International Writing. – Hundreds of people disappeared to the southwest of the Greek island of the Peloponnese after a boat with more than 700 migrants sank on June 14, 34 people disappeared on the 20th in the Atlantic, 185 kilometers south of Gran Canarias and another 40 in the shipwreck last Saturday of a boat with dozens of migrants off Lampedusa (southern Italy). They are the latest tragedies at sea near Europe.
The spokesperson for the International Organization for Migration (IOM), Safa Msehli, acknowledges that there are no reasons to believe that the dangerous journeys to southern Europe will decrease in summer, after months of stable increase, but stressed that “lives should not be reduced to numbers, something that we fear may be happening in the Mediterranean.”
According to the IOM, so far this year at least 1,807 migrants have died or disappeared on journeys to Europe through the Mediterranean.
THE CENTRAL MEDITERRANEAN ROUTE
According to the IOM, the central Mediterranean route (from Libya to Italy) is the most dangerous in the world: “Year after year we document hundreds of deaths there and see very few concrete actions to respond to this situation.”
The Italian government of the far-right Giorgia Meloni decreed a state of national immigration emergency for the entire summer, a way to allocate resources for the transfer of migrants and faster repatriations without having to go through Parliament for approval.
Italy fears an increase in arrivals in summer: already so far this year there have been almost 60,000, more than double that of all of 2022, but still far from the numbers of other years such as 2016, when there were 181,436.
Meloni has restricted the work of humanitarian rescue ships: it assigns an immediate port after each operation -regardless of the number of migrants rescued- which, moreover, is usually far away.
The ship Aita Mari, from the Spanish NGO Salvamento Marítimo Humanitario, disembarked last Sunday in the Italian port of Salerno (south), 172 rescued people, after more than a day and a half of navigation from the relief zone.
After the shipwreck on February 26 off the coast of the town of Cutro (south) in which at least 94 people died, Italy approved a law that introduces a new crime, “death and injuries due to the trafficking of clandestine immigrants”, with penalties of up to 30 years in prison.
LIBYA AS A STARTING POINT
According to the IOM spokesperson, in recent times a greater number of migrant departures from eastern Libya has been registered.
Libya has been denounced as an “unsafe” country for a migrant population of some 600,000 people who suffer continuous human rights violations. Still, it received two new rescue boats from Italy last week as part of a renewed agreement to stem the flow of migrants.
The UN special mission in Libya (UNSMIL) has already expressed concern about the arbitrary and massive detention of migrants and asylum seekers -including minors- under the pretext of fighting organized crime in Libya.
So far this year, at least 7,477 people have been intercepted -161 of them children-, and returned to Libya, which together with Tunisia concentrate around 94% of the departures on the central Mediterranean route.
The campaign launched against the sub-Saharan population by the Tunisian authorities, described as racist, has contributed to the increase in flight by sea, according to the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights (FTDES), which questions whether Tunisia continues to be a “safe country” for the return of migrants and refugees.
The Tunisian Coast Guard intercepted 14,000 migrants, the majority from sub-Saharan Africa, in the first three months of the year.
GREECE, INCREASE IN REFUGEES
With the arrival of summer, Greece has registered an increase in refugees and migrants across the Evros River, the natural border with Turkey, as well as precarious boats loaded with migrants intercepted by the Greek coast guard.
Over the past four years, Greece has been repeatedly accused of illegally “swishing back” migrants to Turkey.
According to the Ministry of Migration, arrivals in 2022 of migrants and refugees increased by 96% compared to the previous year, to a total of 17,112.
The Turkish Coast Guard has increased its activity to interdict migrant boats leaving Turkish beaches, usually in inflatable boats, bound for nearby Greek islands.
Between Sunday the 25th and Monday the 26th, the coastguards have intercepted 215 migrants, including 65 who were traveling on a sailing ship en route to Italy.
According to statistics published by the Ministry of the Interior, the authorities detain between 12,000 and 13,000 refugees and immigrants each month, a number that reached 7,300 in the first two weeks of June.
Since a serious economic crisis broke out in Lebanon at the end of 2019, the number of illegal departures has skyrocketed, especially from the coastal city of Tripoli (north), from where boats with Lebanese citizens and also Syrian refugees leave, a community that has been especially hard hit. because of the depression in the country.
Egypt has been suffering from an economic crisis for years, aggravated by Russia’s war in Ukraine, since it is one of the main importers of wheat in the world.
This has led to more young people looking to go to Libya to take the Mediterranean route to Italy or Greece.
THE WESTERN ROUTE
The extreme east of Algeria belongs to the central Mediterranean route, while the barges that leave via the western route disembark in Spain, which registered a 50% decrease in 2022 compared to previous periods.
Algeria, also a transit country for the sub-Saharan population, is above all singled out for expelling thousands of migrants into the inhospitable Sahara desert, an equally dangerous migratory journey on which there is hardly any data on deaths or disappearances.
In Morocco, in recent months, a reinforcement of the control of the Mediterranean coasts has been observed, which pushes emigrants to alternatives to reach Spain, such as the Atlantic route to the Canary Islands, the most dangerous and crowded by both Moroccans and sub-Saharan Africans. .
According to the Moroccan Ministry of the Interior, in 2022 the country’s authorities rescued 12,478 people from Mediterranean and Atlantic waters, compared to 14,236 the previous year.
In the first five months of 2023, they helped 3,150. Interior affirms that in 2022 they prevented 70,781 people from leaving for Spain by land or sea, a figure that stands at 63,121 in the previous year.
Organizations that help immigrants such as Caminando Fronteras denounce a Frontex policy focused on preventing their arrival, instead of assisting them in emergencies such as a recent sinking of a boat on this route, with around thirty people missing after waiting for hours without being found. rescued.
