By: Mia Holmberg Karlsson/TT
Published: Less than 30 min ago
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Francesco Creazzo at the aid organization SOS Méditerranée, which works to rescue those in need in the Mediterranean.
1 of 2 Photo: Private/TT
Over 31,000 migrants – four times more than during the same period last year – have arrived in Italy this year. At the same time, more people are dying on the doorstep of Europe than in six years.
– Europe has decided that they will not be saved, says Francesco Creazzo of the aid organization SOS Méditerranée.
On the third attempt, 17-year-old Mubarak succeeds in crossing the Mediterranean.
The first time, his party gets lost in rough seas and is forced to return to Libya. The second time, the overloaded boat’s hull is torn apart. People, among them small children and pregnant women, fall into the water.
– Three people died that day, says Mubarak, originally from West African Guinea, to the aid organization SOS Méditerranée.
The Libyan Coast Guard finds the wreckage and returns the approximately 130 migrants to the country’s notorious prison-like detention camp. In March 2021, during the third attempt to reach Europe, Mubarak is finally picked up by the Norwegian rescue ship Ocean Viking, chartered by SOS Méditerranée.
Choose death at sea
The organization’s spokesperson Francesco Creazzo has heard countless stories like Mubarak’s.
– Those we rescue are often on their fourth, fifth, sixth attempt to escape from Libya. The stories they tell… it’s absolutely horrifying. “Between dying mentally every day in Libya and dying once in the sea, I choose the sea,” they say, Creazzo tells us.
In just one day recently, 26 migrant boats arrived on the small Italian island of Lampedusa. In a facility built for 400 new arrivals, 3,000 people are crowded – women, children, unaccompanied minors. And as winter turns to spring and spring to summer, more and more people are expected to go out to sea.
– The most important reason why they leave is undoubtedly desperation. The other is the weather, says Creazzo.
State of emergency in Italy
So far this year, more than 500 people, including around 50 children, have lost their lives in the Mediterranean, according to the UN migration agency IOM. The death toll is rising in parallel with more and more reports of delayed state rescue efforts and aid organizations being prevented from saving lives. Italy’s right-wing government, led by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, has declared a national state of emergency and introduced a series of laws and decrees that many say make rescue efforts more difficult. Among other things, since February it is illegal to pick up people in distress from more than one boat at a time.
Completely unacceptable, believes Francesco Creazzo.
– It’s about people who move for all sorts of reasons. Call them migrants or what you will – the second they find themselves in distress at sea, they are shipwrecked under international law and have the right to be rescued.
It’s not about politics, he says. It’s about humanity.
– Migration is up to the countries to decide; our job is to save them. It is not negotiable. But for six, seven years, Europe has decided that migrants should not be rescued, that they should be left to die in the sea or sent back to hell in Libya.
“People go regardless”
Francesco Creazzo refers to the cooperation that the EU started with Libya in 2016, which was then expanded in a “memorandum of understanding” in 2017. In short, this means that the responsibility for patrolling the Mediterranean now rests with the Libyan coast guard – largely at the expense of the EU.
– The EU wanted to discourage people from starting the journey by emptying the sea of rescue efforts. But people go regardless. Take the ambulances off the street – there won’t be fewer accidents, but fewer people will survive.
At the same time, Libya’s coast guard has been accused of firing sharply at both migrants and rescue ships. Not least the country is accused of inhumane conditions in the camps where refugees are kept.
– Today, no functioning state rescues people in distress in the central Mediterranean. According to the law, they must be taken to a safe harbor – and it is not Libya, says Francesco Creazzo.
– People are fleeing torture and violence in Libya and we, as Europeans and EU members, pay to send them back there.
Facts
Background: Libya’s role
In 2014, the Italian rescue operation Mare Nostrum, set up in response to the disaster off Lampedusa in 2013, when over 360 lives were lost after the Italian and Maltese coastguards failed to agree on who was responsible for the rescue operation, ended.
Mare Nostrum was replaced by a one-third as large operation led by the EU’s border agency Frontex. In 2017, the EU then concluded an agreement that transferred responsibility for patrolling the Mediterranean to the Libyan coast guard. Since 2016, the Libyans have been receiving training, equipment and financial support from the EU.
The hope was to stop the trips across the sea, which did not happen. Instead, more and more have died.
The UN and a number of human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, have for years sounded the alarm about inhumane conditions in the detention centers in Libya where migrants are kept waiting to manage to borrow enough to be able to pay smugglers for the journey to Europe.
The residents are said to be exposed to degrading treatment, abuse, punishment and torture.
UN investigators have visited facilities where severely malnourished people – men, women and children – are kept locked in small premises with overcrowded latrines and a lack of food and water. Diseases spread, women are sold for sexual exploitation and men are sold as slaves.
Libyan security forces, militias, smuggling networks and criminal gangs are said to be exploiting the migrants on their way to Europe.
Source: UNHCR, OCHA, Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders.
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The journey across the Mediterranean
The journey across the central Mediterranean towards Europe is considered to be one of the world’s most dangerous migrant routes.
During the Easter weekend alone, around 3,000 migrants arrived by sea in Italy. This brings the total number of arrivals this year to over 31,000. During the same period, more than 500 deaths have been confirmed at sea, but the dark figure is likely to be large as many substandard boats are believed to perish in silence.
In the single worst tragedy this year, at the end of February, nearly 100 people died off the coast of Italy’s Calabria.
The majority of those who arrived in Italy this year originate from Ivory Coast, Guinea, Pakistan, Egypt, Tunisia and Bangladesh.
The most common departure countries are Libya and Tunisia. Another, longer route runs from the west coast of Turkey. Most of the migrant boats aim for southern Italy.
Since 2014, over 26,000 people have died during the journey across the Mediterranean.
Facts: UN, IOM, Italian Ministry of the Interior.
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