Paris – Morocco deported hundreds of African migrants from the country’s stark southern desert over the weekend, part of an ongoing effort to rid the country of migrants who have massed in the country in hopes of illegally reaching Spain, either by boat or by breaching the barriers surrounding two tiny Spanish enclaves on the coast.
“The operation is continuing,” said Mohammed Ben Abdallah, a spokesman for the country’s Interior Ministry, saying migrants had been flown to Senegal and Mali, whose citizens make up the two largest groups of undocumented Africans in the country. He said the country was negotiating repatriation agreements with several other sub-Saharan countries.
Ben Abdallah denied that Morocco had dumped some migrants in the desert areas to the south to fend for themselves, as alleged by the Polisario Front, an independence movement in an area of Western Sahara claimed by Morocco. That group said Friday it had found dozens of African migrants abandoned in the heavily mined area beyond the 1,500-mile wall that separates Moroccan-controlled territory from that controlled by the Polisario.
Morocco has called the charges “propaganda” and blamed the Polisario and their supporters in Algeria with abetting the flow of illegal migrants into Morocco. It has said none of the migrants being expelled has been left on the kingdom’s southern border.
Morocco has faced stiff criticism for its treatment of migrants after 14 sub-Saharan Africans died in recent weeks while trying to climb the double fencing that separates the country from the two Spanish enclaves, Ceuta and Melilla. Some of those people were apparently killed by gunfire from Moroccan border guards.
The country has been charged with dumping migrants in the desert before. The aid agency Doctors Without Borders, based in France, last week found dozens of migrants – many of them dehydrated, hungry and injured during attempts to cross into the Spanish enclaves – stranded near Oujda, a northeastern town by the Algerian border.