Riot police were deployed throughout a Spanish seaside town popular with British expatriates today after the second consecutive night of rioting by African immigrants.
The fighting in Roquetas del Mar, 12 miles west of Almería, were caused by a dispute between Spanish Gypsies and African immigrants in which a 28 year old Senegalese man was stabbed to death, the Spanish Interior Ministry said.
Outraged migrant workers set fire to the home of the man they said was responsible, and erected barricades, smashed shop windows and kept firefighters at bay with stones and bottles.
Police responded with baton charges and rubber bullets in scenes that were reminiscent of race riots in the Paris suburbs last year. Four police officers were injured and several fire vehicles were damaged. Eight Africans were arrested.
It was the latest outburst of race-related violence in Spain, which has witnessed a surge of immigration in the past decade. As many as 1,000 Spanish youths fought Latin American immigrants in the Madrid suburb of Alcorcón last year. Many claimed that they were reclaiming the neighbourhood from gangs that had arrived from Central America.
Immigration has swelled the registered population in Spain from 40 million in 2000 to 46 million today. A study by the research group Fundación BBVA estimated last year that the country had the largest number of immigrants in the developed world after the US.
The economy was one of Europe’s fastest-growing but there was little tension between Spaniards and the different groups of immigrants. The Spanish Socialist Government granted an amnesty to 700,000 illegal immigrants and considered the race riots in Paris as proof that the French hardline attitude towards immigration was wrong.
Some critics now worry that, with the Spanish economy slowing and unemployment rising, episodes such as the one in Roquetas del Mar are a taste of things to come. Immigrants work mainly in the construction and service industries, which are the hardest-hit by the economic slowdown.
“To British holidaymakers, places like this may seem like paradise by the sea,” David Mathieson, an associate of FRIDE, the Madrid-based think-tank, said. “But for many marginalised people, they can turn into hell.”
Others argued that the latest incidents were not comparable to race riots such as those in Britain in the 1980s. “They still appear to be isolated incidents,” Mr Mathieson said.
A Spanish Government official denied that the economic woes of the country had anything to do with the outbreak of violence, claiming that it was strictly racial in nature.
The Government plans to announce measures to ensure that immigrants are integrated into Spanish society and avoid the sort of racial problems faced by France, Britain and the Netherlands, the official said.
“The situation in the suburbs of Paris worries us,” the official, who asked not to be named, said. “We want to avoid a similar fate.
