How the Mediterranean turned into the graveyard of tens of thousands

In this video grab released by the Italian Coast Guards (Guardia Costiera) on April 17, 2015 migrants sit in a boat during a rescue operation on April 15, 2015 off the coast of Sicily as part of the Triton plan (Frontex). PHOTO | AFP

What you need to know:

  • Human rights groups claim that 3,285 bodies of Africans were found on the shores of Morocco or along the Strait of Gibraltar alone between 1997 and 2001, but the figure could be higher as many bodies were probably never found.
  • The Italian coast guards reported Friday last week that in one week, 11,000 people were rescued trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea in rickety, often makeshift boats. Just a day earlier, 900 immigrants had been  rescued trying to reach Sicily.
  • Why would one risk life to live in a place where one is neither appreciated nor wanted, or where the prospects of getting a job are diminishing by the day even for locals?

On the night of Sunday, April 19, a rickety boat carrying about 940 illegal immigrants capsized in the Mediterranean Sea, off the Libyan coast. Seven hundred people — men, women and children — perished. 

The previous week, more than 500 people had perished in the similar circumstances, all trying to reach Italy, seek asylum and funnel out into Europe.

These are the latest disasters in what is quickly escalating into the most tragic act of human desperation in modern times.

The Italian coast guards reported Friday last week that in one week, 11,000 people were rescued trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea in rickety, often makeshift boats. Just a day earlier, 900 immigrants had been  rescued trying to reach Sicily.

Thousands have died trying to cross the sea into Europe, and these are only what the Italians could document, otherwise there could as well be hundreds of others who might have drowned without anyone knowing between April 12 and 16 this year.

Both the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) are stunned by the influx of such a high number in just one week. And they have a very good reason to worry because, with last week’s fatalities, this year’s deaths are 10 times more than last year’s over the same period.

Africans have tried to cross the Mediterranean illegally into Europe for a long time, but the waves of immigrants seem to have risen to disturbing levels in the last two years, becoming a deluge this March-April.

Shipwrecked immigrants rest after disembarking from a rescue vessel as they arrive in the port on the island of Lesbos on April 17, 2015. PHOTO | AFP

Over 280,000 people entered the EU illegally last year, many fleeing conflict and poverty in Syria, Southern Sudan, and Eritrea. Most were from sub-Saharan Africa.

STRONG MAGNET

Until recently, the main route for illegal immigrants to the European El Dorado was Morocco, which was particularly popular among West Africans. Once in Morocco, the immigrants would try to reach the Spanish enclave of Melilla.

There, they would either attempt to scale the 10-metre perimeter wall or storm the gates of the tiny island.

But this route became increasingly difficult following draconian measures put in place by the Spanish and Moroccan authorities, including shooting anyone who approached the border.

Although the coast of Morocco is just 90 kilometres from Spain, we will never know how many people have died trying to cross the Strait of Gibraltar using boats.

Human rights groups claim that 3,285 bodies of Africans were found on the shores of Morocco or along the Strait of Gibraltar alone between 1997 and 2001, but the figure could be higher as many bodies were probably never found.

Despite that, many sub-Saharan Africans try to enter Europe every day from somewhere along the Mediterranean coast.

Since the end of Col Muammar Gadaffi’s rule, Libya has been having an unstable government, opening a new, unrestricted avenue for illegal immigrants to try to cross into Europe.

On this route, as many as 3,500 immigrants died in the sea last year, while 170,000 were rescued in the Mediterranean by the Italian border patrol, NGOs say, adding that this was 30 times more than in 2013.

Why would one risk life to live in a place where one is neither appreciated nor wanted, or where the prospects of getting a job are diminishing by the day even for locals?

There are no straightforward answers, but there is, of course, the perception that Europe is paradise. The prospect of landing a nice job or easy life in developed countries is a strong magnet for many young people in Africa and other poor countries.

There are certainly thousands of genuine asylum seekers who desperately seek to leave their countries because they are in great danger from war, poverty, famine, religious persecution or ethnic discrimination.

PERILOUS JOURNEY

However, experts on the subject say it is wrongly assumed that clandestine immigrants are mostly the poor. They argue from the strong premise that one needs substantial financial resources to reach Europe illegally.

Reports point out that the daredevils have to pay bribes to cross borders, either directly to officials or intermediaries.

Then there is chain of traffickers to be taken care of. Indeed, the most expensive are the human traffickers and middlemen in the Mediterranean who organise for boats, security and all manner of “fees” for the immigrants to reach Spain or Italy using all types of makeshift vessels.

The “security” is to fight off any intervening patrol boats, as witnessed last week when Italian guards were forced to fight off traffickers who had opened fire on them.

So what happens in the perilous journey to cross into Europe? In this shadowy business, humans are little less than cargo. From anecdotes from the media, researchers and the occasional illegal immigrant, DN2 got a fairly clear picture of what happens.

Shipwrecked migrants disembark from a rescue vessel as they arrive in the Italian port of Augusta in Sicily on April 16, 2015. As many as 41 migrants drowned after a small boat carrying refugees sank in the Mediterranean, Italian media said, days after 400 were lost in another shipwreck. PHOTO | AFP

We take up the itinerary of clandestine Eritrean immigrants in a perilous journey that could take several weeks or even months in planning and execution to reach Tripoli.

We single out Eritrea because, in Africa, most immigrants are from crisis-hit countries like Somalia, Eritrea, and South Sudan in Eastern Africa, and from most of West African countries, specifically Ivory Coast, Togo, Mali and Nigeria.

From Asia, waves of asylum seekers in Europe have been increasing in the last few months due to the raging wars in Syria, Iraq and now Yemen. The rise of the Islamic State menace has not helped the situation.

From Eritrea, the immigrants have to either bribe the border officials along the Ethiopian or Sudanese frontiers or sneak across the border and make their way to Addis Ababa.

BRUSH WITH DEATH

The majority prefer to sneak in. The first brush with danger is usually at the Ethiopia-Eritrea border, which is heavily mined on both sides, and where it is not uncommon for immigrants to be blown up by land mines.

According UNHCR, the human rights and economic situation in Eritrea has become increasingly constrained in recent years, forcing many to seek to immigrate. Originally, many Eritreans sought to enter Israel illegally through Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, but the Jewish nation has been tightening border control.

The situation in Libya has opened an alternative; cross into Sudan or Ethiopia, find a way through the desert into Libya and cross the Mediterranean.

Once in Khartoum or Addis Ababa, the immigrants quickly establish linkages with clandestine immigration networks, called the Tchagga in West Africa. These are mainly Arabs from Sudan who ferry them for hundreds of kilometres across the desert.

Sources say the immigrants pay up to $1,000 (about Sh96,000) to reach Khartoum. Once there, they might try to get menial jobs in construction sites or as househelps so that they can earn money to pay for transport and sustenance across the Sahara desert into Libya. Mostly in groups of up to 100 people, they hire four-wheel-drive vehicles and trucks.

The 2,757-kilometre journey from Khartoum to Tripoli can take up to a month and charges come close to $3,000 (Sh290,000). The voyage is full of dangers. Often, water and food are easily available, but Libyan Bedouins frequently commandeer the vehicles and hijack women and children, whom they turn into slaves.

Things are no easy for Black immigrants in the streets of Tripoli and there are harrowing stories of police torture and even boys with guns routinely robbing the hapless immigrants.

The refugees also face kidnappers who take them for ransom, or what some reports on the Internet call “organ trafficking”, where they are killed and their internal organs harvested for sale. 

Once in Tripoli or Benghazi, the immigrants, at least during Gaddafi’s time, would again try to get jobs in Libya while remaining forever hopeful to enter Europe. Today, however, they quietly search and link up with the Mediterranean human traffickers. Payment for crossing the sea is strictly in advance and many are conned several times.

SHOOT ON SIGHT

Due to the increased traffic, it is a game of chance to get a boat, and a UNHCR report says that at any given time, there are about 13,000 Africans along the Libyan coast waiting to be ferried across the Mediterranean.

The biggest problem, reports indicate, is the lack of boats to meet the rapidly rising demand by immigrants.

In peacetime Libya, the regime would frequently raid harbours and liaise with Italian or EU border patrol, greatly reducing the illegal immigration.

This avalanche of illegal immigrants into Europe comes in the wake of falling job prospects in the West. Xenophobia is also on the rise in Europe and Asia, and attacks against black immigrants are increasing, especially in Italy, German and Israel.

Israel, particularly, has become very strict on emigrants, and, fearing the wrath of right-wing led government in Tel Aviv, Cairo has long caved in to pressure and adopted a simple strategy against African emigrants trying to use its territory to cross into Israel: shooting them!

The current influx of refugees from sub-Saharan Africa is being seen in Israel as a security threat. Last year, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned that the influx could imperil Israel’s ability to remain both a Jewish and democratic state.

The situation of refugees in Israel is made worse by the fact that most “infiltrators”, as they are called in Israel, are Christians and Muslims joining a region deeply divided between two peoples; the Arabs and Jews.

In 2013, the Israeli government was reported to be negotiating with the Ugandan government to accept the refugees.

The Jewish state is particularly attractive to Africans because it is the only European-style democracy and hi-tech country that Africans can access by foot, says journalist William Booth in an article in the Washington Post

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FYI

As the anti-refugee narrative gains ground in Europe, scholars are, meanwhile, deconstructing the common explanations behind the surging number of illegal immigrants into developing countries.

In The Myth of Invasion: The Inconvenient Realities of African Migration to Europe, Hein de Hass of Oxford University says EU immigration policies fail because there is a symbiotic relationship between developed countries and African immigrants, and European leaders know this.

“Despite the lip service being paid to combating illegal migration, for political and diplomatic reasons, neither European nor African states have much genuine interest in stopping migration,” says De Hass.

Also, “many top economies rely on the inexpensive labour of illegal immigrants to stay competitive and reap higher profits”, editorialised the influential German newspaper, Der Spiegel, in March.

While many European countries have put in place policies to discourage illegal immigration, such as fostering economic development in poor countries, De Hass says such policies are doomed to fail.