Emergency EU talks after mass migrant influx

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1:19Hello and welcome to NewsHour. I'm Sean Lay reporting live from the BBC World Service studios in London. Coming up this hour...

1:35Breathing fresh life into an ancient Greek instrument, thanks to the latest adaptation of the Odyssey. Do stay with us for that. But we begin in Ceuta. The surge there lasted barely 48 hours. During that time, the Spanish Territory, the part of Africa closest to mainland Europe, which measured just 18.5 square kilometres, saw its population explode from 80 ,000 to 140 ,000 people. Would-be migrants forced their way through the border fence or swam around it from neighbouring Morocco. Most of them have already gone back to Morocco, but at least 67 will never leave. Susanna, a nurse in Ceuta, has been telling NewsHour about those she tried to save on Thursday.

2:19We got shocked to see thousands of people crossing through the water. Whole families, father, mother, children under 12 years old, all together, coming out of the water with fear. Without shoes, the whole shore was full of shoes, full of floaties. Every once in a while, they were taken out of the water, dead people. We tried to do the resuscitation to all of them, but most of them were all dead. It was absolutely dramatic. Too many people. It was absolutely overwhelming. We had to get IVs and get fluids because some of them were dehydrated. Also with hypothermia, we got some warm fluids and also injuries in their arms, in their foot, giving stitches.

3:28Some of them had to be taken to the hospital because they seemed that they had hit the rocks badly. badly women that were pregnant. One of them was rushed to the hospital and she had the babies, two of them. She was pregnant with twins. She had her twins in the hospital. At first, we felt fear because we didn't know these people what they were going to do. But afterwards, words, we felt mercy and sadness because all of them felt so disappointed with nothing to do, no place to stay, no place to buy water. In my opinion, people are just looking for a better life and to find jobs and to have their families.

4:18And in Morocco, they don't have that opportunity, But Celta doesn't have any opportunities either because we don't have this. This city is very small. The place where immigrants stay temporarily is absolutely overwhelmed. If you come to Celta, you're going to be in the streets without anything to do, anything to eat. So please go back to your families, go back to your houses, to your homes. Yesterday night I was crying because I was thinking of all these people, all the disappointment, the dream that they have, that they're going to come to Europe and they're going to have a happy life. That's Susanna, a Spanish nurse.

5:04In the wake of the events in Ceuta, a diplomatic row has erupted, which has divided the European Union on the sensitive question of immigration. An emergency meeting of the 27 member governments is to convene in Brussels on Tuesday. Most EU countries allow free movement between them without passport checks. As a result of what happened in Ceuta, Italy has suspended the application of what's called the Schengen Zone, though Spain has pointed out that Ceuta isn't part of Schengen, so migrants couldn't cross from there into mainland Europe without checks anyway. Some of this week's new arrivals are still in the Spanish territory.

5:39Tension may be heightened later when a rally is held by opponents of immigration. Carlos Barragan, a reporter with the New York Times, is in Ceuta, and I asked him about the mood there. Well, I would say that today on Sunday morning, the city is cautiously returning to normal. It took a while for residents to come out on the streets. On Saturday, there were just a few people walking the streets because they had hankered down on Friday as tens of thousands of migrants roamed the city. but as authorities, police officers and soldiers move these Moroccan young men towards the border more people are coming out.

6:18The thing is that on Saturday evening there was a far-right politician who came here saying that he wanted to expose all the immigrants and there was hundreds of local residents shouted at him saying that he was conflating being an illegal immigrant with being a Muslim and the police had to drive him out because tensions were flaring. In a sense, this is the front line of the migration debate in Europe. The Spanish government, although it's been rebutting a lot of the criticism it's experienced over the last few days from other European governments, has announced that it's going to put in an additional barrier, this time what it describes as a floating barrier.

6:58Do you know any more about that? Yes. So on Saturday morning, authorities were already sending statements that they were installing a floating barrier at the border. The floating barrier, I think, is 50 meters long and is just next to a seawall between the Moroccan and the Spanish frontier where the tens of thousands of migrants came in. It's also important because the Supreme Court ruled a few weeks ago that police officers couldn't push migrants back to Morocco unless they built this floating barrier. So that's why they built it. And also the Spanish authorities wanted to take the lead and show citizens that they were doing something.

7:41But local residents received this news with scepticism. We've heard that quite a lot of those who came into Ceuta on Thursday and Friday have now gone back to Morocco. But there is one group, I think, who are finding it difficult to get back again, aren't they? Yes, well, the Spanish authorities call this, the movement of people towards Morocco, as a voluntary return. They've told me that in quotes. Obviously, I wouldn't call it a voluntary return because we've seen Spanish soldiers and police officers rushing these young Moroccans to go back to their country. The problem Spanish authorities have is that there are a few hundreds of sub-Saharan Africans on a beach on the other side of the city.

8:25and they haven't rushed them to the border because Morocco is not their country. And it's still unclear what is going to happen with them. We've talked to some of these sub-Saharan Africans. They haven't eaten in days. I talked to one young man, age 30, who told me he has only eaten a few pistachios in the last 24, 84 hours. So even on Saturday night, they had not received any food or water from the authorities. it's still unclear what's going to happen to them. Is there any suggestion that that's deliberate, that they're not being given anything to eat, that they presumably don't have accommodation?

9:04I mean, is that kind of an intentional policy by the authorities? Well, definitely. The problem they have is that the migration centre is already overflowed. It was already overflowed with hundreds of people before this crisis. A few weeks ago, it was already overflowed. so migrants they crowd the entrance of the center and also the beach when i asked the spanish government they just said that they were trying to put more resources into the center but they were very vague about whether they were going to provide food or shelter to these hundreds of sub-saharan africans what are locals saying the people who live in seuta all the time Well, they feel abandoned.

9:47Some of the locals I talked to, they said that they were seeing this coming because in the last few days and weeks, there were already dozens if not hundreds of Moroccans arriving, swimming to the beach, and they are angry at authorities. Some of the locals are also chasing off these migrants because especially at night you can see some of these young Moroccans were hiding from the police and some young residents organized bans to chase them and tell them to go back to morocco at the same time many other residents are angry at far-right politicians who are marching to theuta to hold rallies and i think from my conversations with them they are very angry at anyone who tries to instrumentalize this crisis for their political purpose that's Carlos Barragan from the New York Times in Ceuta.

10:41And we've just had an announcement from Miguel Trianos, Spain's delegate to Ceuta. It's an update on the deaths from those people who swam or crossed the border with Morocco. That figure has risen from 57 to 72.

11:08To Russia now, and three people have died in Moscow on Saturday after an attack on one of the city's most exclusive restaurants. It was shut to host a private party. According to the mayor of Moscow, the three fatalities included the woman bomber. A further 21 people are known to have been injured. Let's talk now to Olga Ivshina from the BBC Russian service. She's on the line. Olga, what more do we know about the incident? Well, the official statements are very limited, as you rightly said. The last official information we have received is that three people were killed and 21 wounded. The last statement was done by Moscow mayor just a few hours ago.

11:45He had called it a terrorist attack, but no one has claimed responsibility yet, and the authorities have not identified the intended target. But the widespread speculation is that it might have been linked to a Russian general, some event connected to Russian general. Whether this is true or false, the important point is that, you know, the people around, especially ordinary Moscovites, are connecting this to the war with Ukraine. Also to mention, in the last two years, three Russian generals have already been killed in assassinations, and one has survived assassination attempt, all in Moscow or Moscow region.

12:28And that's the first time, I think, since the start of the invasion when there was a blast in the center of the city in Moscow, which included such a significant number of casualties. You mentioned the war with Ukraine. Kiev says its forces struck oil facilities and a military air base in Russia overnight. And again, they've targeted the online retailer Wildberries. How is that being reported in Russia? this is being reported because i guess this plays to the moscow narrative that you know ukraine is targeting civilians it's as russia says a terror state so moscow moscow officials have claimed that air defenses intercepted 635 drones but as you rightly said the number of targets still have been hit these are wild berries facilities in samara and saratov and also some industrial facilities in Ufa.

13:23This is around 1 ,000 kilometers from Moscow. And this shows you just how deep these strikes have become. And of course, the strikes on oil refineries and some storage facilities have impacted Russia. And the general aim of this campaign from the Ukrainian side seems to be sort of cumulative rather than decisive. So they try to disrupt fuel and distribution, force Russia to spread its air defences and make its economic air increasingly expensive to protect. Olga Ivshina from BBC Russian, thank you very much. You are listening to NewsHour from the BBC World Service, back in just a minute.

14:15You're listening to NewsHour from the BBC World Service. As well as answers, scientific research often throws up fresh questions. So it is for a team at the Centre for Paleogenetics in Sweden who've been examining the bones and DNA from woolly mammoths, an ancestor of the Asian elephant. Their research suggests that hunters were more likely to kill the female, which begs the question, why? I've been speaking to Hannah Mutz, an archaeogeneticist from the team. And we studied 11 different accumulation sites. These These are sites that sort of during the last ice age, northern Europe was covered in glaciers.

14:52And then south of that, there were these communities that were relying really heavily on mammoths. And so we have these sites. One is Krakow's Fajista, which is in Poland. And it's this hill that's rising above the river plain. And archaeologists have excavated and found layer upon layer of mammoth bones, over 100 of them, which is pretty cool. And we were interested in looking at the demographics of these mammoths to see if we could get a better understanding of what was happening here. Is this related to humans hunting the mammoths? We extracted ancient DNA from these bones to get a sense of the mammoths that were there.

15:25So this was a site of human habitation. And in a sense, this was almost like the butcher's cast offs, as it were. Yeah, although it had been hotly debated because mammoths are very difficult to transport. and so some people were saying maybe this was some sort of natural trap. Now the results are fascinating because presumably from the DNA you extracted you established that a lot of these bones were from female mammoths. Yeah absolutely. At the sites that were associated with hunting we compared those also with mammoth remains that were found dispersed in the landscape that didn't have signs of anthropogenic either hunting, scavenging or butchering and we found that at the accumulation sites they were mostly females and then at these dispersed contexts they were mostly males.

16:08And have you had any thoughts as to why the disproportionate number at this location where the bones were female mammoths? It was really fun to think about this question. Perhaps they moved more predictably, which modern elephants also do. And that's because essentially you have this herd structure where females are leading the herds. They also have calves with them. So they're a little more constrained. Yeah. And they need to find predictable sources of food and water. So if humans kind of twigged that this was a place where you could get a significant number of mammoths all together, they just happened to be female, but they were kind of accessible.

16:47That might have been a reason for them to be to all have ended up killing the females more than the males. Absolutely. And mammoths were very important to these people. I mean, not only would they have been used for meat and for hides, but also the bones were used in building structures. The ivory was used for making art as well. So they were really important to these people. Yeah, so making sure they had access, I think, was a big part of it. How do we think they were killed? It's hard to know. There's been a bunch of theories, everything from sort of holes dug in the ground. But finding the spears indicates that people maybe were like the spear points embedded in the bones, indicates that maybe people were, you know, directly hunting them.

17:26You obviously were able to derive a lot from the bones themselves. What are they like? Are they very large? Are they difficult to handle? Do they survive intact? Sometimes they do. Yeah, so we mostly worked on teeth. Yeah, if they've been buried, they do survive pretty much intact. And that's how you can get these signs of butchery and stuff like that. Sometimes they are quite weathered. The teeth are like dinner plate size, so they're quite large. And in fact, you can even estimate the age from those. So we're working with archaeologists to try and get the age, to understand the age structure of the mammoths that we're hunted to.

17:59That's Hannah Mutz at the Centre for Paleogenetics in Sweden.

18:29about why we do the things we do and how to make better choices to help avoid costly mistakes. Each episode covers the latest research in behavioral science and dives into themes like the power of self-control, shaping your mindset for success, navigating new beginnings, and why starting over can feel so hard. Listen to choiceology at schwab.com slash podcast or wherever you listen.

19:01Welcome back to NewsHour. The Austrian composer Johann Strauss called his tribute to Europe's longest river, the Blue Danube. Right now it's more the shallow Danube. Drought conditions across the countries it flows through, or in which its tributaries are found, are at their lowest level for at least 30 years. Birgit Fugel is Executive Secretary of the International Commission for the Protection of the Danube River, the ICPDR, which brings together the countries on the Danube. Low water levels certainly deserves attention because it can affect several sectors simultaneously. And at the same time, the impacts differ regionally and also locally.

19:44And, you know, the national authorities are coping with this at the moment because there can be effects on navigation. There can be effects on water supply. So we are speaking about drinking water. There can be effects on agriculture and, you know, shutting down the nuclear power stations, not only in Hungary, but also in Romania, because these plants require the cooling water. And if there are prolonged periods of low river flows and high water temperatures, this can certainly create operational challenges. but you know the national authorities and plant operators are the best you know people to be addressed regarding that.

20:35Are there any management measures that can be developed to try and compensate for this limited rainfall these drier winters and then intensely dry summers? In general when we speak about management we need to become more resilient and also when it comes to ICPDR, strengthen cooperation in managing our shared water resources because rivers and also events like that don't stop at borders. So the cooperation is important. And yes, the winters have become more dry as well. That was the case last year. Of course, there's a variation over the years. You're asking about measures, which is a challenging question.

21:22However, the authorities and water managers and also drought managers are looking more and more at nature-based solution to actually start increasing the storage of water in a natural way in retention areas. So thinking about where we build and what impact that might have on the ability of the land to absorb water when there is rainfall in order that it can replenish the rivers. Yes exactly and this also relates to floods which are also extreme events that get more frequent and more intense and for that like retention natural retention areas are also needed to you know keep the water and actually buffer flood effects and flood risks.

22:11That's Birgit Fugel.

22:31You're listening to NewsHour from the BBC World Service with me, Sean Lay. Let's return now to our top story, the row caused by a dramatic influx of people from the Moroccan side of the border with Spain's African territory of Ceuta. I'm joined by Lassane Haddad, a Moroccan MP. He's a former tourism minister. He's speaking to us on NewsHout in a personal capacity. Mr. Haddad, thank you for being with us on the programme. What do you think explains what happened last week? Well, first, what happened was tragic, extraordinarily and deeply alarming. Tens of thousands of people moving toward the same narrow coastal area within hours created an almost impossible security.

23:13and humanitarian situation. So what happened in Sota was a human tragedy. People died, and that should actually unite people instead of dividing them politically. So what happened is, of course, there were different kinds of factors. I think there was the ruling of the Supreme Court in Spain saying that you cannot repatriate people who swim by sea towards Sota. And there was also, people have heard of the policy of the Spanish government to regulate those who are illegal immigrants within Spain. There is also the use of all of that information and then the distortion of that information by different kinds of groups, smuggling groups, people smuggling kinds of groups, inciting people and telling them that SOTA is open, that the border is open, that they can go now to Spain very easily, that there are no Czech, and they cannot be returned automatically as happened in the past.

24:26And that meant like mobilization of tens of thousands of people who swarmed there into the beaches and then they tried to swim to Sota. And the rest we know, like 49 ,000 people got into Sota and most of them now have returned to Morocco. They have. Mr Haddad, I want to just play you an extract from an interview we broadcast on Friday's NewsHour. This is Juan Fernando López Acquia, a member of the European Parliament from Spain's governing party, PASOI. It's not acceptable that Morocco can simply do away with its responsibility in managing the side of the external border of the European Union.

25:08And third, it's calling for the national consensus, making clearly the point that we are ready to stand for Spanish sovereignty and protecting the rights and liberties of the Spanish population living both in Ceuta and Melilla. And of course, we are expecting that with cooperation with Morocco, the situation will be sorted out as it has been sorted out before. You can see what Mr. Kear is getting at, suggesting that maybe the Moroccans, for whatever reason, encouraged last week's events to make a political point. I mean, there have been reports that Morocco border guards let people through, made no attempt to stop them.

25:46Well, the first thing that the gentlemen should understand is like everyone should look at their borders. so Morocco guards its own borders. We don't ask Algeria or Mauritania to protect us. We protect ourselves from illegally migrants coming from Algeria or coming from Mauritania. So that's the same thing applies to the European Union. Sure, but the point about a border is that it's on both sides, isn't it? So the two authorities on both sides have got to cooperate. I'm coming to that. But there is a partnership that exists between Morocco and Spain with regard to that. and Morocco prevents tens of thousands of illegal migration attempts every year.

26:24But it didn't last week. That's the claim. It didn't last week. I mean, one thing does not show that Morocco did not do its job. I mean, like 2024, 2025 and 2026, 270 ,000 migrants were prevented from crossing. 13 ,000 attempts at crossing were prevented by the Moroccans. So now what do people ask Morocco to do if you have like tens of thousands of people that are coming and swarming towards Fnidak in order to swim to Sota? I mean, short of shooting at those people, what do you do? I mean, like what kind of of of of I mean, what kind of of control do you need to do? So I think it's a concatenation of different kinds of events that happened within Spain and happened also this side of border.