Ceuta was explained without asking Moroccans
Two rumours began circulating in Morocco last week.
The first said that the route to Europe was open. People set off from across Morocco towards Ceuta, the Spanish city on the North African coast. Some climbed over fences; others swam around the Tarajal breakwater. The rumour did not have to be true. It only had to reach people who desperately wanted it to be.
The second rumour said that Europe was under attack. It travelled faster and further. It crossed Spain, France and Germany, reached Finland without getting its feet wet and made it all the way to the White House. In an interview with Fox News, US President Donald Trump warned that the same thing awaited the United States if the ‘wrong side’ came to power in the midterm elections. This rumour did not have to be true either. It was enough that it gave fear a direction and the enemy a face.
By the time Interior Minister Mari Rantanen of the Finns Party told MTV News on Friday that she had begun preparations to reinstate internal border controls and said Spain had failed to prevent ‘an incursion and invasion’, more than 48,000 of those who had arrived had already returned to Morocco. According to EU Commissioner for Migration Magnus Brunner, not one of them had continued on to mainland Europe.
The scale of what happened should not be played down. An estimated 50,000–60,000 people arrived within a few days in a city of 85,000 inhabitants. By Saturday, 67 people had lost their lives. Residents were afraid, public services were under strain, Spain deployed soldiers and Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez described the border crossings as a violation of Spain’s territorial integrity. Morocco has loosened its border controls for political reasons before. All of this deserved to be reported.
The more important question, however, is whether the reporting helped us understand what had actually happened.
In Finland, the news coverage mostly answered two versions of the question ‘why’. Why Ceuta? Helsingin Sanomatoffered an answer in its headline: ‘Ceuta and Melilla are the gateway from Africa to Europe’. But why now? There was no shortage of explanations. In July, Spain’s Supreme Court had ruled that people arriving by sea could not be immediately turned back without legal proceedings. Smugglers were said to have spread false information. Relations between Morocco and Spain were strained. Yle asked Saila Heinikoski, a researcher at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, whether this might be an attempt to destabilise Europe; she said Russia could not be ruled out either.
Researchers, ministers and officials were asked for explanations – almost everyone except those arriving themselves. As a result, the most fundamental question went unanswered: why were tens of thousands of people prepared to leave their current lives behind the moment a rumour of an open border reached them?
A border is an excellent place to take photographs and a terrible place from which to explain a life. A camera can see a man climbing over a fence. It cannot see the years spent looking for work, the wage that is not enough to support a family, the degree that leads nowhere, or the cousin who moved abroad and seems to have found a better life.
According to Morocco’s own statistics, unemployment among 15–24-year-olds stood at 29.2 per cent this spring. In an Arab Barometer survey conducted in 2023–2024, 55 per cent of Moroccans aged 18–29 said they were considering emigrating. More than half of them said they would be prepared to leave without the required papers. The most common reason was economic, followed by educational opportunities, corruption and politics.
These figures do not tell us why one particular person risked their life at the breakwater. One person wanted work, another wanted to study, another followed friends. But the figures do tell us what kind of reality makes a rumour of an open border seem worth taking seriously.
Very little of that reality appears in Finnish news coverage. Part of the reason lies in the structure of the news machine itself. Ministers, authorities and EU institutions issue press releases in European languages. They have communications departments and direct lines to newsrooms. A young Moroccan has neither – and may have little reason to trust a foreign journalist.
There is a small but revealing passage in Helsingin Sanomat’s report from Ceuta. The journalist tried to interview three Moroccan men, but according to the article the interview fell through because the men spoke neither English nor Spanish. It would have been equally possible to write that the journalist did not speak Arabic. Which person’s lack of language skills is recorded tells us something about whose terms the news is produced on.
For an individual journalist, the problem is understandable. The fact remains that the Finnish media can reach a minister calling for border controls more easily than it can reach a person those controls are intended to stop.
During the first few days, people who had tried to cross the border made it into the news mainly through international news agencies. Buried in Iltalehti’s live coverage was Fatima Zahra, interviewed by AFP, who said she worked in Tangier in ‘terrible conditions’. When she heard the rumour about the border, she and her friends decided to try their luck. Another interviewee, Abdelhakim, abandoned his attempt after being pulled under the water. ‘That’s when I turned back and realised that I have two children and I can’t risk my life,’ he said.
Listening to ordinary Moroccans explains more than speculation about the schemes of foreign powers. That does not mean that a possible attempt at hybrid interference should be denied or left uninvestigated. In fact, evidence pointing towards Morocco’s role emerged precisely by listening to those who had come: several told the New York Times that Moroccan police officers had waved them towards the border. But a state can only open the gate. It cannot manufacture, in a single afternoon, tens of thousands of people’s desire to walk through it. People may have been exploited, and they may also have had reasons of their own for setting out. Both can be true at the same time.
Finns should be capable of holding those two thoughts in their heads at once. When Russia directed migrants towards Finland’s eastern border in 2023, the instrumentalisation was real – and so were the people, whose reasons for setting out had not been invented in the Kremlin.
If the media narrative begins with talk of an invasion, the latter truth disappears. The word leaves room for only certain questions: how do we repel the attack, could it reach Finland? The person disappears step by step: a student teacher becomes an illegal entrant, arrivals become a wave, and the wave becomes a threat to Finland’s borders.
By Friday evening, a Finnish reader knew about preparations for border controls, soldiers, the dead and speculation that the events might constitute a hybrid operation. Within a day, Ceuta had become a stage on which others pursued their own interests: the White House blamed Sánchez’s migration policy, Italy announced that it would suspend Schengen co-operation with Spain, and in Finland the interior minister spoke of an invasion and, like the finance minister, supported expelling Spain from Schengen.
The European Union pays Morocco to control migration. It hired a gatekeeper and is now surprised to discover that the person holding the keys has interests of their own. If Morocco used people to put pressure on Spain, that must be investigated. But people can only be moved around like pieces on a board that someone has built.
Good journalism would ask ‘why’ at least three times: not only ‘why Ceuta’ and ‘why now’, but also ‘why leave at all’. And it would put those questions to the people arriving themselves – preferably straight away, rather than on the fourth day. Failing to ask creates a picture of a world in which people walk into the sea for no apparent reason, and in which European politicians are almost the only people with motives, voices and names.
A human perspective does not necessarily make journalism gentler; it makes it more precise. If you support strict border controls, you should want to know what drives people towards borders. It is poor journalism to look only at the match and fail to notice the tinder-dry forest.
This piece was originally published in Journalisti on 3 August 2026 under the title ‘Media kysyi Ceutan kriisin syitä kaikilta muilta paitsi marokkolaisilta, kirjoittaa Antti Yrjönen’. Read the original →
