MADRID (dpa) – Senegalese hawker Mamadou Kane lived and worked in Spain legally – but that did not stop four police from detaining him for an identity check, driving him to a mountainous area and beating him up.
The four were handed prison sentences for causing injuries to the 29-year-old immigrant near the northwestern city of Vigo in 1999. The culprits have petitioned the government to pardon them, and they have not yet served a day in jail.
The Kane case is not the only one of its kind in Spain. A recent report by the human rights organization Amnesty International (AI) accused Spanish police of “widespread ill-treatment and torture” of non-European immigrants.
The authorities tacitly tolerate racist violence, AI charged.
Undocumented women immigrants have been sexually abused, and Moroccan street children living in the enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla have been deported amid slaps and insults, abandoning them to their fate in Morocco, according to the report.
As many as 321 cases of racist ill-treatment have occurred over the past six years, AI claimed – charges which square poorly with Spain’s image as a modern and liberal western European country.
Interior Minister Mariano Rajoy downplayed the accusations, saying that the AI report contained gross inaccuracies.
Police had showed “irreproachable professionalism” and “a sense of humanitarianism” in their treatment of immigrants, Rajoy added.
The authorities of Ceuta and Melilla have also denied charges of wrongdoing, but not everyone is convinced.
The press has occasionally reported on cases of police maltreating immigrants, and opinion polls indicate that relatively high numbers of Spaniards hold racist attitudes.
One recent poll, for instance, showed that 30 per cent of youths regard immigration as being “bad for the Spanish race”.
Neo-Nazi websites are proliferating on the Internet, and racist violence has even broken out on a large scale.
The worst such incident of recent years occurred in the southern town of El Ejido, where more than 60 people were injured in clashes between local people and Moroccan agricultural labourers in 2000.
Is Spain heading for a situation similar to France or Austria, where the far-right has risen to a major political force?
So far, Spanish anti-immigrant parties are fragmented and insignificant – but an equivalent to French far-right presidential contender Jean-Marie Le Pen will appear by 2008, the daily El Mundo predicted.
Immigrants now make up less than 3 per cent of Spain’s 41-million population, but thousands more take off from African coasts every year.
The government is blaming immigration for the rapid rise of crime, which increased 6 per cent in the first three months of this year.
Add an unemployment of more than 10 per cent and the ongoing controversy over the rights of Moslem immigrant women, and the situation is ripening for the rise of xenophobia, analysts say.
Spain has an average birth rate of 1.07 children per woman, one of the world’s lowest, and the economy also needs immigrants to fill jobs unwanted by Spaniards in sectors such as agriculture and construction.
Jose Maria Aznar’s conservative government has pledged to legalize the situation of more than 200,000 undocumented immigrants, but critics accuse it of being slow to do so and of leaving migrants at the mercy of ruthless businessmen.
African vegetable pickers sometimes live in slave-like conditions, earning miserable wages and sleeping in ruined houses or fibreboard shacks.
In the meantime, the influx of immigrants continues, with the Canary Islands as one of the main routes of entry.
The islands do not have the infrastructure needed to receive the immigrants, and hundreds of Africans have been lodged at an abandoned airport terminal on the island of Fuerteventura.
The conditions at the ill-lit and overcrowded terminal have been described as abysmal, and were denounced by Human Rights Watch in another report critical of Spain.
