'s Deep South?
Matters are proceeding at two distinct levels. The big media story is the first prefabricated hut built as temporary accommodation for homeless Moroccans. The hut is little bigger than a garden shed, measuring 3 by 6 meters, and is intended for four workers who will thus have just four and a half square meters each. The first hut is situated outside town and, with the landlord\\\\'s permission, just a few yards from the invernadero hot house where the intended occupants will work. The installation ceremony was attended by two town councillors and Fernando Hermoso, the government\\\\'s representative in Almería who was himself attacked by fascists two weeks ago. Hermoso expressed satisfaction in the work, advising that the complete plan of installations is near completion. Hermoso is agreeing the plan with Juan Enciso, the racist mayor of El Ejido, but there has been no consultation with the Moroccan immigrant community. A census of all the Moroccan immigrants and a survey of their needs has been suggested, but the immigrants won\\\\'t provide information that might be passed on to Enciso, and the government is not really interested in their needs anyway.
In the meantime, on the streets there are posters calling for \\\\'Spaniards first\\\\'. Oppressive violence against the Moroccans is ever present. Apart from the fascist threat, the police are conducting widespread stop and search operations and are seeking out five of the strike leaders.
The prefabricated huts, constructions which aren\\\\'t homes, represent a contradiction in the employers\\\\' situation. They want rid of the Moroccans, but as yet they still need them as labourers. While speaking of reconciliation, the bosses are busily conniving to replace the Moroccans with other sources of cheap labour. The new Foreigners Law is being put into practice in El Ejido. The immigrant can stay legally, so long as their labour is required and they can be socially policed. Otherwise get rid of them.
Behind the interconnected official and unofficial levels is the real policy: to break and drive out a large part of the Moroccan community. The prefabricated huts are a construction for the media, a facade for more intensified and selective repression. Without home, without work, constantly harassed - the situation for many of the Moroccans is becoming acute and desperate. Both sides are preparing for a possible second strike. The situation in El Ejido is about to reach the real crunch.
The national and international supporters of the Moroccan immigrants should urgently send messages of support, and also start planning to send delegations to El Ejido to inform themselves of the severity of the situation. They should send money to directly support the victims of the racist attacks.
El Comission de Immigrantes del Ejido, c/o CC.OO, Calle Almería #1, El Ejido 04700, Almería, España.
Bank Account: Banco de Andalucia 0004; Branch 3085; Check Digit 00; Account Number 0700415222
Voices from La LomaLa Loma is one of the main chabola (slum) sites on the outskirts of El Ejido where the Moroccans stay. It is an open stretch of waste ground between a housing estate and the motorway. A crowd of 4,000 racists gathered there on the night of 5 February and set upon the immigrants, who are still in shock from the attack and in the meantime experiencing ever greater exclusion. Most of them are young men. They told their story as police vans cruised by, and just 50 yards away two mounted police cantered their horses.
\\\\'The big crowd gathered at about 9.30pm. They started setting light to our places, and pulling at others. A group of them chased after me, they caught up with me and beat me with sticks.\\\\'
\\\\'I came along at 1am. There was a pile of Spanish. They got me and cut my arms open with broken bottles.\\\\'
\\\\'The racists destroyed four Moroccan cafeterias, and they destroyed three shops - one for clothes, one for music and one for meat. Apart from lacking money it is now hard for us to get food. If we go to the supermarket, they say that we cannot go in. If we go into a cafeteria, the normal price for a coffee is 125 pesetas, but they will charge us 250 or even 300 pesetas.\\\\'
\\\\'We, the young ones, used to go the hostel during the day, there were about 30 students. As well as helping us with our papers, they helped us to study. But that was all destroyed. It was at 62, Calle Abrocina.\\\\'
\\\\'Many people lost their passports and their papers when their places were attacked. We lost our clothes and things like bicycles. They destroyed 25 cars which makes it hard for us to get around. They destroyed my motorbike, I still have all the papers, insurance and registration. But when I went to the police station they said that they couldn\\\\'t do anything.\\\\'
\\\\'Since the attack and then the strike, they have been sacking a lot of the African workers. We have been two weeks without work. Now we go every day to try and get work in the morning at the parada de trabajo, but they are not taking African workers. At this place which starts at 7am there are the Moroccans, the Rumanians and so on. We each stand in our different national groups. The bosses don\\\\'t come to the Moroccans any more.
\\\\'Everything is plastic here - working, sleeping, shower - all our life we are under plastic. We came here to change our lives but we don\\\\'t even have anywhere to sleep. A lot of people are thinking of going back. No Spanish people want to spend a night here with us.\\\\'
\\\\'We want a decent life in Spain. We want to work, we want to live quietly without racism, and we want to live in a house. But we can\\\\'t live in a house. The Spanish people don\\\\'t want us to live in a house, they won\\\\'t rent them to us. They want us to suffer at work and suffer in our lives. There is no electricity, no running water here. They don\\\\'t even come to collect the rubbish. We are not allowed to live like human beings. We are not human because we don\\\\'t have a house. And they say we don\\\\'t have a house because we are not human.\\\\'
\\\\'They see that we don\\\\'t have water and light. The employers don\\\\'t give us these things. We are here to work for them and no more. There are some of us who have worked for three or four years here, but the bosses won\\\\'t pay any insurance.\\\\'
\\\\'In the invernaderos all the work is by hand. There are no tractors. We grow all sorts of vegetables: cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, runner beans, cabbages; and fruit like melons and water melons. Where the immigrant is paid 4,000 pesetas, the Spanish workers is paid 8 or 9,000. Each boss can have 10 or 30 workers, some even go up to 80. I worked in the same place for one and a half years, but now the patron says there is no work. None of the Spanish people I worked with have come to see me.\\\\'
\\\\'The police search us a lot. They search me every day, more than once a day. Every time I go to town they search me.\\\\'
\\\\'We are working people. We are not robbers. We don\\\\'t want problems with the Spanish people.\\\\'
Voices from the MosqueI went with the Imam and other Moroccan Moslems to their place of worship. It is on a side street, behind heavy steel shutters with no sign outside. Next to the mosque is a pub-bar. The Imam worked as a waiter in one of the destroyed cafeterias. He lost his home as well as his job and income. Gathered after prayers, the Imam and his twenty fellows were composed as they explained and analysed what has happened.
\\\\'Our mosque is in a hired building. It was attacked on the night of the violence and everything inside was destroyed. They tore up the Koran, they urinated on the carpets.
Most of our people cannot come to worship every Friday because they don\\\\'t get permission to leave work. According to Spanish law they are meant to be able to break from 12.30pm to 3.30pm in respect of their religion, but the employers don\\\\'t respect this law.
A father has been unable to find his twenty year old son. We looked at the hospital, we have asked at the police station, we don\\\\'t know where he is. And it is very easy to disappear a person if they don\\\\'t have papers.
Why is the racism here so violent? The people here are not cultured. There is no respect for other religions here.\\\\'
\\\\'There are specific reasons for the strength of the racism in the local population. One part is rational, and one is quite irrational. Thirty years ago there were only three houses here. So, everyone in El Ejido is an immigrant. The first people to come here were peasants from the nearby Alpujarras mountains. They had been very poor, and had to go to work in Germany as immigrants. They were able to come back with some money and they bought a bit of land. At first the families worked the land. And then they began to recruit other people, migrants like they had been, to do the work for them. The landless workers had quickly become land-owning bosses. They are nuevos ricos, the new rich, and they are very insecure.
Yes, they are all afraid. But there is irrationality in their fear too. They fear that the Moors have come back to repossess the land. There is something medieval in their way of thinking. And they cannot break the Moroccans\\\\' spirit, because they have their own faith and way of doing things. They cannot be assimilated in the sense that the Moroccans cannot be made to submit.\\\\'
\\\\'El Ejido was famous in Morocco even before the violence. Whole families will save to send somebody over, and so they all follow what is happening here. Under the previous immigration law as soon as an illegal immigrant was captured they would be shipped straight out of Spain, without right of appeal, without a lawyer. And so the illegal immigrant had to get across the sea and then find a place of refuge. El Ejido was that place, because the employers were so hungry for labour that they didn\\\\'t mind taken on people without papers. The police turned a blind eye to what was going on. The law was not applied, El Ejido was a lawless town. For the Moroccans the idea was not to stay too long in El Ejido, but to use it as the essential first base and then to move on to better things.\\\\'
\\\\'There are some Moroccans who are really trapped. They are opponents of the corrupt political system. But no Moroccans get refugee status here, because there is co-operation between the two states. The King of Spain says that he and the King of Morocco are like brothers. Morocco has a new king now, but they are trying to manage the change on the Spanish model, that is in just the same way as Spain did after Franco died. Change at the top but no real change at the bottom.\\\\'
\\\\'The government is not putting the agreement reached a week ago into practice. The agreement was that the government and the Moroccans would work together in deciding the type of accommodation and where it should be located. This has not happened at all. Instead they are putting these prefabricated huts on the patron\\\\'s land, far away from anywhere. Who will be able to stay in these places? Only immigrants working with that employer, and they will have to behave themselves otherwise they will lose their dwelling as well as their job.\\\\'
\\\\'The policy is very divisive, in every way. There is no social integration with the local population. And then the idea is also to divide the immigrants between themselves. So that those with work, and they will have to be the legal ones, will be treated differently than those without work, and the illegal ones. Even those in work will be split apart from each other. Each small group will be kept next to the invernadero of their boss, kept as cheap night-watchmen. They will still be chabolas, only modern ones.\\\\'
\\\\'They are talking about housing the hundreds who lost their dwellings in the night of the long knives. But what about the other thousands who didn\\\\'t lose their dwelling, but are still stuck in the same intolerable subhuman conditions as before. In Europe how is it that workers are living in these conditions?\\\\'
\\\\'This is the frontier between Europe and Africa, between the rich world and the poor world. This is it. And the frontier is a very dangerous place.\\\\'
Andy Higginbottom 22 February 2000
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