Hundreds of children arrive alone
Close to 1,300 children estimated to have arrived alone in Italy this year
Berhane was beaten, starved, locked up and forced to witness horrific atrocities in his desperate journey across Libya to the Mediterranean Sea and Italy with some of the world’s most brutal smugglers.
But the 17-year-old Eritrean youth was one of the lucky ones — he made it. Unlike the hundreds of would-be migrants who have perished in the past month, and the thousands who have died in recent years, he reached the Italian shore alive.
“We don’t know how many children have died in these attempts,” said Sarah Tyler of Save the Children, in an interview from the port of Catania in Sicily, where a handful of survivors were taken after the capsizing of a boat carrying up to 900 people.
“I’ve been doing emergencies for about nine years now,” she said, “and these are some of the worst stories I’ve ever heard.”
Save the Children estimates that close to 1,300 of the 22,507 migrants who have arrived in Italy this year are unaccompanied minors, many of them from Eritrea, Somalia and Gambia, as well as strife-torn Nigeria, Mali, Sudan, Afghanistan and the Palestinian Territories.
The sheer horror of Berhane’s plight took hold when the unaccompanied teen travelled through the Libyan desert with about 30 others on a pickup truck driven by cocainefuelled smugglers.
“When the truck stopped for a break, if you did something they didn’t like, you paid dearly,” he told Save the Children workers in Italy. “I saw them spray people with petrol and set fire to them until they died.”
In Libya he was starved and beaten with iron bars on a month-long stopover near Benghazi. On the road to Tripoli, where Islamists had seized territory, he saw bodies of up to 63 people, 25 of them beheaded.
To extort more money the smugglers forced the migrants to phone their homes, beating them so their relatives could hear them scream.
“It’s a very organized network,” said Tyler.
“People are passed from one group to another. When they get to Libya they’re sometimes kidnapped by other smugglers and have to pay more.”
The stories of violence in Libya are some of the worst, she added. “Children told us they were put in cells, raped and tortured. One young boy from Somalia who was 15 saw someone raped, and then she committed suicide because of the shame.”
Even babies have suffered and died. They were among 23 burn victims taken to Lampedusa in life-threatening condition after rescue at sea on Friday. They were in a cooking gas explosion in Libya before the voyage, and forced into a boat without treatment.
Berhane is hoping his luck will hold. Taken to Palermo after an earlier rescue at sea, he is being transferred to a facility for minors in Sicily. “He hopes to go on to a new life in northern Europe (and) leave behind him all the viciousness and inhumanity he has witnessed,” said Save the Children.