Footballers and fishermen: Italy's red prawn war with Libya turns ugly
At two docks on opposite shores of the Mediterranean, two sets of families have been drawn into a small international crisis as the fate of 12 Italian fishermen held in Libya appears to hinge on that of four Libyan footballers jailed in Italy for people smuggling.
In Mazara del Vallo, in Sicily, family members have been calling for the immediate release of 12 men, part of a crew including six Tunisians, whose vessel was seized on 1 September by Libyan patrol boats accusing them of fishing in territorial waters. They were taken to Benghazi, Libya, where the warlord Gen Khalifa Haftar reportedly ordered them detained unless Italy released the four Libyans whose families claim were wrongly convicted.
“The situation is unbearable,” said Alessandro Giacalone, brother of one of the fishermen from the boats Antartide and Medinea. “After 16 days, I finally managed to speak to one of the crew members, who told us that they are all mentally strained and pleaded with us to do everything possible to get them out of there.”
Tensions have been rumbling in the 180 miles of sea separating Sicily from Libya since the mid-1990s, when Libya began protecting its fishing waters from foreign vessels with the use of force, and escalating in 2005 when Muammar Gaddafi unilaterally extended Libya’s territorial waters from 12 to 74 miles offshore. At stake are the fishing grounds for one of the world’s most prized crustaceans – thegambero rosso, or red
prawn, which can costup to €70 (£62) per kilo.
According to data from Sicily’s Distretto della Pesca, a fishing industry cooperative, more than 50 boats have been seized, two confiscated, about 30 fishermen detained and dozens of people injured in the last 25 years of the “war of the gamberorosso”.
After the rumours about the exchange proposed by Haftar, families of the footballers held protests in front of the Benghazi naval base, demanding the Italian fishermen not be freed until the Libyan players were released from Italy, the Benghazi-based newspaper Address Libya reported.
Detainees are usually released after two weeks and a string of negotiations, but the most recent case has been further complicated by allegations that the Italians were smuggling drugs on the fishing boats. Two weeks after they were first apprehended, the Italian news agency AGI published photos of 10 yellow sacks, allegedly containing unspecified drugs, laid out in front of one of the seized boats.
“They want to frame them, and now it’s clear that they’re raising the stakes,” said Marco Marrone, owner of the boats, adding that he had not received any confirmation on behalf of the Italian government regarding the latest accusations.
“The Italian government must help us,” said Giacalone. “There are mothers, wives, siblings, children and fathers who are all suffering. Enough is enough. Free them!”
Italian authorities believe Haftar’s plan is clear and any new accusations against the fishermen, who must now appear before a Libyan judge, are yet another indication he is determined to force an exchange for the four Libyans.
Joma Tarek Laamami, Abdelkarim al-Hamad, Mohammad Jarkess, club footballers, and Abd Arahman Abd alMonsiff, a Libyan A series player, were arrested in Sicily in 2015 and sentenced to 30 years for a sea crossing in which 49 people died.
According to investigators, the four men were on the bridge of the ship and allegedly locked dozens of people in the hull during a rough crossing, a move that led to the migrants’ death when the ship capsized near the Sicilian coast. The defence said the accusation was groundless, given that there was no door on the ship separating the hull from the bridge, just small air vents, and that the 49 people who died had been shut in the hull before the ship left for Europe.
“The judges themselves admitted that other traffickers in Libya placed the migrants in the hull. My clients certainly did no such thing,” said Cinzia Pecoraro, Abdelkarim’s lawyer. “And the passengers couldn’t have reached the bridge, not because the doors were closed, but because the ship had no doors, just small air vents. These men are victims of a travesty of justice, the result of a sentence full of contradictions.”
The men’s families and friends claim the four Libyans were refugees who fled the civil war to continue their careers as footballers in Germany, and were forced to pilot the boat by smugglers. A 2017 report by Borderline Sicilia, an NGO that provides legal assistance in migration cases, said Italian prisons were increasingly housing migrants who “had been specifically trained as boat drivers – including minors – subjected to maltreatment and death threats prior to departure”.
An appeals court confirmed the original sentence of 30 years. The Libyans’ last hope is now the court of cassation, Italy’s supreme court, where judges should take up the case in the coming months.
“They are not criminals,” Hamed Nasser, the uncle of one of the footballers, said. “We respect the Italian judiciary and we just ask them to see the human side of the situation of our children who have chosen to emigrate.
“These young men have chosen to emigrate only to pursue their sporting futures and their past was full of sporting successes in football clubs.”
Italy’s foreign minister, Luigi Di Maio, has vowed that Italy “will not be blackmailed”, while the district attorney Carmelo Zuccaro in charge of the investigation, has said “an exchange would be repugnant”.
The protest by the fishermen’s family members has now moved to Rome, where – with picket signs in hand – they demanded the Italian government do everything in its power to free the men. In Benghazi, relatives of the four footballers are continuing their fight to release their loved ones.
“We learned that the Libyan authorities have seized an Italian fishing boat that entered Libyan territorial waters and that the Italian people and their government are fighting for their release,” said Nasser. “That’s why we have chosen to demonstrate in front of the port of Benghazi: we, the families of these young men, who have been detained in Italy since 2015, accused of things they would never dream of.”