Will new EU funds help manage spike in migration? | DW News

Some 10,000 migrants have arrived on Spain's Canary Islands so far this year, most of them crossing from Mauritania. Last week the European Union and Spain pledged 210 million euros to help Mauritania clamp down on smugglers and to deter the migrant boats. The Canary Islands are a first destination for people trying to reach continental Europe. Numbers of those attempting the dangerous Atlantic crossing are soaring, so too the number of those who die. DW's Jan-Philip Scholz reports from Las Palmas and Morgan on Gran Canaria. A small cemetery on the Canary Islands. Blank spaces stand out between the other plaques. No name, no epitaph. These are the graves of unknown African migrants. There are now so many of these that the cemetery has had to expand. Modu often comes here. He survived the crossing from Senegal, but many people he knows didn't. A good friend has been missing for three weeks. This could be him or anyone else around me who has died. That's why I always feel incredibly sad when I'm here. The number of migrants who've made it to the Canaries is at an all-time high, but so too is the number of those who've died attempting the crossing. Few carry any documents, so identifying them is difficult. The EU requires all recovered bodies to be identified and properly buried, but in reality this rarely happens. Raico Guerra manages the cemetery in this small community. He feels abandoned by his government. He says he gets no help in giving the migrants a dignified burial. Just a number, put in that box, finish. When we take the phone and call to Madrid or to the superior governments, they always say, don't worry, we'll see, don't worry, we'll see, but we don't have any solution. There are only a few experts on the island who can help identify the many dead. Javier Tapia is a pathologist. He and his team gather DNA samples, dental analyses and photos of the deceased. Their final report is often as far as they get. Tapia says the past months have been exceptionally hard. The worst are the autopsies of small children. This is really difficult to process emotionally. You feel terrible and you just want to cry for a day or two. It's actually quite traumatic to be confronted with all that. Modu continues to search for more information about his missing friend. His relatives in Senegal keep asking him for news via WhatsApp. They've given up hope of getting information through official channels. I'm at my wit's end. His wife and his young daughter are waiting for news. And I don't know who to turn to. We just want to know if he's still alive or if he died. Maybe a miracle will happen, says Modu. But he knows that for all those unidentified people buried here on the island, there are many more unaccounted for, lost at sea. Over to our Brussels correspondent, Jack Parrick. Jack, tell us more about the EU's deal with Mauritania. Will it cut down the number of people attempting the deadly crossings? Yeah, well, I mean, this is how they're trying to deal with this situation, as we just saw in the reports. The European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, and the Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez, went to Mauritania, which is where many of these boats are leaving to make their way to the Canary Islands. And basically what they offered was money. 250 million euros, essentially. 40 million of that to try and help the Mauritanians deal with their border with Mali, where there's an ongoing conflict and many terrorist activity across that border. As we've seen in the report, how devastating that is for so many people. Now, it sounds logical, Brussels outsourcing responsibility for border control to other non-EU countries, or at least getting them involved, but is it realistic? We saw it, for instance, with Tunisia, where they signed a multi-million euro deal last year. Interestingly, though, we saw the Tunisian government, that was the key route in the latter part of last year, we saw the Tunisian government transfer 60 million euros back into the account of the European Union Commission. They saw that money as derisory. They didn't want the charity of the European Union. So it's a really complicated position for the EU at the moment. We're also seeing countries like Italy have agreed with Albania, for instance, to set up migration processing centres in Albania, which is outside of the European Union, in order to try and get people to go there rather than to stay in Italy. So the situation at the moment is very clear. Especially from EU member states, especially from front-line EU member states where people are entering, they're trying to keep the migrants outside of the EU, trying to prevent them from entering the EU's borders. The latest on that ongoing issue of migration and Europe, Jack Parrott in Brussels.