Za "Time" from Rome
A wreath of flowers floats calmly on the surface of the sea not far from the island of Lampedusa. Fifty meters below it is the grave of the still uncounted victims of the shipwreck that happened on October 3, just 500 meters from the place where they sought salvation fleeing their homelands. Italian coastguard divers say dozens of hundreds of bodies are still trapped in the hull of a ship that sank near Italy's southernmost outpost in the Mediterranean. The Coast Guard, fishermen and people from Lampedusa have rescued 194 people as of Tuesday (at the time of writing). More than 110 bodies, including women and children, were washed ashore by the waves. There are perhaps 300 more people lying at the bottom of the sea, and the final number of dead and missing could be even higher.
What happened last week near Lampedusa, less than 120 kilometers from Africa, is probably the biggest maritime disaster in Italian history. For the sake of comparison, the most terrible event until October 3rd took place in 1997, when more than 100 people died in the shipwreck of the Albanian ship "Kater i rades" which tried to reach the Italian east coast.
At that time, Italy began to realize that its coasts had become the main sea border of the European Union. Sixteen years later, sunken ships and rafts along the Sicilian and Calabrian coasts are more or less daily news. The dead bodies of migrants found by fishermen or washed ashore by sea currents are almost daily news. And yet, nothing like this has happened yet, at least not this close to the coast and not in front of the TV cameras.
WRONG DECISION: The scenario of the accident, according to the local authorities, is as follows: the ship left Libya, with about 500 people on board, when they approached the coast of Lampedusa, someone on the ship thought that the easiest way to attract the attention of the coast guard was to light a fire and rise smoke The fire apparently got out of control, causing general commotion and panic on the ship, among the migrants mainly from Eritrea and Somalia. Most likely, they tried to escape from the flames to the opposite side of the ship, which is why it eventually capsized.
Italian authorities are still investigating whether the story took this course. Some of the survivors remember that three fishing boats from Lampedusa passed by the ship while it was still burning, before it sank. Some other ships stopped and took in as many people as they could, thus saving dozens of lives.
The sight of bodies lined up side by side on the beach of Lampedusa is reminiscent of a battlefield scene after a just-ended battle. It evokes tears and sympathy for the victims, both among the Italian public and among politicians. Two days after the shipwreck, residents of Lampedusa organized a vigil for the victims and demonstrations, asking the government in Rome to do something: to open a humanitarian corridor, a safer sea route from North Africa to Italy, to avoid tragedies like this one.
Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta decided to declare a day of mourning in the country. This is the first time that a day of mourning has been declared on such an occasion. He also called on the European Union to strengthen surveillance at sea and to support the Italian authorities to deal with the influx of disaster-stricken ships coming from the coasts of Libya, Tunisia, and sometimes Egypt. It's a tough call to answer. To the EU agency responsible for border surveillance (Frontex) the budget was reduced by a third to 85 million euros.
"Those who died in this accident are Italian citizens," Leta said. Did he really mean it or is it just a rhetorical exaggeration of the scale of the tragedy?
REVOLTED AND INTENTIONAL: "In my opinion, there has been a change in the way the Italian media reported this event," Clelia Bartoli, professor of human rights at the University of Palermo, author of the book, tells "Vreme" Racists by law. Italy which discriminates (Racists by law. Italy that discriminates, 2012) and advisor to Cecile Kayenge, the Congolese-born Italian Minister of National Integration. "Many newspapers gave importance to the personal stories of the survivors and victims of the shipwreck, publishing their family photos as well. It irresistibly reminds me of the way the media normally covers air crashes in which Italians and people from the West are victims. "Previously, events like this with victims of refugees were mostly treated as a collective tragedy, the victims were impersonal numbers, there were no personal stories," says Bartoli.
Several factors could be responsible for this change in course, Bartoli explains. First of all, three important institutional figures in different but very important positions in the country had personal experience with migration and working with refugees. "The Pope is the first of them. "His words of indignation and shame, which he felt because of this accident, were much sharper than those spoken during the usual statements of condolence," Bartoli points out. "The second is Laura Boldrini, the president of the lower house of the Parliament, who in her previous position as a spokesperson for the UNHCR voiced sharp criticism of Italy's anti-immigration policy." The third is Minister Kayenge. To all this, you can add the fact that the general attitude of this government on many issues is significantly different from the thinking and actions of the previous one. In it, the Northern League (Silvio Berlusconi's ally) often openly expressed racist theses and propagated anti-immigration policy."
The attitude of today's government and a large part of Italian public opinion could be different after the tragedy at Lampedusa. While Umberto Bossi, the former leader of the Northern League, continues to defend his "child", the so-called Bossi-Fini law that currently regulates immigration to Italy, voices calling for the abolition of this legal act are increasing.
Two provisions of the Bossi-Fini law are particular traps for migrants: the first states that it is illegal to stay in Italy illegally, and the second states that legal entry requires a job offer before applying for a visa or work permit. "It never worked in practice, because it's simply impossible for anyone, if you live in Senegal or say Ukraine, to hire you for a low-paying job in Italy before you apply for a visa," explains Bartoli. "The result is that anyone who wants to move to Italy from non-EU countries has the status of an illegal immigrant." As a result, migrants are exposed to exploitation and abuse by ruthless employers. The calculation is clear: if they don't have a job, they don't have permission to stay. That's why they agree to all the working and living conditions that are offered to them."
It is true that the Bossy-Finney Act punishes the exploitation of workers, but this part of the law was rarely enforced by the authorities. To make matters worse, Italy lacks an updated and complete asylum law. That was one of the battles that Laura Boldrini fought, admittedly in vain, while she was UNHCR's spokesperson in Italy. Perhaps now as the president of the lower house of the Parliament, she will have better luck. From this point of view, perhaps the victims of Lampedusa did not die in vain.
JOURNEY TO THE PROMISED LAND: Is all this enough? Of course not. Judging by the attitude of the government, there are problems that Italy cannot solve alone. One of them is the situation in Eritrea, where many of the Lampedusa victims came from. This small, strategically positioned country has been ruled by ex-guerrilla leader, now President Isaias Afwerki since 1993 and, according to Amnesty International's latest report, it is one of the worst countries in the world in terms of human rights abuses and suppression of personal freedoms. The entire population, both men and women, has an obligation to serve in the army, some for life. This is one of the reasons why many young people flee Eritrea, risking their lives on the way through Sudan and Libya.
UNHCR data shows that Eritreans form the dominant majority of the approximately 3000 people who illegally left Libyan shores by boarding 27 Italian vessels in August 2013 alone. Before the fall of Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi, Libyan forces were doing "dirty work" on migrants from sub-Saharan Africa who were trying to reach the Mediterranean coast in order to avoid reaching Italy. The camps scattered across the Libyan desert were a certain fate for most of those who tried to leave the mainland illegally. Living conditions in those camps were, and in many still are, below all standards: abuse, torture and arbitrary arrests were widespread. Today, though, to a lesser extent.
The fear of what may await them in Libyan camps has driven many migrants into the hands of human traffickers. They put them aboard old ships that can barely keep afloat, even in relatively calm seas like the one between the African coast and Lampedusa. For many, those 120 kilometers of hope and dreams ended tragically.
NEW LAWS AND COOPERATION WITH LIBYA: The latest UNHCR reports indicate that the new Libyan authorities are cooperating with the EU migration agency, which was not the case under Gaddafi. However, much still needs to be done in order for an adequate system of protection for migrants and potential asylum seekers to function in Libya. By the way, Italy once cooperated heartily with Gaddafi. During Berlusconi's "honeymoon" with the dictator, Italy sent equipment and trained his "border police" and in some cases even helped set up "camps" for migrants.
Cooperation with the new Libyan authorities today is taking place with much less enthusiasm, but after the tragedy in Lampedusa and with the support of the UNHCR, this could change for the better. According to Bartoli, a combination of better treatment of migrants and refugees in Libya and different laws in Italy could in the future unravel the network of illegal human trafficking that has claimed so many lives. The Lampedusa tragedy is only one of the most visible incidents: the actual death toll in the Sicilian Channel is unknown.
"What we have to think about in relation to this tragedy," adds Bartoli, "is that migrants were treated for the first time in the media and public opinion, as part of 'us' building a national political community." It was 'our' tragedy, not theirs. I hope this change will have a long-term impact on the media image and political attitudes." It may sound too optimistic, but there are other signals that strengthen Bartoli's point of view. During the last election campaign, for example, immigration was not an issue, as it was the case in the 2009 election campaign, when the Northern League played this card hard to score political points. Let's go back to the beginning of the story: who sits in the Italian institutions today? In addition to the already mentioned Minister Kayenga, the young Khalid Chaouki, a Muslim of Moroccan origin, is also in the Parliament.
Whether these small changes in mindset and interpretation of events persist or disappear with the next high tide will be shown by the winter lull in travel from North Africa to the Italian borders. The general feeling today, now, this week is that the country through which millions of migrants from all over the world have passed can no longer tolerate such tragedies on its shores. As Laura Boldrini said at a press conference in Lampedusa: "Things will never be the same again."
Until something changes, the 155 surviving shipwrecked men face charges under current law for attempting to enter Italy illegally.
(Translated from English by Jasmina Lazić)
The tragedy near the shores of Lampedusa is the biggest, but it is only one in an endless series of accidents in the Mediterranean where illegal emigrants trying to reach Europe have been losing their lives for decades. In July 2012, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) announced that at least 50 migrants, mostly from Eritrea, had died of thirst in a rubber boat found floating off the coast of Tunisia. The boat, departing from Libya, arrived close to the Italian coast, when the wind brought it back to the open sea where it spent fifteen days.
In the summer of 2012, the Libyan Coast Guard found fifteen bodies of drowned people on the coast, which were thrown out by the sea. Among them were twelve women and one baby. During the civil war in Libya in 2011, the British "Guardian" reported the news that a ship with 72 passengers, which left Tripoli for the Italian coast, floated on the sea for sixteen days without fuel. The survivors claimed that no one came to their aid even though the coast guards of Italy and Malta received a call for help, and that an aircraft carrier passed them without stopping to help them. 61 people died of hunger or thirst, including two babies. On the ship were Ethiopians, Nigerians, Eritreans, people from Ghana, Sudan. In early April 2011, the Tunisian Coast Guard found the bodies of 27 migrants who drowned when their overcrowded boats, which had set off from the Tunisian port of Sfax, sank in the Mediterranean Sea.
In June 2008, a ship carrying 150 emigrants from Egypt sank off the coast of Libya, only one passenger survived. In March 2005, people smugglers boarded fifteen Chinese in Malta and threw them into the sea three kilometers away from Ragusa, Italy, and eleven of them drowned in the cold sea. In a shipwreck near the borders of Tunisia in June 2003, 210 emigrants died.
According to UN data, last year at least 500 people died trying to enter Europe by sea, in 2011 about 1500, although it is emphasized that it is impossible to determine the exact number of victims, because a huge number of boats and ruined ships full of emigrants disappear at sea. without a trace. The Italian television station RAI claims that at least 16.000 emigrants have died in the Mediterranean in the last 16 years. Frontex, the EU agency responsible for monitoring the borders, announced that in almost 900 rescue operations from 2011 to today, around 50.000 emigrants were saved in the Mediterranean.
Although the accident near Lampedusa once again brought to the fore the suffering of emigrants at sea, we should not forget that they also lose their lives on other roads to the "promised world", at the hands of smugglers, from illness and exhaustion, by accident. In July of this year, one emigrant was killed and three others were wounded by firearms in Macedonia, near the border with Serbia. The police suspect that the emigrants, originally from Afghanistan, were shot by someone before they tried to cross the border illegally. In September 2012, the dismembered body of a dark-skinned man literally fell from the sky onto the street in a London suburb. He was identified only eight months later, as a thirty-year-old Mozambican citizen, Jose Matada. The unfortunate Matada probably fell out of the landing gear of the plane from Angola in which he was hidden, which at the time landed at nearby Heathrow Airport.
M. Turudić
Sicily, Lampedusa and Malta are located on the so-called Central Mediterranean route, through which emigrants from North Africa, in smaller numbers from Greece and Turkey, are transferred to Italy, and then to other countries of the European Union. Frontex announced that from January to September of this year, more than 31.000 emigrants arrived in the EU countries via this route, from the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, Somalia, Eritrea, Syria... The Western Mediterranean route leads from the countries of West Africa to the southern Spanish coast, the Canary Islands and Spanish enclaves. on African soil, Ceuta and Melilla.
Immigrants from Asian countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, countries from the Middle East and some African countries mainly come via the Eastern Mediterranean route. Admittedly, these divisions are conditional; if border control is tightened on a certain route, emigrants take another route, so it happens, for example, that emigrants from the west coast of Africa reach Europe via Greece. This route from Turkey leads through Greece further towards Europe. Until last year, a greater number of entries from Turkey to Greece were registered on the Evros (Marica) border river than by sea, but the picture changed after a protective fence was erected on that part of the border on the Greek side at the end of 2012. Frontex reports for this year also state that after the actions of the Greek authorities in 2012, which reduced the number of immigrants entering the country from Turkey, more and more emigrants are using the Northern Balkan route, via Bulgaria and Romania.
People go from Greece to other EU countries by sea, via Italy, or via the Western Balkan route, via Macedonia and Serbia, or Albania and Montenegro (people smuggling by sea from Albania to Italy is also on the rise).
There are an estimated 800.000 registered immigrants in Greece, and the number of unregistered immigrants is estimated at more than 350.000. About 128.000 illegal immigrants entered Greece in 2011 alone. It is estimated that between 350.000 and half a million illegal immigrants arrive in Europe every year.
MT
