A photograph that has been trapped in my mind for the last few days is of a girl, around my age, wearing a football jersey which could easily be mistaken for Atlético Madrid’s, smiling at the camera with a field stretching out behind her and a goalpost standing in the distance. Faten Ben Omar El Azizi drowned last month while trying to cross into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta. Playing in a women’s football league in Morocco, while working part-time in a cemetery where she is now buried, was not enough, and so she decided that the crossing was worth the risk.

El Azizi’s is just one story among nearly 150 others of those who drowned or were crushed to death in a stampede at the border between Morocco and Ceuta last month, and, according to the International Organisation for Migration, among the at least 3,400 people who died or went missing last year while trying to reach Europe.

What is the natural human response to a tragedy like Ceuta? Grief, surely? Shock, perhaps even anger, at the circumstances that could make thousands of people decide that risking death was preferable to remaining where they were. But listen to the reaction of much of the European political establishment — including Spain’s left-wing leader Pedro Sánchez, who labelled the mass influx a “violation of Spain’s territorial integrity” — and you encounter a vocabulary so impoverished that there appears to be little to say beyond “security” and “legality”.

Italy’s Giorgia Meloni spoke of “illegal immigration” and border defence; Germany’s Friedrich Merz demanded that Morocco take back “illegal........

© Indian Express