Photo: Alarm Phone
Today, twelve years after the horrible shipwreck off the coast of Lampedusa, we publish a text written by Father Mussie Zerai, one of the key inspirations behind the Alarm Phone project. Back then, in 2013, when we wondered whether and how to launch our activist hotline, we asked Father Zerai for advice. At that time, the Eritrean-Italian priest had been contacted by people in distress in the central Mediterranean for years already, in particular by people from East Africa. In Libya, his phone number was written on the walls of detention camps and passed on – from the prison to the sea. When called from the boats, Father Zerai would gather crucial information and then pressurize Italian authorities to rescue. When we told him about the idea of the hotline project, and our ambition to collectivize his work, he said: “start today, not tomorrow”. In this text, Father Zerai reflects on the October 3 shipwreck and what has followed since. He reminds us that remembering horrible shipwrecks like the one twelve years ago is not an empty gesture but a call for action and radical change.
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Twelve years ago, 368 young lives were lost just a few hundred meters from the beaches of Lampedusa, just as freedom and a better future seemed within reach.
The twelfth anniversary of this tragedy comes at a time when the political climate and practices in place are erecting yet another barrier of death for thousands of refugees and migrants like the young people who were swept away on that grey dawn of October 3, 2013. We do not know whether representatives of this government, or of the majority parties in power, or more generally whether other political figures from recent years intend to promote or even participate in the ceremonies and events commemorating the shipwreck. But if it is true – and, indeed, it is – that the best way to honour the dead is to save the living and respect their freedom and dignity, then it would make no sense to share the moments of reflection and remembrance that October 3rd calls for with those who have been building walls and destroying bridges over the years, ignoring the cry for help that rises from the entire Global South. If they too wish to “remember Lampedusa”, let them do it alone. Let them remain alone. Because over the past ten years, they have overturned, destroyed, and distorted the great outpouring of solidarity and human compassion that this massacre aroused in the conscience of millions of people around the world.
What remains, in fact, of the “spirit” and commitments of that time? Nothing. We have regressed to an even worse cynicism and indifference than that of the period that preceded that terrible October 3. Despite investigations by the judiciary, it is still unclear how it was possible for 368 people to die just 800 meters from Lampedusa and less than two kilometers from a port full of fast, well-equipped military vessels capable of reaching the scene in a matter of minutes.
The scale of the tragedy, with the enormous toll of 368 lives lost, drew attention to two points in particular: the humanitarian catastrophe of millions of refugees seeking safety across the Mediterranean; and the plight of Eritrea, since all those who died were Eritrean.
The first “point” was addressed with Mare Nostrum: the Italian Navy was given the mandate to patrol the Mediterranean up to Libyan territorial waters to assist migrant boats in distress and prevent further tragedies such as that of Lampedusa. That operation was a source of pride for our Navy, with thousands of lives saved. Five years later, not only is there nothing left of this operation, but it almost seems that most politicians consider it a waste or even a form of aid to traffickers. Exactly twelve months later, in November 2014, Mare Nostrum was “cancelled”, thereby multiplying—just as the Navy had predicted— the shipwrecks and victims. The tragedy of April 15, 2015, claiming approximately 800 victims, the highest death toll ever recorded in the Mediterranean in a shipwreck, occurred in its wake. Instead of that rescue operation, rules and restrictions were gradually introduced that even the escalation in the number of victims failed to halt. These led to the increased externalisation of the borders of Fortress European ever more south, to countries in the Middle East and Africa, through a series of international treaties aimed at blocking refugees in the middle of the Sahara, “far from the spotlight,” before they can reach the southern shores of the Mediterranean. This is what treaties such as the Khartoum Process (a carbon copy of the previous Rabat Process), the Malta agreements, the treaty with Turkey, the refoulement pact with Sudan, the blackmailing of Afghanistan (forced to “take back” 80,000 refugees), the Memorandum signed with Libya in February 2017, and the latest measures taken by this government. Not to mention the criminalization of NGOs, which are responsible for rescuing around 40 percent of the thousands of lives saved, but which have been forced to suspend their activities. Today we are witnessing rescue ships being forced to sail long distances in search of assigned ports to disembark, far from the places where they operate and where they are needed. The duty of dismemberment in the closest and safest port provided for by international maritime law is now being ignored. Massacres have kept taking place over the last twelve years as if nothing has happened: cynicism has replaced humanitarianism.
As for the second “point”, with regards to Eritrean refugees solidarity has given way to derision or even contempt, to the point that authority figures in the current ruling majority have called them “vacation refugees” or “migrants seeking the good life,” in order to deny the reality of the dictatorship in Asmara. This process began immediately in the aftermath of the tragedy, when at the funeral ceremony for the victims of the October 3 shipwreck in Agrigento the government invited the Eritrean ambassador to Rome, the man who in Italy represents and is the voice of the very regime that forced those 368 young people to flee their country. It could have been seen as a blunder. Instead, it proved to be the beginning of a process of gradual rapprochement and re-evaluation of Isaias Afewerki, the dictator who enslaved his people, bringing him out of international isolation, associating him with the Khartoum Process and other agreements, sending him hundreds of millions of euros in funding, and effectively electing him as an anti-immigration policeman on behalf of Italy and Europe. This continued up until the recent documentary “La grande Bugia – Eritrea andata e ritorno” (The Big Lie – Eritrea Round Trip) aired on RAI.
The bitter taste of betrayal therefore lingers on twelve years after the tragedy of October 3, 2013, both with regards to the situation of migrants more generally and to that of Eritrea.
- Betrayed were the memory and respect for the 368 young victims and all their families and friends – the case of Libyan General Al Masri is a clear act that has trampled on the memory and dignity of all migrants and refugees.
- Betrayed were the thousands of young people who are denouncing, by fleeing, the ferocious, terrible reality of the regime in Asmara, which remains a dictatorship even after the signing of the peace agreement with Ethiopia for the very long border war that began in 1998. The recent documentary broadcast by RAI3, “La grande Bugia – Eritrea andata e ritorno” (The Big Lie – Eritrea Round Trip), attempts to denigrate and downplay the plight of Eritrean refugees and rehabilitate the ruling regime, thus serving the anti-immigration and isolationist policies currently in place in Italy and Europe. We are saddened that RAI3 has lent itself to this terrible act, which conveys a deeply distorted and misleading message about the reality in Eritrea and the flight of young people from the country.
- Betrayed was the cry of pain rising from Africa and the Middle East towards Italy and Europe from an entire population of migrants and refugees forced to abandon their homelands. Their flight often stems from situations created by the politics and economic and geostrategic interests of those very countries in the Global North that are now raising barriers. Betrayed, this cry of pain, at the very moment when one pretends not to see an obvious reality, that is:
“…leave home only / when home no longer lets you stay / No one leaves home unless home kicks you out / fire under your feet / hot blood in your belly / something you never thought you would do / until the scythe marked your neck with threats…” (from Home, monologue by Giuseppe Cederna.)
Wherever people want to remember the tragedy of Lampedusa these days, on the island itself or anywhere else, it will be meaningless unless they want to turn this sad anniversary into a starting point for radically changing the policy pursued over the last twelve years towards migrants and refugees. The “lowliest of the low”. Always remember that the rights of the weakest are not weak rights!
Don Mosè Zerai
