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Europe and Africa search for ways to stem migration

Posted on: Monday, 10 July 2006, 14:41 CDT

By Ingrid Melander and Tom Pfeiffer

RABAT (Reuters) - European and African ministers said on Monday the waves of illegal migrants seeking a better future in Europe would not be stopped unless Europe helped Africa fight poverty.

The ministers, meeting in Rabat to reach a plan on migration, came from 50 nations, grouping for the first time countries where migrants leave, travel through and end up.

They said legal migration should be encouraged to channel money and skills back to Africa, the world's poorest continent.

Thousands of African youths make treacherous journeys every year trying to reach Europe for work. Many die in the attempt, often drowning in rickety boats.

"Let us offer Africa's youth a future of dignity. Then it will not risk resorting to violence and extremism, or choosing, en masse, the paths of exile," French President Jacques Chirac said in a letter read on his behalf at the conference.

Europe, apparently willing to show commitment on aid, on Monday offered grants to Mauritania and other African states.

Spain said it was committing 10 million euros ($13 million) to help would-be African migrants set up small businesses. Mauritania, a springboard for illegal migrants sailing to Spain, got a 2.45 million euro EU grant to help it cope with migrants.

France put forward a "savings development fund" giving tax breaks to migrants investing in their country.

Several European countries said they were working on making it easier and cheaper for migrants to send funds back home.

Morocco said the EU had promised it 70 million euros.

"We are uniting will, ideas and criteria," Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos told the conference. "We have the shared responsibility to build a migratory model."

But about 300 Moroccan migrant rights activists staged a protest before Morocco's parliament building in Rabat to denounce what they called a "European war on African migrants."

"We believe that despite rehetoric about aid, Europe's approach on migration is a war against African migrants," said Abdelhamid Amine, head of Morocco's AMDH rights group.

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Africa's population is rising sharply and economic growth has not kept pace. In 2001, around 46 percent of sub-Saharan Africa's people lived on less than $1 per day.

French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said Africa and Europe working to give the African youth confidence in its future was a priority.

But he also warned that opening Europe's borders to all could lead to a political destabilization of both Africa and Europe and would fuel racism.

"Zero immigration is a dangerous myth," he said. "But I can also not accept the extremist words of the partisans of no-limits migration. Europe cannot accept all those who think it is the Eldorado."

European ministers also pushed for African countries to take back illegal migrants.

EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner hoped an agreement on the readmissions of illegal migrants would be signed with Morocco.

But Morocco junior foreign minister Tayeb Fassi Fehri said it would be unfair for the EU to send illegal migrants from other African states to Morocco just because it was their last port of call.

(Additional reporting by Zakia Abdennebi)

Source: REUTERS

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