The Ceuta Operation: Washington Wrote the Script in March, Morocco Ran It in July

from AntiWar

Seventy-two bodies came out of the water at Tarajal, and the sea kept giving some of them back through the weekend. They drowned in sight of Europe, in the fourteen-kilometer channel where the Mediterranean meets the Atlantic, reaching for a seven-square-mile scrap of Spain on the African shore. Most were young men. Some were children. They died over three days at the end of July, crushed against a breakwater barrier or pulled under while swimming around it, and within forty-eight hours of the last of them entering the water more than forty-eight thousand of the living had turned and walked back into Morocco.

Between fifty and sixty thousand people crossed into Ceuta in seventy-two hours. The enclave holds about ninety thousand. In three days its population rose by seventy percent and then drained away, a tide come in and gone out on command. Spain’s prime minister called the crossing an attack and a violation of the country’s territorial integrity, and sent in the army.

Tides do not take instruction. States do. A crowd of sixty thousand does not gather the way weather gathers. It gathers because people are told where and when, because they travel, some of them from the far side of a country, because they arrive together, and because the security apparatus of one of the most heavily policed states in North Africa elects not to stop them. Each of those is a decision, and the decisions were Rabat’s to make...

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