400 euros for a passport to seek refuge in Spain

Mousa Abdi was one of the first Somalis who surprised the police at the Madrid-Barajas airport last year. He had left Kenya, stopped in Türkiye and, later, in Madrid. His final destination was Brazil, but in his last connection, in Havana, he was sent back to Barajas. Mousa just wanted to get to a safe country and once he found himself back in Madrid he went straight to the agents and asked for asylum. His case would not be so extraordinary if it were not for the fact that after him, at least 650 other Somalis, according to police sources, made similar trips for the same purpose. All of them requested asylum and all of them carried with them a Kenyan passport, apparently genuine, but which was not theirs. They had bought it so they could escape. In 2022, only three Somalis requested asylum at Spanish airports.

The passport determines the power a citizen has to cross borders without visas. There are very powerful ones, like that of Spain, which, according to the 2023 Henley Index, is the third travel document that opens the most doors in the world because it allows you to travel to 191 of 225 countries without major difficulty. Somalis, on the other hand, although they have a clear refugee profile, experience enormous difficulty in entering developed countries. Your passport only opens visa-free doors in 35 countries and is the sixth least valuable passport among the 199 analyzed.

As it is, there are not many options for them: take refuge in neighboring countries, where they suffer real hardship; waiting for years for resettlement in a rich country, which may never come; or getting on a boat after a tortuous migratory route. But Barajas has been witnessing for months a new, faster and safer formula: buying another nationality. These refugees, according to police sources, used passports from Kenya, a neighboring country to Somalia. The Kenyan document is in 68th position and, unlike the Somali one, allows transit through the international zone of Spanish airports, where travelers can request asylum, and enter several Latin American countries.

Some of the Somalis who have arrived in Spain this way bought it when they lived in Kenya so they could live outside the refugee camps and have the same rights as Kenyans, although they later used it to travel. “Life in the camps is like in a prison, you can't leave, everything is missing. They practically force you to buy a passport if you want a normal life. And it is completely normalized, everyone knows it,” explains Mousa, who paid 400 euros for his. Others already bought it with the intention of crossing the world. “I wanted to look for a safe place and it is impossible to get a visa to go to Europe,” says Ali Ahmed, who paid 700 euros for his visa. Both ask not to reveal his real name and some personal details. “I'm afraid that something could happen to my family,” they say.

This flow of Somali refugees, revealed by EL PAÍS in August, has been adding chapters in recent months. The number, which was around 400 in the summer, has continued to grow to the point where the Barajas airport facilities for asylum seekers were overwhelmed. On December 22, three judges required the Ministry of the Interior and the National Police to adopt “urgently” measures to put an end to the “overcrowding” that, at that time, the 244 applicants who were sleeping on the floor while waiting for that they be allowed to enter Spanish territory. Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska has said that he sent police reinforcements to speed up the interviews they must undergo before letting them in and the spaces to receive them have been expanded.

But it doesn't end there. According to police sources, an investigation has been opened to discover if there is anyone doing business with these trips, although both Mousa and Ali claim that they organized the trip on their own. Furthermore, according to sources familiar with the case, Spain is studying imposing a transit visa on citizens with Kenyan passports to block this route. It would not be the first time.

Every time a specific nationality has attracted attention for requesting asylum at a Spanish airport, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has imposed transit visas to avoid this. It happened in 2011 with Syrian citizens; in 2018, with Palestinian refugees in Lebanon; in 2020, with Yemenis; in 2021, with Haitians; in 2022, with Turks; and in 2023, with Burkinabe. “Spain has the bad practice of imposing transit visas on groups when it detects that a certain number of people arrive, without taking into account that they may be susceptible to receiving international protection,” denounces Estrella Galán, director of the Spanish Commission for Refugee Assistance. (CEAR). “It is a terrible decision for those who need asylum and, in the case of Somalis, a definitive obstacle for them to reach a safe country after fleeing terror.”

An open-air prison

The life story of these Somalis before arriving in Barajas is terrifying. Ali can't even talk without crying. Somalia is mired in an armed conflict, in a humanitarian crisis, and faces the worst drought in the last 40 years, with the risk of widespread famine. At the end of 2021, according to UNHCR, there were 836,000 Somali refugees and asylum seekers worldwide. The EU recognizes refugee status for 55% of Somalis who request it, the fifth highest percentage among the 20 countries that submit the most applications, according to Eurostat. But to achieve it, they must first arrive.

Mousa, 35, built a career in Somalia as an official for international and local organizations dedicated to the fight against malnutrition and his work led him to become a target of Al-Shabaab, the main terrorist group operating in the country. “They saw me as an enemy, as a spy, it was dangerous for my family to be with them,” he remembers. Since the civil war began in 1991, he has left Somalia three times to live in neighboring Kenya. Sometimes he did it alone, other times, accompanied by his wife and his eight children. Dadaab, one of the largest refugee camps in the world, is located in Kenya. Life there was impossible for him. “The Government of Kenya does not allow refugees to leave the camp. You have no freedom of movement, you can't even go to the nearest town, you can only work there and if you leave they can arrest you. A Kenyan can earn 1,000 euros a month, while a Somali refugee will not get more than 100. It is not at all unusual for people to buy a passport to live better; intermediaries sell them for as little as 100 euros. “Everyone knows who they are and the Kenyan Government knows it too,” he explains.

In this case, Kenyan diplomatic sources have maintained their reservations about the veracity of the passports. Only they, they warned in August, are competent to establish the validity of the document.

Ali lost his brother, who was a government official, during a terrorist attack in a restaurant in Mogadishu in 2019. And in August of the following year he received a call. “They demanded that I join the terrorists or they would destroy me forever,” he recalls. Here he has to stop because tears come to his eyes and his breath stops. “They separated me from my family, from my children, from my wife, from my mother, for whom I was the only thing left,” she sobs. Ali sold the grocery store and escaped to Kenya in October 2020. His description of his life in the refugee camp, where he worked as a taxi driver, is not far from Mousa's. “You can't go out, if they see you on the street they arrest you, you spend the day paying bribes to avoid going to jail,” he laments. Fed up, he handed over 700 euros for a passport, the key to a new life. “Now I feel safe, I'm going to learn the language, I'm going to work, I'm going to live, finally, as a human being,” he explains.

Ali's final destination was Cuba, but he did not wait to be sent back. As soon as he landed in Madrid, in September of this year, he went in search of the police. By then, there was no longer surprise, but dozens of eyes studying how to stop them.

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