3 October 2023 marks the tenth anniversary of the tragic sinking off Lampedusa that drew the attention of the global community to the Mediterranean as a place of flight, migration, and death and highlighted the high price that Fortress Europe demands.
On 3 October 2013, a cutter ran aground off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa and eventually sank. On board were around 545 people who had fled from Somalia and Eritrea. Many them had been captured by militias and smugglers while fleeing through Libya and locked up in a detention centre in Sabha, where they had been extorted for ransom, tortured, and raped. Unlike many, they survived the ordeal and finally boarded a boat in the Libyan harbour town of Misrata, paying high smuggling fees in the hope of reaching Europe and finally being able to live a life of safety and dignity. But the Mediterranean proved to be cruel that day, and most on board died when the boat sank within sight of the coast of Lampedusa; 366 bodies were recovered and buried. The Italian public prosecutor’s office opened investigations against the survivors for illegal immigration.
The Mediterranean was also cruel a few days later, on 11 October 2013, when another tragic incident occurred off Lampedusa. This time it was a boat that had set sail from the Libyan town of Zuwarah travelling to Europe carrying around 400 refugees from Syria. But the Italian coastguard was even crueller than the Mediterranean, apparently unimpressed by the tragic sinking a week earlier. After the boat had begun to take on water, one of the refugees on board called the Italian Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre several times, but they pointed out that the boat was in the Maltese sea rescue zone and that they were therefore not responsible. When, after several more desperate calls and hours had passed, a Maltese patrol boat finally reached the scene of the accident; by then, the boat had already capsized. More time passed until, at the request of the Maltese, the Italian warship IST Libra, which had been in the vicinity of the accident all day without intervening, was finally ordered to come to the rescue. In the meantime, over 200 people had already drowned, including 60 children. In January 2021, the UN Commission on Human Rights (OHCHR) ruled that the Libra should have intervened earlier, and that Italy must compensate the families of the victims.
The fact that the Mediterranean is a theatre of flight and cruelt is not a new development. After the Second World War, thousands of Jewish Holocaust survivors, including my grandfather Jacob, tried to reach Palestine by boat from the coasts of southern Europe. In 1946, the British launched Operation Igloo to intercept Jewish refugees attempting to enter the then British Mandate of Palestine without authorisation off the coast of the port city of Haifa. Those intercepted were then deported to internment camps in Cyprus. The camps quickly became overcrowded, and dramatic humanitarian conditions developed. The British then launched Operation Oasis, which transported the refugees back to mainland Europe instead of Cyprus. The most famous case is, of course, that of the refugee ship Exodus, which was sailing with over 5,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors on board in 1947 when the ship was forcibly prevented from reaching Palestine before the British cynically forced those on board to an internment camp in Germany.
History teaches us that neither cruel seas, high walls, ruthless policies, nor reports of thousands upon thousands of deaths can or will prevent people from fleeing dangerous situations and trying to find refuge in safer places, not least to give their children a better future. My grandfather felt the same way 77 years ago as the hundreds of thousands of people who continue to flee across the Mediterranean to Europe every year. At the time of writing, around 186,000 people have reached the European Mediterranean coast in this way so far this year, over 130,000 of them reaching Italy and the rest Greece, Spain, Cyprus, and Malta. Between 1 January and 24 September, at least 2,500 people are officially known to have lost their lives or were reported missing on this journey; the number of unreported cases is likely to be significantly higher.
It seems that Europe has unfortunately not come very far in the last ten years and has not learnt much from the countless tragedies. Lampedusa remains, as it was ten years ago, a destination for refugee boats. The authorities on the island, where the reception centres are bursting at the seams, seek to accommodate the refugees elsewhere, while the EU member states squabble about how to fairly distribute those seeking protection within the EU. The tragic boat accident on 14 June 2023 just a few miles off the Greek peninsula of Peloponnese with over 500 dead by drowning is one of the latest in a long line of deadly tragedies. The countless people whose bodies have not been found join the victims of 3 October 2013 at the bottom of the sea off Lampedusa – how many more must there be before Europe comes to its senses and puts an end to the dying in the Mediterranean?
