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01/01/2006:

"Santiago Alba Rico - Immigration and the Iron Curtain of Melilla"

The beatings and insults to the sub-Saharan nationals in Melilla are something slightly more radical and fearsome than racism; they are the manifestation of a belligerent and potentially homicidal anti-humanism.

We Spaniards should have reserved a bit of naiveté for this occasion. During the last years we have been exposed to such a digest of horrors that our conscience got jammed. Spain trembled with the destruction of the Twin Towers and its 3,000 dead; it trembled with the bombing of the Atocha Station and its 200 victims torn to pieces; it also trembled with the missiles over Baghdad and with Abu-Ghraib’s tortures and trembled again with the scenes of a New Orleans turned upside down by the water and abandoned by its government. Nevertheless, much more impressive than all that –both as a question and as an image– is the zoological treatment accorded by the Spanish State to the African nationals at the iron curtain of the Melilla border with Morocco.

The gunfire, deportation and caging of thousands of persons who were asking for help–that strategy they call “migratory policy,” just as Hitler used to call “demographic policy” the transfer to Auschwitz of the European Jews–de facto challenges before the eyes of the world the legitimacy, viability and justice of the political and economic order in place.

At the same time, the reaction of our politicians, our mass media and our public opinion challenges our right to the wealth, to democratic institutions and, especially, our present and future right to feel we are good. After all, the pain caused by both the 11-S and 11-M can be attributed to “wicked terrorists” just the same that the pain of Baghdad’s children can be attributed to “wicked imperialists.” But in Melilla there is no doubt: we have photographed the system, we have fixed forever the image of an order that has to shoot the people who ask for help, that cannot stop treating as animals the people who are hungry, which cannot even allow hospitality.

The very fact that the African nationals are asking for help from the same people who rob them demonstrates their desperation; the very fact that those who rob them answer with bullets and clubs their demand for help demonstrates the irrevocable ignominy of capitalism. We can fight distant wars, impose programs of structural adjustment, sign in an office a commercial agreement and destroy ten countries without violating in appearance any commandment. But if a few men and women who are hungry and thirsty knock to our door then we have no option but to breach their heads, shoot them and abandon them in the desert. Whether one believes or not in God, this is a sin, a shameful, dirty, abject, despicable sin, and it is not strange that we make so big an effort to conceal it, to forget it or to justify it.
peacepalestine.blogspot.com

Nothing like a little imperial crisis to expose the true nature of a European 'leftist' government