In Spain, in Cadiz, there is a small coastal town called Tarifa. And as in any town or city, Tarifa also has its cemetery. But it is not just any cemetery. There are several different niches, lined up in the highest rows of the concrete structure, which are also the cheapest and most difficult to access. Just one sentence, engraved in sea blue on the white marble: "Immigrant from Morocco".. No name; at best the day the body was found. No one knows who rests on the other side of the cold marble. Whether he will have friends and family who do not forget him. Whether or not he was a good man. Whether anyone will remember him.
He is one of hundreds of migrants who the waters of the Mediterranean spat the dead onto the shore without their bodies being identified. They paid with their lives for daring to reach their paradise. When the "capacity" of holes in the concrete is full, the nameless immigrants rest in a mass grave under the ground. Above it, a small monument: "In memory of the migrants who died in the Strait of Gibraltar"..
Every day, the sea stains the waters of the Strait of Gibraltar black. Most of them are sub-Saharan and disappeared after leaving the Sahara, Mauritania or the Alboran Sea.
Hundreds of nameless niches. The niches of nobody, the niches of those who are nobody. Those without names. Those who are numbers. Those who didn't make it.
That Mediterranean to which Serrat sang, the same Mediterranean that for centuries united civilisations, is today a symbol of tragedy: more than 20,000 dead in recent years.
And the "First World" remains unperturbed and impassive, as if they were "numbers", "immigrants", when we all know that behind those "numbers", those "immigrants", there are human beings, each one with families, with stories.
Unfortunately, as long as there is no humanist approach to this phenomenon, mafias will continue to profit, human beings will continue to migrate and the Mediterranean will continue to be the graveyard it is today.
Poor things. What suffering. What they must be going through. It's terrible. I can't even look at the pictures. I can't even look at the pictures. How many times have we heard these phrases? Europe cries, screams, wants them to be saved, not to die, but... but they should not come, they should go away, they should disappear, they should not exist and we should not have to see them on TV, let alone on our streets, with their blankets, in the metro, or on the stairs of our houses.
Let us admit that it is not just our political "leaders" who are cynical and hypocritical, but we ourselves - each of us, all of us, as a society. More and more countries are turning their backs on the free movement of people in the bloc and are erecting barbed wire fences or imposing border controls. The latest to join in was Austria. And right under our noses, Turkey has just put up concrete blocks on its border with Syria to prevent refugees from crossing.
Yes. Cynical, shameless, shameless, insolent, cheeky, false, hypocritical. That is what we are as a society. Because none of us, for example - not even the writer of this text - would be capable of giving up our latest generation mobile phones or computers. Even when we know that all these gadgets carry coltan, a mineral extracted by starving children in Africa (in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where 80% of the world's coltan reserves are found).
