The Dream That Cannot be Broken

Mamadou is 17 years old and comes from Mali, fleeing from war, poverty, violence and starvation. Mamadou has crossed Mauritania and Algeria before reaching a mountain that stands behind the Moroccan city of Nador and overlooking the Spanish enclave of Melilla.  He is one of about 4,000 inhabitants of a veritable tent city on the slopes of an impervious mountain, exposed to every kind of hardship. Cold, hunger, disease and violence are the order of the day on Gurugu. Tents made of plastic bags and branches, blankets retrieved from garbage cans, small bonfires to keep warm, and nothing more. There’s no water on Mount Gurugu. It is packed with migrants from nearly every corner of Sub Saharan Africa. There are Malians, Senegalese, Nigerians, Cameroonians, Liberians, Ghanaians, and all have arrived on Gurugu with a single goal: to scale the fence that divides Morocco from Melilla. It is a triple barrier 12km long, controlled by dozens of cameras and continuous patrols both by the Moroccan police and the Spanish Guardia Civil.

 The Moroccan police are the greatest nightmare for the migrants: both for those dwelling on Gurugu and for the others hiding in the forests and in the suburbs of Moroccan cities.

“Almost every day, at dawn, the Moroccan soldiers leave their base at the foot of Gurugu, come to our camp and destroy everything” says Idriss, who can barely walk after being severely beaten. “They pull down the tents, set fire to them, throw away the food, steal the little money we have, our phones. And if they can catch anyone then they arrest him and beat him, and then take him to Rabat the capital. We fall over the cliffs, many of us fracture arms and legs, we are hurt and we have no medicine to treat us. Over the years we have stopped counting the dead.”

All migrants have a dream: Europe. A Europe which, however, doesn’t want them, and turns a blind eye to the – both Moroccan and Spanish – violence as many NGOs point out. Violence, mafia, arrests, nothing seems to be able to blunt the will power of these people,

 “They can treat us like animals, beat us, steal everything from us, hurt us, even kill us, but they don’t know what we are running away from and they don’t know how strong our desire is to reach Europe. Everyone here dreams of having a pair of wings, but if God wills, sooner or later, even without them we will make it.”

From here