Seven hundred people died in the Mediterranean in the night between Saturday, April 18 and Sunday, April 19, 60 miles off the Libyan coast. It is the worst massacre at sea since World War II. Listing the numbers from the last few weeks and the constantly growing percentages is, at this point, useless: there is always a point where numbers blind long term vision, highlights and, at the same time, erase people. Lists and calculations are useless, now, unless we urge a response from those politically responsible for this drama: the European Commission, the States of the Union, the UN High Commission.
Everyone should be reminded that norms on the rescue of shipwreck victims and on non-rejection became cogent with European Unification, in memory of the lack of rescue to the victims of Nazi genocides. They are our European Common Law. We should turn to these actors, today, with a preliminary and solemn request: stop using impressive sounding words; proceed to act; do not react with naval blockades that keep refugees away from our homes, just as we did with the Jewish refugees escaping Nazism. This is a day of change. Beginning today, we must replace the word “emergency” with the word “urgency”. We must call reality with the name it deserves: we are in the presence of war crimes and massacres in times of peace, committed by the European Union, by its 28 States and by the Members of the European Parliament. The crime is no longer episodic, but rather it has been, for a long time, a systemic one. And it should be considered at the same level of prolonged wars and famines.
The Mediterranean has not stopped filling up with corpses since March 28, 1997, when in the Kater I Rades shipwreck, 81 Albanian refugees died off the Apulian coast near Otranto. The massacre has been going on for at least 18 years: longer than the two world wars combined, an even longer than the Vietnam war. It is indecent to speak of a “Mediterranean Cemetery”. We should speak, instead, of a common grave – as there is no tombstone remembering the names of the fugitives we left to drown. The urgent actions that must be taken should, all, be worthy of this crime, and of the memory of the omitted rescues of the last century. The diplomatic or military missions in Libya are not there. Due to the Union, its governments and the United States, an official interlocutor no longer exists. Even less worthy are the naval blockades, the help to the dictatorships from which asylum-seekers escape, and the silence about the strong destabilization of the Mediterranean– from Syria to Palestine, from Egypt to Morocco – of which the West has been responsible for years.
Here is a list of immediately necessary actions. It is urgent to take away the monopoly of the life and death of refugees from the hands of mafias and traffickers; consequently, we need to set up legal escape routes presided by the European Union (EU) and the United Nations (UN). It is urgent to finance search and rescue interventions, not only along the coasts of Europe but also on the high seas, just like Operation Mare Nostrum used to do, and operation Triton is supposed to do as well; all this with the full awareness that stabilization of the Libyan chaos is not obtainable in the medium-short term.
It is urgent that the European states collaborate fairly (as stated in art. 4 of the Union Treaty) denying what the spokesperson for the Commission, Natasha Bertaud, declared: “At the present time, the Commission has neither the money, nor the political backing to set up a border protection system, able to commit to search and rescue operations”. The sentence has the upsetting sound of ‘failing to rescue’ – considered a crime, by the way, by our judicial systems.
The UN itself needs to move with urgency, and the Security Council must face this tragedy with a resolution. If crimes at sea look like a prolonged war or famine born out of the collapse of origin or transit states, we cannot rule out interventions of UN peacekeeping forces. Aid to the displaced and the hungry are a consolidated procedure at the United Nations: today it must be applied to the Mediterranean. The Dublin regulations must be rethought as soon as possible. With a ruling dated Dec. 21, 2011, the European Court of Justice declares the positive assessment of the risk for refugees to be the subject of inhumane treatment as an essential condition for the transfer. This is about a real obligation to detour from the competence criteria listed in the Dublin norms.
With the same timeliness, we need to take into account that the countries most exposed to the flow of refugees are, today, located in Southern Europe (Greece, Italy, Cyprus, Malta, Spain): these are the same countries that were hit the hardest, after the 2007 to 2008 crisis by a drastic reduction of social spending. These spending items include assistance and rescue for refugees. The burden unfairly weighing on these countries’ shoulders must be immediately alleviated.
Finally, there is the ‘time’ issue. Since the 2013 Lampedusa massacre, European governments have advocated cooperation with origin and transit countries, in order to “externalize” search and rescue, as well as asylum policies. Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos has even wished for a “collaboration with dictatorships”, and considered collective rejections, even though forbidden by the 1951 Geneva Convention on the Statute on Refugees (in art. 33) and by articles 18 and 19 of the European Charter of Fundamental Rights. There is no time to build diplomatic relationships – within the so-called Rabat and Khartoum processes – because the refugees are at sea, here and now they must be saved: form death, of course, but also from the mafias making money on their flesh by taking advantage of a legality vacuum that the Union must now fill.
The European states are guilty of crimes and yet keep living in a delusional state. UNCHR spokesperson Carlotta Sami was very clear: “letting people die at sea will not discourage refugees in their search for safety”, from wars, from famine, from hate currently unleashed against Christians or other minorities, and, in the future, from climate related catastrophes as well. The speed of talks and diplomatic negotiations no longer matches that of the urgency at hand. The time to organize a massive rescue operation for the humanity escaping towards Europe is now, as we speak.
The article was originally published in the Italian newspaper Il Sole-24 Ore, April 21st, 2015