The ministry publishes its own arithmetic
Morocco's interior ministry released figures on Sunday: about 40,000 people involved in the mass crossing into Ceuta, 1,135 stopped before they could enter Melilla, and 11 dead, mostly by drowning. It said it was fact-checking reports of deaths coming from the other side of the border. Spokesperson Rachid El Khalti, quoted in Moroccan media, attributed the surge to the shore-to-shore distance of less than seventy metres, which he said "created a misleading perception among many participants that the crossing would be easy", and the ministry blamed the "malicious exploitation" of social media and the "spread of misleading information".[1]
Until Sunday, Morocco had been the subject of everybody else's account of Ceuta: the country the migrants came from, the country the Spanish government wanted them returned to, the country twenty-two European governments were writing letters about. Publishing a count changes that position. A state that gives numbers has entered the argument as an author, and the numbers it chose are legible: 1,135 stopped at Melilla is enforcement asking for credit, and 11 drownings is a death toll that its own coastguard can be held to. It is fair to read the same release as domestic reassurance — Moroccan audiences also saw the footage, and a ministry that says the surge was manufactured by misinformation is telling its own public that nothing structural has failed.[1]
A table Morocco is not sitting at
The gap between the two sets of figures is not a rounding error. Spain says more than 60,000 crossed by land and sea and puts the dead at 72; Miguel Ángel Pérez, the government's representative in Ceuta, says more than a thousand people were treated by health services. Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares said on Monday that the vast majority had already returned to Morocco and that "every last one of them will return" — a policy whose delivery depends entirely on a state that will not be in the room on Tuesday, when the twenty-two governments that signed the joint letter meet by videoconference to discuss external borders. The people counted differently are the same people; what differs is which side of seventy metres of water does the counting, and which side has to receive them afterwards.[1], [2]
That makes Tuesday's meeting worth reading for its arithmetic rather than its language. The signatories wrote that they cannot allow uncontrolled mass crossings, and several of them acted nationally before the meeting was even called. If the ministers produce a text, the thing to look at is whether it cites a crossing figure at all, and if so whose: a European conclusion that uses the Spanish number treats Morocco as the object of the policy, while one that acknowledges both counts has conceded that the state on the other shore is a party to it. Nobody at that videoconference has to answer for the 11 or for the 72, which is the part of the arrangement neither count captures.[1], [2]