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Dr Gabaldon came here after stints in, among other places, Burundi and Rwanda at the time of the massacres. “Immigration,” he says, “is a long process with a long resolution. Every situation is different, every immigrant group is different, every individual profile is different.” What these all share is vulnerability to institutional and mafia bullying. The immigrants have access to two networks for help. One is MSF, the only provider of aid to illegal immigrants in the north of Morocco. The other is the sinister “Nigerian Network”, which has made a huge difference in the immigration situation over the past two years. Human trafficking is big money. It costs from £3,500 to £5,500 to get as far as Morocco.

“You pay the bill. High interest. Women will most often pay in sex work.” MSF often ends up looking after people abandoned by the network.

At the moment, though, most violence against immigrants comes from the Moroccan security forces. Last summer, all the inhabitants of camps in Bel Younech and Mariwari in the north mass-rushed the fence in an “organised” rebellion to try to enter Ceuta and Melilla. Few succeeded; 15 people died of injuries sustained after the security forces shot and beat them. It’s possible to see the “mistake”, as the security forces call it, of dumping the 1,200 people in the desert, as a bit of institutional vengeance in the wake of this.

Gabaldon is handling the aftermath of media excitement about it all; some news networks described a “genocide”, causing more local and government resentment. Gabaldon is angry too. “It isn’t genocide, and to call it what it isn’t endangers what we’re doing.” In two years, MSF has held 9,350 medical consultations in Morocco. A number of these were owing to violence against the immigrants. Of the most serious cases of violence, about 10% is carried out by the network, but 67% is from the actions of the Spanish and Moroccan security forces, with the Moroccan forces answerable for 52%.

Most immigrants in Morocco, about 2,000, are almost totally abandoned, with no way out and no way home. Morocco has stopped repatriating; the remaining groups are without embassies. Most live in the poor areas of the rich city of Rabat.

Pascal takes us to an undercover house, where I meet a 26-year-old man, B, who has prosthetic legs. B was an electrical worker trying to get to Europe to make money to send home. When he was running away from the police who were stoning him, he fell under a moving train and mangled both legs. He’s been here 18 months.

The house is all windowless rooms full of people, several sleeping in each room. On the top floor, two girls, aged five and three, run about delightedly. Their mother is suspicious but agrees to talk to me. She came here “on a flight” (via the network?) from “the Ivory Coast”.

She was a business traveller in France and Italy, in leather goods. But her business went bust. She “knew someone” in Rabat, so came here. Now there is nowhere for her to go.

It dawns on me that most people are lying when they tell you their stories, which are given guardedly, pared down, full of the unsayable. Two things stay with me from this visit: the passionate articulacy of a man of about 19 – who said to me: “There is nowhere to go from here. Please tell people. It is very important. It is not human” – and the room the children live in with their mother, nothing in it but a mattress and an array of bottles of cheap moisturiser, baby oil, cleaning products, lined up precisely, tallest to smallest, with newspaper pictures of models and film stars stuck above this on the wall.

All the way back to the rich part of town I wonder about a woman from the Congo whom Gabaldon told us about who refused to be interviewed by me. She was raped twice in one month, once by the security forces, once by the network traffickers. Now she’s pregnant and HIV positive. “MSF can help her on a medical level,” Gabaldon said, “but who will protect her?”

FERRY

Rabat is the “European” capital of Morocco, with its neat streets, coiffured trees, Ikea-like shops, McDonald’s McArabia burgers, and its much less gender-biased cultural mores – I saw more women walking about freely and confidently in one night in Rabat than I did elsewhere in my whole time in Morocco. But Tangier is a city on the edge, a city in economic metamorphosis, aspiring to a Europe so visible from its port, you feel you could reach over and touch it, so close that my mobile switches to Vodafone Espagne on some parts of the coast. This strait, between the tips of Africa and Europe, is the petrol route, and has always been a highly contested business route. You can see Spain from every rooftop in Tangier, and Gibraltar from a few miles north. Further along the coast, Spain is so close that you can see the propellers turning on the Spanish wind masts. Ferry boats cross merrily from shore to shore all day long.