http://www.good.is/post/waves-upon-waves/
Waves Upon Waves: Arab Spring Refugees Cross the Mediterranean
November 29, 2011 • 5:30 am PST
*William Wheeler*
*writer*
The small Coast Guard boat motors along the coast of southern Italy,
bouncing through the swells of a royal-blue Mediterranean. It’s a
cloudless, perfect day—ideal conditions for smuggling.
They are out there, says Commandante Cosimo Nicastro, pointing south to the
horizon. Some 300 miles away, several boats are reported to have left from
Tunisia, each one carrying around 100 refugees fleeing North Africa. The
ships are headed to the Italian island of Lampedusa, the gateway for
migrants trying to enter Europe. The Italian Coast Guard’s job is to stop
the boats. Or, as Nicastro sees it, to save their cargo.
Since 1988, at least 17,856 people have died trying to cross into Europe,
according to a report from Fortress Europe, a website that monitors refugee
migration. They were found in the undercarriages of airplanes and as
stowaways in trucks. They were shot by border police. They died under
trains or trying to swim the English Channel. At least 114 froze to death
while crossing the mountains from Turkey into Greece; 92 more died along
the same border when they stepped on landmines. But no route is more deadly
than the sea-lanes between North Africa and Italy, where well over half of
them perished. And the Mediterranean crossing is only getting more
treacherous. With 2,049 deaths there since January—more than a tenth of all
reported casualties since 1988— this year is on track to be the deadliest
ever. By comparison, an estimated 350 to 500 migrants die each year trying
to cross from Mexico into the United States, according to the ACLU and
Mexico’s human rights agency.
While the majority of immigrants still arrive in Europe by air or land, an
increasing number are embarking on the harrowing journey by sea. Some
European politicians, eager to fan the flames of anti-immigration
sentiment, use their dramatic arrivals as telegenic fodder—if they arrive
at all.
“The sea is the most difficult to control,” says Nicastro. “Four hundred
people can die in five minutes.” One night last winter, Nicastro was aboard
one of two boats sent to rescue 400 people in brutal weather 50 miles off
Lampedusa. When the passengers spotted the Coast Guard, they all rushed to
one side of the boat, causing it to capsize and dump them into the frigid
sea. Nicastro’s boat moved in to pluck people out of the water. Most were
already dead, but the crew saved almost 100. “They didn’t know the water.
They just touched the water, the cold water, and they [didn’t] scream. They
just disappeared,” he said. “Almost 300 people just died in the sea under
our eyes.”
* * *
For all the talk about globalization eliminating boundaries and bringing
the world closer together, it has also created new imbalances between rich
and poor, spurring migration and, in turn, the construction of new barriers
to stop it. In Europe’s case, where internal borders have been opened up to
compete in the global economy, the focus has turned to tightening the
continent’s external edge. That’s led to increased pressure on “weak link”
states, and the creation of a pan-European border patrol agency called
Frontex. On a continent struggling to weather an economic crisis and
assimilate immigrant communities already within its borders, many Europeans
see strict, unified border enforcement as the continent’s first line of
defense.
This intensified border enforcement has angered activists on the European
left, who argue that the deaths of migrants at sea are a function of
policies of neglect, part of a coordinated effort to discourage
immigration. “The Mediterranean is a mass grave,” wrote German journalist
Heribert Prantl in a recent op-ed, criticizing the Italian Navy for failing
to send support ships to rescue leaky boats. “Death on the Mediterranean
is, like it or not, part of a deterrence strategy.” Critics accuse Frontex
of drawing “a new Iron Curtain” around Europe.
Until now, the agency has been little more than a bureaucracy, coordinating
border patrol units on loan from member states, including the Italian Coast
Guard. Frontex also runs Rapid Border Intervention Teams (RABITs), which
were created by EU resolution in 2007 to “allow, in case of urgent and
exceptional migratory pressure, rapid deployment of border guards at the
European level.” The agency has been playing an increasingly sophisticated
game of cat and mouse with illegal migrants trying to enter the EU, and its
commando-style operations have decreased the flow of boat migrants into
Greece, pushing more toward the mine-laden land border with Turkey. With
its success have come casualties, as traffickers are forced to take riskier
routes and methods.
Now that the agency’s legal mandate is expanding, Frontex will have the
authority to operate its own assets—patrol boats, aircraft, and border
guards. That increased power is designed to meet a new wave of immigration
from the developing world in coming years, one fueled by climate change and
continued political instability. How Frontex will handle its newfound
responsibility is an open question. So, too, is how humanely the
organization will treat the expected hordes of refugees fleeing persecution
and strife in North Africa.
As Europe’s handling of migration during the Arab Spring proved, there is
room for improvement.
* * *
On August 1, the Italian Coast Guard intercepted a rickety, 50-foot boat
overfilled with passengers and bobbing in azure Mediterranean waters less
than a mile from Lampedusa Island. Two days earlier, the 296 migrants had
embarked at a port outside of Tripoli. For many, the journey had begun on
the other side of the Sahara, which they crossed in cramped trucks and
off-road vehicles before navigating the borders and battlefields of Libya.
They were fleeing famine in Somalia, endemic poverty and strife in Sudan
and Eritrea, and the more recent unrest in Libya and Tunisia. The last and
most important stretch was a mere 100 kilometers of open sea.
As passengers clambered aboard, more and more cramming in behind them, the
traffickers directed dozens into the engine room, where the air was already
thick with exhaust. When members of the Italian Coast Guard crew boarded
two days later, they opened the engine room to find the corpses of 25 young
men. Some had died of asphyxiation. Others were reportedly beaten to death
by those afraid that an attempt to flee the engine room would capsize the
boat.
For two decades, some analysts have been warning that a combination of
environmental change, population growth, and political instability would
plunge Africa and South Asia into chaos. The eruption of the Arab Spring
last winter was a test case of sorts for a Europe made frantic by the
possibility of 1 million Africans landing on its shores.
Some 57,000 migrants turned up on Lampedusa Island as a result of Arab
Spring, and the Italian detention center there was allowed to overfill,
triggering protests and clashes between authorities, detainees, and locals
angry that the influx had scared off tourists. Despite recent rhetoric
about pan-European solidarity in sharing the burden of large refugee flows,
neighboring countries largely resisted helping Italy and Malta, who
squabbled over who should take in the migrants to process their claims to
international protection.
“The Arab Spring showed how the system we are building is still really a
draft of what we should do, and there are a lot of flaws,” says Seline
Trevisanut, a legal specialist in boat migration at the University of
Cagliari. “The Arab Spring showed the weakness of our system.”
Experts and rights groups say that politicians dodged the issue, framing
the people fleeing Libya and Tunisia as illegal immigrants rather than
refugees seeking asylum. The reluctance to open the doors to migrants, in
the long run, is likely due to concerns about climate change.
“European politicians are beginning to wake up to the idea that climate
change may produce large numbers of people moving,” says Khalid Koser, a
migration expert at the Brookings Institution. “One doesn’t want to
speculate about climate change, but there could be millions of people
affected. And if you have very large numbers of people moving, I think
you’re going to face a real crisis.”
“I guess this is seen as [European politicians] putting up the first
barrier to that,” he continues. “‘If we’re soft on this, how are we going
to be tough when large numbers of people arrive in the next five years?”
Rather than play defense, says Trevisanut, Europe must develop a shared
strategy for managing not only the borders of individual sovereign states,
but also the continent’s external border. Member nations have been
reluctant to cede power over their own borders, but the focus on
antiterrorism measures since 9/11 has added a new urgency to the matter.
Trevisanut believes that the same level of urgency must be applied to
protecting migrants and upholding Europe’s obligations under international
and human rights law as the system evolves. Instead, the discourse has
increasingly linked the flow of people across borders with criminality and
terrorism.
In recent years, European nations have tried to stem the influx of migrants
largely by striking deals for stronger border enforcement in other
countries; Spain has worked with Senegal and Mauritania, for example, and
Italy with Libya and Tunisia. In practice, this has outsourced
responsibility for protecting refugees to regimes that, in the extreme case
of Libya under Gaddafi, have no respect for human rights (in Libyan
detention centers financed by Italy, migrants were reportedly beaten,
tortured, and forced to drink their urine). The European Court of Human
Rights is expected to rule this year on whether Italy has violated its
international obligations with the so-called “pushback” agreement, which
allowed Italian authorities to intercept migrant boats in international
waters and turn them over to their Libyan counterparts.
Other EU member states have also been implicated. A September report from
Human Rights Watch chronicled the “inhuman and degrading” treatment of
migrants held in sewage-infested, overcrowded Greek detention centers. The
report, *The EU’s Dirty **Hands*, took Frontex to task for knowingly
turning over migrants, in its first RABIT operation, to Greek authorities
it knew did not comply with EU rights standards.
Because Frontex will likely continue to rely on member states for detaining
and processing the migrants it picks up, these types of problems are “a
good example of what we may expect in the future,” says Niels Frenzen, a
law professor at the University of Southern California who specializes in
refugee law. Rather than offering a remedy for the shortcomings of EU
border enforcement, Frontex appears to be subject to its same failings.
What’s more, he says, its status as a background player is actually
blurring responsibility and access to information. That was also the
conclusion of a recent study commissioned by the EU Parliament, which
blasted Frontex, arguing that its status as a depoliticized coordinating
agency has given it too much autonomy and shielded it from “proper
democratic scrutiny.”
As Frontex’s influence grows, Frenzen says, so does the need for its
transparency.
In the meantime, the factors driving migrants to the open sea are not
likely to diminish, linked as they are to stability and opportunity across
Africa. In a squatter building occupied by hundreds of refugees in a suburb
of Rome, 37-year-old Yakub Abdelunbi explains why he left his home in
Darfur eight years before. “I don’t love Europe,” he says. “I love my
country. But I can’t be there or they’ll massacre me.” Abdelunbi fled first
to Libya, then invested in an inflatable boat with 17 others and set out
for Lampedusa Island. Unlike thousands who followed, they made it.
*This reporting was funded with a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis
Reporting<
http://pulitzercenter.org/projects/libya-revolution-qaddafi-rebel-government-democracy>
*
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Received on Tue Nov 29 2011 - 10:46:01 EST