Somali Boat tragedy, news article

[General Duke]

Migrant girl, 9, tells of planned exodus from Libyan camp

 

By Peter Popham in Rome

23 October 2003

 

 

Italy is bracing for the arrival of another wave of illegal immigrants after a little girl who survived the journey from north Africa told her rescuers of a holding centre near Tripoli where "hundreds" of would-be migrants are waiting to sail.

 

Identified only as Asma, the nine-year-old girl lost three of her siblings on the nightmarish journey during which about 80 Africans died from hunger, thirst and exposure. She said she had been kept in a holding centre near the Libyan capital with many people from other African countries.

 

And an Italian diplomat in Tripoli reinforced fears of a mass exodus across the Mediterranean. "The situation in Libya is already close to collapse," he said. "Unless action is taken to block the land routes [to the coast], the number leaving [for Italy] will increase every day. There are thousands waiting to embark."

 

Some in Italy point the finger of blame at the Libyan dictator, Muammar Gadaffi. At the beginning of July, following an earlier spate of deaths among illegals crossing from Africa, Italy signed an agreement with its former colony by which Libya pledged to patrol its coastline. But the radar and other technical items Libya demanded to beef up its coast patrols are banned under EU sanctions. So although the agreement is still in force, it is proving ineffective.

 

Sergio Romano, a senior retired diplomat and author, says that is exactly how Colonel Gadaffi wants it - he is cynically using the desperation of the illegal immigrants to improve his bargaining power with the EU. Mr Romano wrote in Corriere della Sera yesterday: "After purchasing the lifting of sanctions at the United Nations, [Gadaffi] is using African clandestini as a barter for the technical collaboration (radars, sensors, naval equipment) that he needs (or so he claims) to patrol his coastline. Oil and clandestini are Gaddafi's preferred weapons against Italy."

 

Only 15 people remained alive on the nameless fishing boat carrying Asma and her parents. There were 13 corpses on the boat; dozens more had been tossed overboard.

 

At the reception centre in Lampedusa where the clandestini are being held, Asma spoke of the holding centre near Tripoli. "It was like a big shed, with a door but no windows," she explained through an interpreter. "There were hundreds of people ... They kept us indoors all the time, we were not allowed to go out. Children were allowed to play and grown-ups to watch television.

 

"We were there for four days, others for 20 or more. Groups came in from different countries by lorry. We saw them arrive - always the same lorry, the same jeep, the same drivers."

 

An adult among the group said that migrants from Somalia paid $400 (£240) for the trip across the desert to Tripoli and $800 for the sea crossing .

 

The Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and his Home Minister, Giuseppe Pisanu, strove to persuade Europe to take responsibility for the immigration crisis. At the European Parliament in Strasbourg, Mr Berlusconi spoke of the need for a new EU agency to bring about "concrete collaboration" to control Europe's frontiers. And in Rome, Mr Pisanu told Italy's parliament that Europe should set an EU-wide quota on new arrivals.

 

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Damn it makes you wana weep and weep for this is what our people have become.

[General Duke]

Strewn with corpses, another refugee ship offloads its cargo

 

By Peter Popham in Rome

21 October 2003

 

 

It was a scene from hell. When the Italian coastguards boarded the dilapidated wooden fishing boat in high seas on Sunday, flying no colours and with no name, they found 15 survivors and 13 corpses.

 

They had been warned what to expect. The first craft on the scene, an Italian fishing boat, had spotted the living and the dead mixed up together. They had tossed bottles of water and bread across to the survivors, but the seas were too high for them to risk boarding.

 

When the coastguards arrived, they found the deck littered with bodies, while those left alive were wailing for help. They were at their last gasp, human skeletons.

 

The coastguards transferred the survivors to their boat and towed the fishing boat back to Lampedusa, arriving shortly before dawn yesterday. They began hauling away the corpses; trapped beneath them, they found a young woman, unconscious, barely breathing. She was sent by helicopter to hospital in Palermo, on the Sicilian mainland.

 

So many flimsy boats crammed with illegal immigrants limp into the harbour of Lampedusa, the small Italian holiday island halfway to north Africa, that it's no longer news.

 

When hundreds of the so-called clandestini drowned in June, Umberto Bossi, Italy's Minister of Reforms, dismissed it, saying: "They died while travelling, like many people on the roads."

 

The endless flow of these sea-borne migrants has become a fact of Italian life: they arrive at the reception centre in Lampedusa, they are transferred to a larger holding camp on the mainland, and one by one they disappear. Italy, its birth rate dwindling, needs migrants to work in its fields and factories, and slowly it is beginning to accept the fact.

 

In a surprising volte-face, the post-Fascist Alleanza Nazionale, part of the ruling coalition, recently proposed giving legally resident immigrants limited voting rights. Others in the centre-right have urged the quota on immigrants be abandoned. Only the xenophobic Mr Bossi - who has said the Italian Navy should fire on the migrant boats - holds out.

 

But for now, this is the way the needed new arrivals turn up. In the first six months of this year Italy detected the arrival of 8,881 illegal immigrants. That's a drop of 40 per cent compared with last year - thanks to the government's joint patrols with Albania in the Adriatic. But across the Sicily Channel from north Africa the flow is practically continuous.

 

And now summer is over. All the Milanese bourgeois families packing Lampedusa's small beaches are long gone. The sea chops and rolls and the wind whistles; and still the migrants roll up on Lampedusa's shore. Only now they roll up dead.

 

The previous most recent disaster in the Sicily Channel, the one about which Umberto Bossi was so complacent, happened in June, when the seas were flat calm: more than 200 died when their grossly overloaded vessel sank.

 

The latest tragedy looks smaller; but one of the survivors told a reporter that there were "a hundred" on board when they set sail, including seven children. The 70-odd of whom no trace remains were buried at sea. The disaster follows one that came to light on Friday after seven migrants died from cold and hunger en route to Lampedusa.

 

Yesterday, Giuseppe Pisanu, Italy's Home Minister, told his European counterparts meeting in France that the latest incident was "a dreadful tragedy that weighs on the conscience of Europe".

 

Hundreds of clandestine immigrants had died in the sea this year, he pointed out, and probably others had died attempting to cross the Sahara, en route to the north African coast. The latest event, he said, "is only the most recent of a huge and ignored tragedy that has been unfolding under the eyes of Europe" .

 

Rejecting the notion that Italy had special responsibility for the crisis, he insisted that "the whole European Union must feel responsible, as well as the governments of African countries from which the migrants depart or through which they transit". Italy signed an agreement with the Libyan government in the summer, requiring Libya to tighten patrols in its ports. But according to a source in the Italian Home Ministry, "the patrols in the ports push those who want to leave to try their luck from the beaches" - only increasing the peril of the voyage.

 

The spokesman at the ministry said: "We fear that in the high seas many other tragedies occur which no one ever learns anything about."