On the morning of June 24, 2022, in Melilla, a Spanish exclave in Moroccan territory, the Barrio Chino border post was stormed by thousands of sub-Saharan migrants, mostly Sudanese, who were seeking to cross into Europe. Caught between the repression of Moroccan forces and the eight-meter high fence that they were trying to climb, many migrants were victims of the stampede.
The death toll rose to 23 identified deaths – 37 according to NGOs -, as well as several dozen missing people, making it the deadliest tragedy to occur at the land borders of the European Union.
While more and more migrants are knocking on Europe’s doors, the means implemented in recent years to prevent these men, women and children from arriving there also continue to grow. magnitude. Concertina barbed wire, deafening cannons, thermal cameras, drones, muscular subcontracting to third countries, explosion on a European scale of surveillance and control budgets.
Between 2014 and 2022, the length of border walls in the Schengen area has increased from a few hundred kilometers to more than 2,000 kilometers, recalls French journalist Émilien Bernard, who has been documenting the effects of Schengen’s migration policies for a dozen years. Europe. He takes stock of the situation in a powerful book: Fortress Europe. Investigation into the other side of our borders.
“The entire journey of exile is made of walls,” says Émilien Bernard, reached at his home in Marseille, France. There are the physical walls, which are not always the most difficult to pass. And there are all the legal, administrative, police walls, even ideological in a certain way, since all these walls are also built on the idea that Europe is threatened. »
In Laâyoune, Western Sahara, Melilla, Belgrade and Lampedusa, but also in Calais, Briançon and the Menton-Ventimiglia border, Émilien Bernard went into the field. And he came away more revolted, he writes, by the “unworthy and murderous policies carried out by the European Union and its member countries”.
The independent journalist does not hide it: certain passages in the book are the fruit of investigations he carried out for newspapers which are in a rather libertarian or anarchist sphere, including QEDa monthly magazine of criticism and social experiments based in Marseille where he is a member of the editorial staff.
Inflation of walls and budgets
The objective, writes Émilien Bernard, was to “name the culprits, reveal the workings and mechanisms”, and also give a face to those who bear the brunt of this migration policy. If the author admits to having “a somewhat militant position”, his work is nevertheless fueled by facts and is based on numerous observations in the field. “Everything I write, I claim as journalistic work, based on sources, an investigation, a lot of work. Everything I write is verifiable and corresponds to reality. »
In several respects, he adds, his work appears to him to be much less militant than the figures cited or the speeches made in France by a large part of the political or media spectrum.
“I started working on these issues a dozen years ago, at a time when it was very easy to come and document what was happening, which was already scandalous from my point of view, and to which not many people was not interested. » In Calais or Paris, by understanding the exile routes, he quickly noticed that the road, in Morocco as in Libya, was terrifying. And that all this was done with funding from France and other European countries.
However, Émilien Bernard remembers a time, in Europe, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the construction of walls was not a particularly buoyant theme. In around thirty years, it is clear that the discourse on the question of borders, walls, or security has experienced galloping inflation.
“Walls are being built,” continues the journalist. Between Greece and Turkey, between Poland and Belarus. It corresponds at the same time, each time, to national situations where an extreme right or a reactionary right comes to use this figure of the scapegoat, followed then by an acceptance of the European Union of its role in preventing immigration, in particular by the policy of externalization of borders and the checks which are paid to third countries. »
The Damned of the Sea
This is particularly the case for Mauritania, to which the EU, we learned in February 2024, will pay 210 million euros to fight against illegal immigration. A country through which, according to the Spanish government, more than 80% of migrants arriving in the Canary Islands pass.
Frontex, the European agency for controlling external borders, the “armed arm” according to some of European migration policy, has seen its budget increase 140-fold since its creation in 2004, from 6 million euros to 845 million euros. euros in 2023.
But to the many terrestrial pitfalls already mentioned which stand today on the route of migrants, to the mafias which everywhere enrich themselves on their backs, are added the even greater perils of crossing the Mediterranean, from Tunisia, the Libya or Mauritania.
In the eyes of the journalist, the equation is implacable: more walls translate each time into more deaths. “That’s where in this great barnum security and xenophobic there is really madness: it is not effective. It is only effective on one point: causing more deaths. »
According to the International Organization for Migration, with 8,565 deaths recorded on migratory routes around the world, the year 2023 is the deadliest year in the last ten years. The crossing of the Mediterranean being the deadliest route, with at least 3,129 deaths or disappearances.
“People end up passing anyway,” recognizes Émilien Bernard, who also shows in Fortress Europe how different governments, through their voluntary action or inaction, put obstacles in the way of people and organizations whose mission is to help migrants in distress.
And whether it is the Mediterranean, the Atlantic or the Algerian desert, the journalist notes that these issues are increasingly treated in the media in a dehumanized manner, often summarizing them with figures. Except perhaps the tragic episode of the death of little Alan Kurdi on a beach in Turkey in the summer of 2015. “There was this small burst of consciousness, which was followed very quickly by an absolute withdrawal. There was once this shame of Europe, and since then I have not seen it. In June 2023, for example, there were 650 people who died off the coast of Pylos, Greece. »
Despite the tightening of border control and repression measures, “the steamroller has not crushed everything”. And if the situation is generally gloomy, Émilien Bernard cannot help but see a glimmer of hope despite everything.
“People who come into contact with exiled people realize that these are families, people who have very contrasting destinies, even if, like everywhere, we find people there who are sometimes less reputable. There are meetings that take place, actions that are created. There is a huge amount of solidarity, even if, he adds in the same breath, they are increasingly criminalized. »