Take a few everyday words, words we think we know the meanings of, like tomorrow, or doctor. Or trainers, ferry, fence or mobile. How about the words football stadium, or network? Or water-bottle, or pregnant, or ladder, or view? What about the word Europe? What does Europe actually mean? How about a word like insight? Insight The English couple sitting next to me on the Casablanca plane have got the word insight all over their hand luggage.

Insight

Vacations. They’re going to Casablanca first, then down to Marrakech where it should be a lot warmer than England in December. It takes less than 4 hours to get from Heathrow to Casablanca and for two hours I’ve been having a jokey argument with the man about how he’s taking up all of our shared armrest. At the same time I’m looking at the book of photos that Tom, the MSF photographer, has brought to show me.

It’s the work of a Dutch photographer who spent years going round the world taking pictures of the places people with no passport try to cross into other countries. Its pictures from Morocco and Spain are of people washed up on tough-looking beaches, battered people huddled in blankets, bloated from being in water too long, people dead on the shore. There’s a picture of a barbed wire fence that looks like it’s out of a sci-fi vision of a totalitarian hell. There’s hardly any text. What there is says that in the year 2000 fifteen thousand immigrants were picked up on the Andalucian coast trying to get into Spain from Morocco. It says that along with the 3 metre-high barbed wire, the infra-red cameras and the seachlights, the officials in the town of Ceuta, the Spanish enclave at the northern tip of Morocco, have put bars on all the sewer outlets. It says that the identifiable bodies are returned home at their family’s cost, and that there’s a cemetery in Algeciras full of stones marked with just the letter D for desconoscido. Unknown.

Tom, Polly from MSF Press Office and I are going to Morocco to visit the MSF team working with illegal Sub-Saharan immigrants in the north. Because of a recent tightening of measures against illegal immigrants it’s currently a small but very vulnerable group. This vulnerability was pointed up in October 2005, when the Moroccan authorities rounded up 1200 immigrants, many pregnant women and people with TB, people too ill to be summarily dropped back at the Algerian border as usual (it’s against Moroccan law to expel or deny treatment to a sick or pregnant person) and dumped them in no man’s land below Bouarfa, in the desert, miles from anywhere with no food, water or shelter.

Our plane food arrives. The man from Insight Vacations jogs my arm for more room.

Ladder

In the MSF office in Rabat the notice board is covered with press cuttings from the Spanish newspapers about the immigrant situation. In all the portraits the faces are blurred. Javier, the head of mission, explains to us that it might be difficult to photograph people since people filmed by the international media recently were caught and jailed.

The first illegal Sub-Saharan immigrant we meet has a face that’s all gentleness. He is an extraordinary man. When we ask him what he’d like to be called in this article he suggests the name Pascal. He’s an unofficial liason for MSF with the immigrant communities in Rabat; before he came to the city he’d been translator, lay-doctor and a useful MSF contact in the northern immigrant camps in the bush. Pascal is witty and wry; he laughs a lot, a low and thoughtful laugh. One half of an index finger is gone from one hand. He is 36 and clearly brilliant; a microbiologist originally from Cameroon which he left in 2003 because of a “family problem, a social problem” about which he looks panicked, won’t elaborate. “Right now I want to go back. If I go back my life will be in danger.”

Travelling without a passport, he hitched and trekked to the international migrant junction, Agades in Niger. There was a lorry leaving that day for Libya. He spent two weeks in the lorry in the desert, one of 80 people. They had a little food, just enough water. He tells me about the men in a car with no water for over a week, who survived by drinking their own urine. “The desert - the most beautiful place I have ever seen, and the most dangerous. We passed corpses.”

It wasn’t a dream of Europe, for Pascal. “I had a job. I just wanted to go far from my country.” But religious intolerance in Libya drove him to try for “Europe in Africa”, as he calls the northern Spanish enclaves, and he trekked 130 km in the dark, off-road, sleeping in the snow, to reach Gourougou, an immigrant camp outside Melilla. 500 people lived there in tents made from blankets and plastic supplied by MSF, living in separate national communities; Nigerian, Senegalese, Malian, fifty people from Cameroon, all keen to “jump the fence,” which is only the start of dodging the police on the way to breaking into the designated Spanish refugee camp, where. If you get in (like some obscene version of a children’s game of Tag), you’ll be given expulsion papers which guarantee you’ll be taken to the Spanish mainland. If they catch you outside, they eject you immediately. It’s much harder than you’d think, to become an accredited refugee.

“The first thing they say to you when you arrive is, can you make a ladder? Your passport is your ladder! The only thing you take with you into Europe is a ladder. You need two ladders. One for each side of the fence” He laughs, charmingly. “I made many ladders. I entered many times.”

This slight man has done what in a week’s time, when I’ve seen the fences and the patrols, I’ll know is close to superhuman - he’s broken in and been ejected, not just once, but six times, surviving finally in a quarry for an epic eleven days, fed on the quiet by the Algerian quarrymen, before giving himself up out of desperation.

After this Pascal trekked 437 km to reach Ceuta, and tried to swim round the notorious fence there, some of it underwater, only to be turned back twice.

What did you have with you, still, from Cameroon, by now? I asked. “Nothing,” he says. “No - I had one thing. A Cameroon football shirt.” He laughs. Then he’s serious again. “When you don’t have papers, you are nothing,” he says. “You can’t get a job, or a home, or work, or money. And even if you enter Europe illegally you can make big bucks. Your first time in Africa?” he says to me. “This isn’t Africa! This is Europe!” Then he laughs loud and long, hilarious and sad. Pascal, a man with so much presence and so little permission to have it, says it clearly. “Morocco is a trap.”

Network

Javier Gabaldon, MSF head of mission in Morocco, came here after mission stints in, among other places, Rwanda at the time of the massacres. No wonder he’s a sanguine man, with an air about him of both care and irony. “Immigration,” he says, “is a long process with a long resolution. Every situation is different, every immigrant group is different, every individual profile is different.”

What these all share in Morocco is a current vulnerability to institutional and mafia bullying. The immigrants have access to two ‘networks’ for help - one is MSF itself, the only providers of immigrant statistics and immigrant aid in Morocco. The other is the sinister Nigerian Network, which has made a massive difference in the immigration situation here over the past two years. Human trafficking is big money. It costs between 5000 and 8000 euros to get as far as Morocco. “You pay the bill. High interest. Women will most often pay in sex work.” MSF often ends up looking after people abandoned by the Network.

At the moment though, the biggest percentage of violence against immigrants comes from the impatient Moroccan security forces who seem convinced that systematic harassment is a useful force in dissuading immigration. In summer 2005 all the inhabitants of a forest camp in Bel Younech in the north mass-rushed the security fence in an “organised” rebellion, to try to enter Ceuta. No one succeeded. Fifteen people died, of injuries sustained after the security forces shot and beat them.

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