MELILLA, Spain — The women, some pregnant, others toting their children, risk the slippery, rugged cliffs here to cross from Africa into Europe without leaving the continent.
Pat, a 19-year-old woman with smooth, dark skin and hair swept up into a blue-and-white bandanna, is one of those who made it to this tiny enclave of geographic oddity clinging to the northern edge of Africa. Crouched the other day beneath a highway overpass, she tended a small fire and tried to cook a pot of greens. She sliced an onion with the jagged lid of a tin can. At her side was her 16-month-old son.
She had spent two years, in fits and starts, on the very long journey from her native Benin, crossing the Sahara desert and giving birth to the boy "in the bush." Finally, she reached Melilla, a 5-square-mile outpost of Spanish rule boxed in by Morocco and the sea. She thinks her husband is somewhere in Morocco, but she is not sure. She hopes they will be reunited.
"It is very difficult," she said.
Sub-Saharan African men have been making the treacherous journey to Melilla, scaling the barbed-wire fences that mark the border between Morocco and Spain, since the early 1990s. More recently, women and children have joined them, crossing at the cliffs that jut into the sea, where sympathetic Spanish guards usually rescue them.
The location of Melilla, and Spain's similar North African enclave, Ceuta, makes it the gateway between a continent gutted by war, famine and disease, and the promises of an affluent Europe. Jumping a fence on dry land seems easier than braving the Mediterranean Sea in rickety boats.
Spain's traditional leniency toward immigrants has meant that those who make it this far have a very good chance of reaching continental Europe and a new life. But here and elsewhere, tensions have flared as Europe staggers under the weight of new arrivals who have changed the complexion of the continent.
The push of illegal immigration exploded here a couple of months ago into a spasm of unprecedented violence. At least 14 African men were killed, mostly by Moroccan border guards, when the immigrants tried to storm the fences to reach Melilla and Ceuta in wave after wave of mass desperation.
Hundreds more suffered terrible cuts when they snagged on the barbed wire.
