DREAMS OF A NEW LIFE START IN SICILY AS MIGRANTS RISK EVERYTHING ON PERILOUS VOYAGE FROM LIBYA
▶ In part two of our series on refugees, asylum seekers in Catania tell of robberies by smugglers and a trip with 200 people in a boat, writes Seth Jacobson
On a fiercely hot day in the Sicilian port of Catania, a group of recently arrived migrants are lying under palm trees beside the central train station.
The seven men, aged between 16 and 25, have travelled from as far afield as Bangladesh, Nigeria and the Gambia. Now they are watching the world go by.
Having made it to the European Union there is no great rush to push on. Their applications for asylum are stuck in an overloaded system, and while some of them are finding work where they can, for now they wait, many fed and housed in hostels run by private organisations and charities.
One of the Bangladeshi men, “Akash”, explains how he ended up in Sicily. He had worked as a cleaner in Libya since 2013, joining tens of thousands of his compatriots in the troubled state.
“I paid an agency in Dhaka and they found me the job in Libya, in a hospital in Tripoli. The work was very hard and the country was very unsafe,” says Akash, 25.
There are millions of Bangladeshi remittance workers around the world. Like many of them, Akash was misled about the job. He was paid far less than he was promised and was treated with little dignity.
The security situation in Libya deteriorated as ISIL-affiliated militias waged a terror campaign, and Akash decided to flee to Europe early this year.
“We found a gang of people smugglers who said they would take us to Italy,” he says. “I wanted to travel on to Germany. I handed over €1,500 [Dh6,534] to a member of the gang, then the next night we were told to go to the waterfront.
“There was a large inflatable boat there, which didn’t look very safe, and there were 200 of us waiting to get on board. Before we did so, the gang robbed us of all our belongings.”
After they left Libya under cover of darkness, Akash noticed the packed boat was sitting very low in the water. As dawn broke, the vessel was no longer moving in the sea and the passengers started to fear that they would die.
“There weren’t enough life jackets for everyone and people began to panic,” he says.
They were picked up by a rescue boat run by a non-government oganisation.
“They sent out a small boat to where we were and then took us on to a bigger ship, where they gave us food and water,” Akash says. “We were so happy to have been saved.”
Upon arrival in Sicily, he and the others from his boat were processed through a centre where they were registered by the Italian government and where he applied for asylum.
He was then sent to a shelter for young migrants. His friends on the lawn also stay there. It is close to the station, which is why young migrants congregate there.
The front line in the migrant crisis used to be the eastern flank of Europe, through which the mass movement of refugees passed into the continent through Turkey and Greece.
The death of toddler Aylan Kurdi in 2015, whose body washed up on a Turkish beach, forced the world’s gaze to the unfolding tragedy. But an agreement between Turkey and the EU in March last year shifted the main route to North Africa and Italy. Sicily is now Europe’s front line.
The island has long been a place of tolerance towards immigrants, having spent hundreds of years being invaded and settled by everyone from the Romans to the Normans to the Byzantines.
Many in Catania see the latest influx as part of this historical trend and despite some misgivings, Sicilians have proved more welcoming than mainlanders from the north of the country.
This year, Catania’s mayor Enzo Bianco said: “This city, in these years, has received thousands of desperate people fleeing war and hunger, people saved from death by European ships in the Mediterranean who often have lost one or more loved ones crossing the sea. To talk of the ‘defence of Europe’ is demagogic and self-serving.”
Mr Bianco’s words were in response to attempts by a farright group to launch a ship to stop migrant boats.
More than 100,000 people entered the EU from the south last year, by far most of them from Libya. This development led to charities stationing rescue boats in southern Italian islands. There are also boats operating out of Malta, although it has taken in no refugees for the past three years.
Many of the charities operate in the ports of Sicily. In early August in Catania, there was a boat moored every few hundred metres, in the shadow of a hulking Italian naval ship.
In late July, the Italian government issued a code of conduct for groups operating boats in the Mediterranean, including measures to stop vessels alerting the migrant boats to their position and banning them from crossing into Libyan territorial waters.
The aim was to reduce the “pull” that the Italians claimed the boats exert when they go out. Some charities, including Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), were even accused of running a taxi service for migrants and making life easier for the people smugglers.
The government claimed MSF was encouraging migrants to head to sea in boats that were even less seaworthy, safe in the knowledge that they were more likely to be intercepted by rescue boats closer to the Libyan coast.
Save the Children signed the charter, saying they were already complying with the 12 points it contained. MSF and four other groups refused.
“The proposals – in particular the one stating that vessels engaged in rescue must disembark survivors to a place
Catania has an air of tolerant indifference to the new arrivals, with many seeing the influx as part of a historical trend
of safety as a rule instead of transferring to other ships – present unnecessary limitations to the means at our disposal today,” said MSF.
“A reduction in the number of rescue vessels would weaken an already insufficient search and rescue capacity, resulting in an increase in mass drownings.”
It became increasingly obvious last month that the rules of engagement for the groups operating in the Mediterranean were changing.
Early in the month Iuventa, a ship chartered by the radical German group Jugend Rettet (“Youth rescues”), was stopped by the Italian coastguard off the Italian island of Lampedusa.
A prosecutor alleged that the crew had been involved in “the crime of clandestine immigration” and that there had been “contacts, meetings and understandings” between them and the smugglers.
It later emerged that some of Italian government’s evidence on the Iuventa’s activities had been gathered by an undercover agent who was on board the Vos Hestia, Save the Children’s boat operating out of Sicily.
The Italians recorded a 50 per cent drop in the number of migrants in July from the previous year and it became clear there would be an even more substantial drop last month.
Frontex, the EU’s border control agency, said this sharp fall had started earlier in the summer because of inclement sailing conditions in the Mediterranean and more patrols by the Libyan coastguard, who had received equipment and training from the Italians.
But the code of conduct clearly had a major impact last month.
However, few believe the reduction means fewer migrants are trying to cross. They have simply moved on to Spain, where 600 migrants arrived on August 16, to the surprise of holidaymakers on a beach.
Meanwhile, along the Via IV Aprile that runs along Catania’s waterfront from the docks to the central station, the mood is one of patient indifference.
Few among the migrant population expect anything to happen soon. Their dreams of travel through Europe remain on hold and they are trying to make the most of life in Sicily.
The industry and entrepreneurial spirit of the migrant population is evident all over town. Amid the stalls laden with fresh Sicilian produce at La Fiera, the huge covered market that spreads across the Piazza Carla Alberto in the centre of Catania, you will find them wheeling makeshift trolleys loaded with fake designer sunglasses, sun hats and football shirts.
At road junctions there are Bangladeshis respectfully offering to clean car windows as drivers idle at red lights. In the squares round the majestic baroque cathedral, hawkers peddle bottles of water.
It is a city that for more than two and a half millennia, since it was first settled by the Greeks, has demonstrated a proud tradition of openness towards the world.
Whether that extends to the mainland, and Europe beyond, is not so evident.