Le président Volodymyr Zelensky a accusé mardi Moscou d'avoir utilisé des missiles balistiques nord-coréens lors de frappes nocturnes sur la ville de Zaporijjia, dans le sud de l'Ukraine, qui ont fait au moins six morts.
Trains complets, covoiturages improvisés, partage de spots idéaux sur les réseaux sociaux... À la veille de l'éclipse de soleil, touristes et passionnés convergent vers la bande de totalité qui traversera l'Espagne mercredi. À Madrid, France 24 a rencontré plusieurs d'entre eux sur le départ.
Rooms were booked years ago, and officials have been making plans. But there’s no telling where, exactly, Icelanders might go to find the best possible view.
Il y a 90 ans, la guerre d'Espagne (3/4). Quatre-vingt-dix ans après le début de ce conflit, des milliers de familles sont toujours à la recherche de leurs morts. Plus de 100 000 disparus n'ont toujours pas été identifiés, en grande majorité victimes de la répression franquiste. Des fouilles permettent aujourd'hui à leurs descendants de retrouver leurs restes et de les inhumer dignement.
Une attaque russe nocturne sur Zaporijjia, dans le sud-est de l'Ukraine, a fait au moins six morts et 20 blessés mardi, selon les autorités. Le président Zelensky a affirmé que la Russie avait utilisé des "missiles balistiques nord-coréens". À Kiev, des explosions ont retenti après l'émission d'une alerte aux missiles. Suivez notre direct.
A ride from Tangier, the largest city in northern Morocco to the Spanish enclave of Ceuta takes less than two hours. The border crossing has its own, sleepier rhythm, quite different from the tourist-driven bustle of Tangier. In Ceuta, traders run their errands, Morocco-based expats make visa runs and Spanish people catch ferries to the mainland. On most days, the border crossing seems almost ordinary. The fences, though menacing and topped with razor wire, are less imposing up close and officers make small talk with the expats waiting to get their visas stamped.
Then there are those days when the routine collapses and Ceuta becomes the center of Europe’s migration debate.
The territory is a geographic and political paradox. Despite falling under Spain’s — and the European Union’s — jurisdiction, it sits on the northern edge of Africa, surrounded by Morocco and separated from the Spanish mainland by the Strait of Gibraltar. It is an entry point to Europe, yet not fully part of the Schengen zone, requiring additional immigration checks for travelers crossing to the mainland.
When more than 60,000 people — mostly Moroccan men and teenagers — rushed into Ceuta (almost doubling the coastal city’s population), the images reverberated across Europe. There seemed to be no dramatic buildup to the incident, nor any obvious explanation why thousands of people chose that day to make their way to Spain.
Europe’s far-right politicians seized the narrative, portraying the influx as an imminent invasion, warning that the men were on their way to “Calais” and “Germany.” Italy temporarily suspended the Schengen free movement regime with Spain, meaning travellers arriving by sea and air would now be subject to border checks. Spain threatened to take “proportional measures” in response and did so at midnight on August 8, when it imposed similar checks for visitors from Italy.
The standoff between European governments — led by socialist Pedro Sánchez in Spain and conservative Giorgia Meloni in Italy — is not simply a test for European border security. Instead, what transpired in Ceuta poses bigger questions about the shifting nature of state sovereignty itself: How are we to understand borders, if they’re shaped by forces beyond the state’s reach?
Borders are not just lines separating geographic entities. They are systems built on surveillance, diplomatic bargains and digital networks. Ceuta is the place where all three converge. Its borders, already protected by the sea, have been fortified with steel, outsourced through diplomacy and tested by coordinated rumors.
Steel
The crossings into the enclave are blocked by a multi-layered barrier of fences and wire. Morocco administers a fence separating it from the neutral area between the two countries. Two fences on the Spanish-controlled territory follow, creating an enclosure monitored by the Spanish Civil Guard. The physical infrastructure is reinforced with motion sensors, thermal and CCTV cameras, maritime communication systems and facial recognition technology.
Even the sea has now been incorporated into the border system. Just three days after the Ceuta border chaos, Spanish authorities installed a 500-metre floating barrier and anchored naval buoys to create another monitored enclosure.
The EU has funded most of the fortifications. The Border Violence Monitoring Network’s report says that since the construction of Ceuta’s border barrier in the 1990s, the EU has spent tens of millions of dollars to make the Spanish-Moroccan frontier more secure, technologically up-to-date and heavily surveilled. With the recent mass crossing, Spain will now receive additional emergency financial aid.
Yet, the architecture of physical surveillance, built and re-built with European money for decades, cannot prevent the human cost of attempting to cross a border. In Ceuta alone, at least 100 people died according to local authorities. “The rationale behind increasing surveillance is that you'll be able to save lives and smash the [people trafficking] gangs, right?” asked Nathan Akehurst, who has written about Ceuta’s border for Jacobin. “Where was that in this case?”
Diplomacy
Akehurst’s question touches upon the human-centered rationale for heavy border surveillance. But there is also a political one. It is not only Spain, as a EU member, that receives funds to manage migration. Morocco has received €427 million since 2015, for migration-related expenses, including technology and training. That’s part of Europe’s wider strategy of border externalization, a practice where Europe moves border control beyond its own territory.
The practice has been around for decades, but went into overdrive after 2015, when approximately 1.3 million people, mostly from Syria, came to the continent seeking asylum. Many of them reached Europe through Turkey, prompting the EU to strike a deal with Ankara: €6 billion in funds, visa liberalization and EU-ascension negotiations in exchange for stricter border controls and curbing irregular arrivals to Greece. The EU also agreed to resettle within Europe one Syrian from Turkey for every Syrian returned to Turkey from Greece. But by 2020, when the EU failed to resettle Syrians, Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan declared he would no longer prevent migrants from crossing Turkey en route to the EU.
“Border externalization is basically paying other countries, but also subjecting them, through a carrot and stick approach, to performing functions that are usually performed by a state itself at their borders,” explained Josephine Solanki from the Transnational Institute, an Amsterdam-based think tank. It leaves space for leaders like Erdoğan, Solanki added, to bargain for influence by turning migrants “into political leverage.”
The cost of outsourcing borders is not just material. It is measured in control that Europe cedes to the foreign governments it relies on for migration policy enforcement.
Relatives and friends waited by a fence topped with barbed-wire for the return of people who had previously crossed into Ceuta. Spanish authorities claim to have sent almost everyone back to Morocco. Abdel Majid BZIOUAT / AFP
In Ceuta, migrants claimed local authorities did not stop them from crossing the border. A young Moroccan man told the New York Times a day after the event: “They opened the border and let everyone go by.”
Border outsourcing agreements were made, among others, with authoritarian regimes in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, where EU funds were used to detain migrants and quell domestic protests, rights organizations say. Alliances with “deeply unreliable and authoritarian actors” in the name of stability, said Nathan Akehurst, “is short-termist, insane and loses Europe any credibility it has left.” These alliances also allow Europe to “shift the blame to the Moroccans, the Eastern Libyans, the Turkish or whoever decides to take advantage of that moment.”
Rumors
It is yet to be revealed who, if anyone, has taken advantage of the mass crossing into Ceuta. Local and international media have uncovered now-deleted posts that shared tips on routes and equipment for the journey. One of the main networks was called Hrig Sebta network — “Sebta” being the Arabic name of Ceuta and “hrig” being the Maghrebi term for undocumented migrants, literally referencing the burning of identity papers.
In the wake of Ceuta, European ministers pledged to tackle online misinformation to avoid migration crises, but remained cautious when asked about thousands of posts reportedly linked to Russia. Other theories attributed the crossing to Morocco’s tensions with Spain over its closer ties with Algeria, or to Spain’s position on Palestine.
But those rumors, and what appears to be a weeks-long coordinated online campaign behind them, reveal something deeply human that fences can’t deter: movement that is spurred by hopes for a better life.
“[The crossing] would have happened anyway at some point,“ Akehurst argues. “There would have been a crossing because all of the circumstances that generate that are already there before someone with a twitter account throws a match on the fire.”
Yet, let’s pause at the match. It’s not about someone with a social media profile creating chain messages. It is about the ecosystem that can jeopardize borders by creating information flows, turning rumors into perceived opportunities.
Moroccan newspaper TeleQuel already published a report about social media posts amplifying the next hrig — another attempted crossing into Ceuta — on August 15.
When packaged to a hungry audience, rumors carry the currency of truth. They’ve driven migration long before social media was even conceptualized. Now those rumors speed through digital space owned and operated by private companies not prone to accountability and sitting well outside the reach of any single state.
And the EU has understood that for years. “It is necessary to structure the information space, as we have organized in the past the territorial space, the maritime space and the air space,” Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner for Internal Market of the EU said back in 2018. He warned about Big Tech companies treating digital space as a no-man’s-land that they would write rules for.
The no man’s land between Morocco and Spain appears calmer now. But the turmoil of the crossing revealed a new, digital dimension to border governance. Information has always found a way to spread; digital platforms have given it new channels: ones which allow those behind the information to remain faceless, while the information itself passes from screen to screen. It reaches a boiling point, spills over from the digital space and then can be disappeared, even before anyone has had a moment to scroll back.
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Ceuta, Spain, and Fnideq, Morocco, are physically separated by only a mile, but they are intertwined by family and trade. A recent border crisis is the latest chapter in their story.
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An estimated 20,000 are said to have died in the extreme heat in Europe earlier this year, and heat is climate change’s quiet killer, compared with the dramatic violence of death by fire or flood. In eastern Washington, 600 homes have just burned down, and in both Europe and North America, firefighters have died in the effort to contain the climate-fueled firestorms.
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The EU’s panic and the lack of solidarity emboldens smugglers and the far right – and makes Spain even more vulnerable
For the European hard right and the White House, it seemed almost too good to be true: left-liberal Spain punished with a migration crisis of its own making.
The histrionics came right on cue. As thousands of mainly Moroccan citizens streamed into the tiny Spanish enclave of Ceuta at the tip of north Africa, Spain’s far-right party Vox decried a migrant “invasion”, blaming Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez’s regularisation and leftist politics. The Trump administration did the same. A senior Israeli diplomat goaded Madrid over its “colonial” territories while Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, called for Spain to be suspended from the Schengen area. Denmark and Finland backed Italy’s move and, by the weekend, 22 EU leaders had penned a letter pointing an implicit finger at Madrid over its presumed failure to “relentlessly combat illegal migration”.
After thousands poured into the Spanish territory in North Africa, the pro-immigration policies of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez were blamed. The reality is more complex.
Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, center, visiting Ceuta on Friday. “In less than 48 hours, my government has succeeded in fully restoring control over the border,” he said on Saturday.
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Most of the people who surged into Spain on Thursday have since returned to Morocco. A small minority are holed up on a seafront, tired, hungry and vowing to stay.
Some migrants were waiting it out on a beach in Ceuta, a Spanish territory, on Saturday after crossing from Morocco days earlier.
Europe sheltered many refugees in 2015. Its hard-line reaction to a new crisis in Ceuta shows how, 11 years on, the far right has reshaped European attitudes.
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