Hiding the truth about Spain's North African border
💰🔊 Where is the open systemic investigation?
🔊 AUDIO
On Friday, MPs from several parties were able to view several hours of video recordings of the events at the border fence in the Spanish North African city of Melilla at the end of June. They saw how both the migrants and Moroccan forces entered Spanish territory, and a Civil Guard colonel told them 470 people were sent straight back. Marlaska, the Home Secretary, is adamant there were no deaths on the Spanish side. Vox and Ciudadanos defended the actions of the Civil Guard that day, whose relatively few officers were faced with a much larger number of migrants attempting to cross the fence.
“There are some controversial images”, said Bildu MP Jon Iñarritu, at a press conference in Congress: “such as the throwing of stones by civil guards […] it is true there was an exchange of stones […] Civil Guard officers can be seen using stones as riot control material”. He also explained the limitations of the images MPs saw on Friday, from three sources, a helicopter, a drone and several checkpoint CCTV cams: they covered different time periods with different image qualities. "At this point," he said, referring to the Home Secretary, "more than lies, you have to wonder if the minister has told us any truth".
Popular Party MP Ana Vázquez Blanco said in an interview with TVE that "now we know there could have been dead bodies on the Spanish side [...] we have seen he has lied to us". In a press conference in parliament, Vázquez said she regretted journalists had not also been allowed to see the images: "It hurts us to have to spend months asking for videos, asking for documentation, putting up with the lies and then after five months, behind closed doors, we get the smallest room in parliament, and so perhaps no one will notice after a week debating the budget”.
The best public report we have so far is from BBC Africa, which explains, with multiple videos and witness accounts, the systemic aspects of what happened, including the mouse-trap nature of the border design, the immediate return of migrants from Spain to Morocco, the beatings received on the Moroccan side, and the crush situation in one of the penned areas.
It was evident on that day at the end of June that there had been multiple systemic failures in the management of events and of that mass of people, on one side and the other and in the interaction between the two. What should have happened in Spain since then, as the modern western democracy it is, is an open systemic investigation to clarify the failures and make recommendations on improving border management. If that had been carried out correctly, instead of the government trying to hide and obfuscate what happened, again, many of those improvements could already have been put in place.