The United Nations has asked European and African countries to collaborate to establish safe and legal routes in the Mediterranean in order to avoid tragedies like the one that this weekend has claimed the lives of at least 62 immigrants, including fourteen children and a baby. The drama is not over yet. The patrol boats continue their search along the Italian coast of Calabria, where the boat carrying between 200 and 250 people broke into pieces after colliding with a rock in the middle of the waves. The search has allowed three bodies to be recovered this Monday morning, one on the beach and two offshore.
Another horrible shipwreck has claimed the lives of dozens of people, including children, this time off the coast of Italy. I say it once again: everyone who seeks a better life deserves security and dignity”, declared the Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, who has insisted that “we need safe and legal routes for migrants and refugees”. Most of them use the Sicilian Channel to try to reach Europe from the African coasts. Successive shipwrecks have turned this corridor into a huge cemetery. Fiippo Grandi, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, has indicated for this reason that “it is time for States to stop arguing and agree on fair, effective and shared measures to avoid more tragedies.”
The images of the Calabrian beach of Cutro, a tourist paradise in summer, reveal a hell that this Monday still shocks the international community, and especially the Italian one. The Police, the Carabinieri and the rescue services searched the sand for the second consecutive day in search of possible new corpses from the tragedy that the sea has expelled. The shore is still covered with backpacks, clothes, toys, personal belongings and scattered remains of the boat, which first broke into two pieces and then was completely dismantled by the waves. The pieces seem to show the state of decrepitude that the boat suffered when the migrants left Izmir, on the Turkish coast. UNHCR and the International Organization for Migration have asked European governments on Monday “to increase resources and capacities” to “strengthen the rescue capacity, which is still insufficient”, since reality shows an increase in “people who they flee from conflicts and persecutions”.
The latest migration tragedy in the Mediterranean was discovered on Sunday morning on a beach in Cutro, a town in the Reggio Calabria region of southern Italy. Since then, among the sand and floating in the water, the lifeless bodies of 62 people have been found, including a newborn and several children, who would have drowned in the sinking of the boat with which they had sailed from Turkey to try to get to Europe. There are 81 confirmed survivors of the shipwreck. and it is still feared that the final balance of deaths will increase, since at least fifty people are missing.
The initial estimate pointed to the victims coming from Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. According to the testimony of the survivors, the boat with which they were trying to reach the Calabrian coast was overloaded and due to the strong waves, it ended up colliding with some rocks and suddenly breaking in two, without even giving them time to ask for help. The children were the first to be swallowed by the sea. After the shipwreck, which would have taken place a short distance from the coast, the survivors managed to swim to the beach. The investigations have clarified that the group had left between Wednesday and Thursday from the Turkish coast of Izmir. Police have arrested one of the survivors and charged him with the crime of human trafficking.
a cursed channel
The Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, expressed her “deep sorrow” for this new tragedy, which she considered the result of “criminal” and “inhumane” behavior. He also confirmed the commitment of his Government to try to prevent these vessels from setting sail, for which he demanded “the maximum collaboration” from the countries of origin and transit, and finally invited “not to speculate with these dead after having exalted the illusion of an immigration without rules”.
According to data from the International Organization for Migration (IOM), so far this year 143 migrants have died or disappeared trying to reach Europe by crossing the Mediterranean, a figure to which must be added the final number of deaths in this new tragedy. In these first two months of 2023, Italy is experiencing a strong upturn in the arrivals of displaced persons and refugees through the Sicilian Channel: until Friday there were more than 14,100, compared to 5,300 in the same period of the previous year and 4,300 in 2021.
Despite this increase and the consequent risk of new shipwrecks, the Government of Giorgia Meloni has made it difficult for the NGO ships that carry out rescues in the Central Mediterranean. Last Thursday the Senate of Rome approved the decree law that obliges these humanitarian organizations to comply with a code of conduct that makes rescue operations difficult, with fines of up to 50,000 euros and two months of immobilization of the ship. The ship ‘Geo Barents’, chartered by Doctors Without Borders, has already suffered the consequences of the ‘strong hand’ of the Italian authorities with NGOs and has been blocked since Friday in the Sicilian port of Augusta. You can also fall a penalty of up to 10,000 euros.
The ship ‘Aita Mari’, belonging to the Basque organization Maritime Humanitarian Rescue (SMH), also operates in the area, which disembarked this Saturday in the port of Ortona, in the central region of Abruzzo, to the 40 people it rescued on Tuesday when They were traveling in an overloaded tin boat 44 miles from Lampedusa, the Italian island located in the center of the Mediterranean. Among the survivors are 11 women and 2 children aged 7 months and 2 years.
SMH regretted that the Italian authorities forced these migrants to disembark at a port that was 750 miles away, which means “several days of navigation, something that contradicts maritime laws”, while increasing “the suffering of the surviving people who have spent months in very tough immigration processes in which their most basic rights are constantly violated.