Ceuta Declares Itself a Two-Month-Old Country, Appoints Every Resident to Border Patrol
Two months after the mass border crossing, Ceuta has stopped waiting for Madrid and declared itself a fully operational nation, with a rotating citizen border watch and a king who is reportedly still trying to schedule a visit.
CEUTA — Two months after tens of thousands crossed the border in a single day, the autonomous city has stopped waiting for Madrid and declared itself a fully operational country, with every resident assigned a four-hour shift on the new Citizen Border Watch.
The Watch, announced by the city's own security department, requires all adults to patrol the perimeter in rotating pairs, armed with a whistle, a folding chair and a laminated card explaining that they are, in fact, the border. Officials say the first shift began at dawn and that the whistle has already been blown more times than anyone can count.
«We are not asking for reinforcements anymore,» a city spokesperson said. «We are the reinforcement. Every resident is now a border guard, a customs officer and, on weekends, a lighthouse keeper.»
The King, who has called the original crossing unacceptable, has still not fixed a date to visit. Ceuta's new foreign ministry has therefore begun issuing its own passports, printed on the back of old bus tickets, and has opened an embassy in a beach kiosk that sells coffee and now also recognizes three new nations.
By Thursday, the city had introduced its own time zone, two hours ahead of Brussels, so that the Watch shifts would always begin before the migrants could be expected to arrive. Madrid has not commented, reportedly because it is still trying to find the city on a map that Ceuta has quietly redrawn.
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