Barcelona, Spain – With a head of shiny black curls and large dark eyes, Moroccan barber Mohamed Simo smiles into the mirror, and he likes the face he sees.
“I work with many Spaniards; I have many Spanish clients. We respect each other like a family,” he said.
Simo, 30, came to Barcelona three years ago from Tangier on the northern tip of Morocco, where well-paying jobs are scarce. He worked in a clothing factory before he found a job cutting hair in Raval, the city’s most densely Muslim district.
“Only when I take a train do they look at me to see if I’m wearing a pack or not. They never say anything; they just look.”
The March 11 train bombing in Madrid that killed at least 191 and injured more than 1,400 has shined a spotlight on Spain’s largest immigrant population. Of the 18 suspects charged with mass murder or collaboration with terrorist, 11 are Moroccan.
The government estimates that 350,000 to 400,000 Moroccans live legally in Spain, making them one-quarter of the country’s 1.5 million documented immigrants, and about two-thirds of its 600,000 Muslims. Thousands cross the 8-mile-wide Strait of Gibraltar each year on rafts and small boats, seeking better-paying work.
Among the poorest immigrants in Spain, Moroccans form the largest population in the nation’s prisons. Only 8 percent of Moroccans in Spain hold college degrees, compared with 37 percent of Middle East immigrants, 27 percent from Eastern Europe and 25 percent from South America.
And, for instance, while 80 percent of immigrants from Ecuador have legal jobs, only 40 percent of Moroccans are working legally.
So far, there has been no overt backlash against Spain’s Muslim or Moroccan populations since the bombings.
But for a population widely blamed for Spain’s rise in crime and drug use, and feared and distrusted since the wars Morocco fought with Spain during the past two centuries, Moroccans here are bracing themselves for what may be to come.
“A new stereotype has been created since 3-11,” said Jordi Moreras, an Islamic specialist in the Religious Affairs department of Catalonia, Spain’s wealthiest region and home to a quarter of its Muslims. “Spaniards equate Islam with immigrants, and immigrants with Moroccans, and now they can equate Moroccans with terrorism.
“We must break this way of thinking and see Islam as a religious minority, not as a product of immigration,” Moreras said.
Islam’s sporadic growth
The Muslim presence in Spain dates to 711 A.D., when Tariq bin Zyad led Berber troops from Africa across the Strait of Gibraltar to occupy the Iberian Peninsula.
Islam flourished in Spain during the next seven centuries, shaping the county from its architecture to its music, cuisine and family values. When the Roman Catholic monarchy expelled the Muslims and Jews in 1492, the “Moriscos,” as the Muslims who stayed in Spain became known, faded from public view.
Muslims were barely seen again in northern Spain until the Civil War of 1936-39, when Gen. Francisco Franco used Moroccan soldiers to sack towns and terrorize the citizenry, leaving a savage mark on the memory of a generation.
In the 1960s, students trickled in from Syria, Egypt and across the Middle East, and Moroccan communities developed in Catalonia in the 1970s when France, reacting to the economic crisis, closed its border.
Spain remained an underdeveloped country of emigrants, not immigrants – it had more people leaving than entering – until the democratic reforms and modernization in the 1980s, under socialist President Felipe Gonzalez, which climaxed with the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona.
Emigrants from Africa, Asia, the Middle East and South America who had made Spain a pit stop en route to Europe’s wealthier north began to settle there, and between 1995 and 2000 Spain’s immigrant population quadrupled to 1 million.
Moroccans gather
Most of the newcomers were Moroccans, whose numbers leapt from 77,000 in 1996 to 200,000 in 2000, reaching 333,000 by 2003. The chose especially the northeastern coastal region of Catalonia, Spain’s economic engine, where they worked in construction, agriculture and the service industries based on tourism.
Thirty-five percent of the Moroccans in Spain live in Catalonia, which is home to more than half of the 256 mosques in the country.
More importantly, Catalonia has been a base for terrorist cells that purportedly hosted Mohamed Atta on his visit here before he helped carry out the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, and Jamal Zougam, the Moroccan suspected of helping coordinate the March 11 train bombings in Madrid.
The Spanish government has monitors on terrorist cells in every major Spanish city from Seville to Santander, Interior Ministry official Federico Cabrero said.
Cabrero said al-Qaeda and other terror-organization operatives choose Spain because it is geographically and culturally similar to Morocco.
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It has also developed lines of communications and the resources available to them from its Muslim communities – such as the sect of Salafists, followers of Wahabism, an extreme branch of Islam, which Algerians established in the 1990s in Tarragona, a coastal city 60 miles west of Barcelona.
The endless stream of tourists – Spain receives about 70 million visitors a year – and the country’s lenient residency laws make it easier for potential terrorists to blend in and find a refuge during the war on terror, Cabrero said.
Long struggle with terror
Spain has been fixated on terrorism for decades, employing world-class counterterrorist experts to hunt down members of the Basque separatist group ETA, a guerilla-style organization seeking to make the Basque region of the nation independent. ETA has claimed responsibility for close to 1,000 deaths since its founding in the 1960s.
Ironically, the fight against domestic terrorism has allowed international terrorist networks such as al-Qaeda and the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group to slip through the government’s fingers.
“It’s like a doctor for the head and a doctor for the kidneys – completely different specializations,” Cabrero said.
The Human Rights Protection Association in Tetuan, Morocco, reported that as of April 5, the Moroccan secret police were holding 78 people in connection with the Madrid attack. Since the bombing in Casablanca last May that killed 33, Morocco’s anti-terrorism law allows the “unofficial” detention of suspects for up to 14 days; so far, the investigations have focused mainly on the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group, which has links to al-Qaeda and another terrorist group suspected in the Casablanca bombing.
In Barcelona, some Muslim business owners afraid of alienating or losing customers have forbidden their employees to talk about terrorism on the job.
“All Moroccans are worried about the reactions that could come from March 11,” said Mohamed Chair of Ibn-Batuta, an Islamic cultural group that helps immigrants get established in Barcelona.
Immigrants’ rights
Like many Muslims in Spain, Chair hopes the socialist administration elected March 14, headed by Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, will fulfill its promise to improve the rights and opportunities of the country’s immigrants.
“Zapatero’s victory was the best thing that could have happened to the Arab community,” he said.
Zapatero wants a law that would guarantee health, education and social services to all people in Spain, regardless of whether they are there legally.
His policy would contract sharply with outgoing President Jose Maria Aznar. Riding a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment during his eight-year term in office, Aznar imposed ever-tighter laws restricting the rights of foreigners already living in Spain and made it extremely hard for recent immigrants to become legalized.
The government estimates that in addition to Spain’s 1.5 million documented immigrants, another 1 million “irregular” foreigners are living without papers.
“Before it was good, but now there are too many immigrants,” said Mohamed Simo, the barber in Raval. “Everyone is still coming to get papers. But the government isn’t giving papers any more, and more people are entering all the time.”
“No return”
After Moroccans, immigrants from Ecuador and Colombia form the largest foreigner populations in Spain, followed by members of the old eastern bloc such as Ukrainians and Romanians, who have supplanted Moroccans as the country’s cheapest labor force.
“South Americans will work for half of what a Moroccan earns,” Simo said. “But they live with 20 people in an apartment. I can’t live like that.”
Mohamed Halhoul, 32, runs a clothing shop several streets away. As he folds an armful of brightly colored linens and stacks them on the shelf behind him, he recalls the era when his father emigrated from Morocco, in 1968, before work visas or residency permits even existed.
“My father came with a clear plan: to work, to save money and to send it home,” Halhoul said. But the immigrants from his father’s generation always planned to return home one day.
“It’s not easy being an immigrant today. In those days, anyone who wanted to work could work. Now, it’s so difficult to settle in Spain, and the conditions are so poor back home, that generations today don’t believe in the return.”
He paused long enough to fold a luxuriously red tablecloth in four, then sighed. “There is no return.”