CEUTA, MELILLA, and Spain's amnesty to illegal immigrants:

A Spanish amnesty for illegal immigrants has drawn more of them to Europe and unilateral policies should be abandoned in favour of joint international solutions, Germany's Interior Minister said on Sunday.

Europe may be "overwhelmed" by migrants if the economic and social gap between it and impoverished Africa continued to widen rapidly, Interior Minister Otto Schily warned, in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

"The pressure on Europe from migrants will increase so dramatically that we will be totally overwhelmed," the paper quoted him as saying. "Not even three- or five-deep layers of fencing will prevent it."

In recent weeks, large groups of African migrants have tried to get into Europe by storming razor wire fences around Spain's North African enclaves of Melilla and Ceuta, which are situated on the Mediterranean coast of Morocco.

Eleven have died in the last 10 days.

"Wide-ranging campaigns to legalise immigrants such as in Spain mean more illegal immigrants are drawn to Europe," Schily said.

"In the long term immigration and refugee problems cannot be solved with unilateral action, but only with European and international cooperation," he added.

In February, Spain introduced a three-month amnesty for illegal immigrants as part of a drive to lift them out of the shadow economy, give them rights and make them pay taxes.

Around 700,000 people took advantage of the scheme, which the government said helped better regulate immigration in a country that is a main gateway into the European Union from Africa and Latin America.

But the measure also highlighted the absence of a common EU immigration policy and angered some members of the bloc.

UPDATE. Immigrants tell of their ordeal:

Houta Bille Patrick saw men die on the trek across the Sahara, parched and starving as they headed for Europe's doorstep. The 2,400-mile odyssey from his native Cameroon took a year.

Along the way, he saw the unspeakable - men so thirsty they drank their own urine, then begged others for theirs, hunger bordering on madness, skin cracking under a searing sun, horrendous, gushing nosebleeds.

"I thought I was finished," said Houta, who is 25 but looks closer to 40, standing in a crowded holding facility. "It was only prayer that saved me."

Next came 18 months in a hillside pine forest in Morocco, hiding from baton-wielding police by day, sneaking out at night to eat from trash cans and dodging bandits. His destination, this Spanish enclave on North Africa's coast, loomed tantalizingly before him.

After a dozen failed attempts, Houta got in two weeks ago, joining waves of desperate men from sub-Saharan Africa who used ladders fashioned from tree branches to scale one 10-foot razor wire fence, then another, tearing hands and feet, arms and legs as they hurled themselves into Spain in the dead of night.

They come because in the past Spain did not deport many Africans who got onto its territory, having no repatriation agreements with their home governments, which do not want them back. The migrants eventually were taken to the Spanish mainland and turned loose - without work permits or residency papers, but free to look for jobs in the unofficial economy.

So Houta believed he had achieved a toehold in bountiful Europe. Now he is digesting a nightmare: Facing a flood of illegal entrants, Spain is expelling some recent arrivals - not to their homelands, but to Morocco, under a 1992 treaty that had never been implemented. Houta said he would rather hang himself than return to Morocco.

And I can understand: after Moroccan authorities were exposed for not sending the immigrants back to their home countries but dumping them in the desert without food or water instead, now they're just loading them in beat-up buses, handcuffed and againg with no food or water, and sending them who knows where. TV images are really horrific, they're dealt with as if they were cattle, maybe worse.

Doctors Without Borders spokespeople said today the buses have been last spotted in Southwestern Morocco near El Aaiun, the capital of Western Sahara -the territory which used to be a Spanish colony until 1975 and is currently occupied by Morocco-. They say the caravan seems to be going not to Sub-Saharan Africa but further into the desert, towards the border with Mauritania.

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