In a historic move, Italy marked today as a national day of mourning and observed a minute of silence for the 100 dead and over 200 missing after a rickety boat carrying about 500 people capsized in rough waters. The migrants were fleeing their homelands for a toehold on the arid Lampedusa island off the Sicilian coast.
Had they survived, they would have been enclosed in thoroughly over-crowded prison-like camps awaiting processing that can run into several years since no country wants to resettle so many of their kind.
Pope Francis said, “Today is a day of tears”. The world “does not care about the many people fleeing slavery, hunger, fleeing in search of freedom. And how many of them die as happened yesterday!”
Yet, the unexpected Italian decision was historic because no European country has afforded so much public honor to penniless women, children and men trying to escape war and poverty for the safety of Europe, despite such great risk to their lives. Most countries see these refugees as illegal economic migrants who place burdens on their social security systems and take away jobs from the local poor and unskilled workers.
Some now fear that such refugees might have Islamic terrorists hidden among them and counsel prudence in admitting them. The fear has grown since reports that the terrorists who killed 67 people last week end at the Westgate shopping center in Nairobi, Kenya, included Somalis from the US and Europe.
Still, the Italian gesture could trigger a broader change of heart in the European Union towards the profound humanitarian tragedies that cause so many thousands of people to leave all that is familiar at home, to reach foreign lands just to stay alive and survive.
This time the boat people were mainly from Eritrea and Somalia. Each family paid $2,000 or more to human traffickers to take them from their homes and across Libya for the perilous sea journey to Lampedusa.
European and other officials are accusing the traffickers of being criminals who steal from stricken people without delivering safe passage. But blame also rests with governments that close frontiers, leaving no safe choice for those seeking shelter and better lives.
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he hoped this tragedy would be a “spur to action” for Europeans and the international community to open “more channels for safe and orderly migration”.
International migration has jumped to 232 million this year from 175 million in 2000. “We must do more to protect the human rights of all migrants,” Ban insisted.
Francois Crepeau, the UN special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants noted that “treating irregular migrants only by repressive measures” helps to cause such tragedies. The Lampedusa tragedy grew partly out of “criminalization of irregular immigration”.
UN Refugees Commissioner António Guterres voiced “dismay at a rising global phenomenon of migrants and people fleeing conflict or persecution and perishing at sea.”
Earlier this week, 13 mean drowned near Italy’s southern coast while swimming ashore from a capsizing boat. Some 20,000 migrants trying to reach Europe have died at sea during the last two decades, according to immigration charities.
In a world buffeted by humanitarian tragedies and war, these waves of boat people are another rising human calamity. The Jesuit Refugee Service has denounced the “inhumanity” of Europe’s asylum system and Pope Francis, who is a Jesuit, lamented, “The word, ‘shame!’ comes to me; what happened is shameful.”
Some 30,100 migrants reached Italy on boats so far this year, according to the UN Refugees agency (UNHCR). The EU’s border agency Frontex said 2012 saw 272,208 asylum requests in the EU, the biggest since 2005. In 2011, more than 64,000 Tunisians sought asylum in Europe.
The increasing numbers of arrivals have caused bitterness among EU members, all of which are supposed to follow identical rules and share the burdens. In May 2013, Germany alleged Italy was deliberately inciting African migrants to leave for Germany and other countries. The implication was the Italy should intern the arrivals and prevent them from entering European neighbors.
Italian media reported that the Lampedusa tragedy could have been avoided if Italian fishing boats near the Libyan port of Misrata had raised the alarm two days earlier when they saw that the boat was floundering. The government has rejected the reports, which did not name sources, but a non-governmental body has said it will file a suit against the authorities to obtain clarity.
In March 2011, similar media reports accused several European naval ships of failing to help floundering vessels. Their help might have avoided a tragedy in which 400 African migrants drowned.
An official from the Italian office of the UN’s agency for children (UNICEF) said the Mediterranean has “become a cemetery. And it will become even more so.” The EU should recognize there is “a humanitarian emergency in Italy. What are we doing about it? … We cannot have the victims on our consciences only afterwards.”