介绍： Migration to Europe: Travelling in hope
The flow of Africans from Libya to Italy is now Europe’s worst migration crisis
From The Economist 20161022

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BEFORE dawn the Dignity 1 has completed her first rescue, scooping 114 migrants without lifejackets from a rubber dinghy adrift in the Medite...

介绍： Migration to Europe: Travelling in hope
The flow of Africans from Libya to Italy is now Europe’s worst migration crisis
From The Economist 20161022

Audio:

0:00




BEFORE dawn the Dignity 1 has completed her first rescue, scooping 114 migrants without lifejackets from a rubber dinghy adrift in the Mediterranean. The crew, who include a doctor and two nurses from Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), the charity that operates the boat, check the arrivals to see who needs immediate care. No sooner have they finished than the ship is called to assist the Samuel Beckett, an Irish military vessel also engaged in search-and-rescue. Several migrants she has picked up need urgent medical help: they have chemical burns from fuel leaking in their sinking boat. In the evening the Italian coastguard brings 196 more people on board. By midnight the Dignity 1 is carrying 417 migrants. Cordoned off at her prow is the body of Joy, a 23-year-old Nigerian who had been six months pregnant. She died of a heart attack after getting petrol in her lungs.

Some people the boat picks up have fled persecution. Hassan, a 14-year-old Somali picked up the previous day (see picture), is escaping civil war. It has taken him five months to get this far, three of them in Libya, sleeping in animal coops. Kaifa, a 20-year-old from Liberia, travelled through Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Libya; he says he was arrested for taking part in a peaceful protest in his home country. Many have suffered terribly en route. Aruna, a 21-year-old from Sierra Leone, has a broken hand from the smugglers’ beatings, and marks on his back from their whips. A Nigerian woman is keening: her two children were lost overboard before rescue arrived.

But most are seeking a job of some kind, often to support families back home. Although they speak of escaping poverty, most will have had to scrape together large sums to pay for their journeys, often by getting relatives to chip in. Others will pay after arriving in Europe, perhaps by working as prostitutes, though they may not realise that that is what is in store for them. The journey has often been embarked on without much planning, and with little idea of what lies at its end.

Mette, a pregnant 20-year-old from the Ivory Coast, ran away from her violent husband on impulse when he left the door on the latch. She has seen and suffered “many things in the world”, she says through tears, and declares she will take any job to support her child. The medics flag her up for referral to a psychologist once she lands in Italy. Smart, a 27-year-old Nigerian, fell out with his half-brother, who wanted to kill him. He told a man whose car he washed, who in turn put him in touch with people-smugglers. Soon Smart was travelling to Libya in a series of cars. Bashir, a 17-year-old from Somalia, is one of the few with any idea of where he would like to end up: Geneva, because he has heard that many NGOs are based there. “Maybe they can assist me,” he says.

Daring to dream

Migrants have been making their way on boats to Europe for more than a decade. But in the past few years their numbers have soared. Last year over a million crossed the Mediterranean. By far the largest share—around 850,000—travelled from Turkey to Greece, most of them Syrians fleeing their country’s bloody war. The sudden influx brought Europe’s asylum system to the brink of collapse.

A lasting solution will require peace in Syria, which seems as distant as ever. But in the meantime it has proved possible to reduce the flow. In March the EU struck a deal with Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s president, to take back any Syrians who made it as far as Greece. Although very few have yet been returned, arrivals fell from 55,000 in February to 3,000 in August, as fewer Syrians attempted the journey.

Now the longer and more perilous central Mediterranean crossing, from Libya to Italy, has once again become the main migrant route to Europe. The influx has grown markedly in recent years—150,000 last year, up from 64,000 in 2011. This is still smaller than the peak flow on the Turkey-Greece route, but it poses an even more troubling conundrum. The influx is almost impossible to stem. It originates in dozens of countries, and moves via shifting networks of people-smugglers. Most of those who make it to Europe will eventually be judged economic migrants, not refugees. But Libya, without a government since 2011, is so lawless that they cannot be sent back there. Nor is it always possible to send them home, as their governments often refuse to accept them. Most end up staying in Europe despite being denied asylum.

Italy’s sluggish legal system drags out the time spent in limbo. In a state-funded house for migrants in Catania, Sicily, Josef, a young Gambian who arrived in Italy in 2014, says he has been denied asylum but has appealed. Many in his situation enter the shadow economy. In Palermo, Sicily’s capital, many migrants live in Ballarò, a shady part of town where drug-dealing is rife. Some end up working as prostitutes.

When Muammar Qaddafi ruled Libya, Italy struck deals with him so that its navy could return migrants who had attempted the trip. But after his death in 2011 the bargain broke down, and in 2012 the European Court of Human Rights declared that these “push-backs” to Libya breached human-rights law.

Since then the EU has responded to one crisis after another, rather than settling on a consistent plan. In 2013 the Italian government started Operation Mare Nostrum, a search-and-rescue effort that plucked 150,000 people from the seas in a single year. After other European countries, notably Britain, argued that saving migrants inspired more of them to attempt the trip, it was replaced with a scaled-down version, closer to the Italian coast. But the number attempting the crossing fell only slightly, and the number of deaths increased.

Next, the EU took aim at the smugglers. In May 2015 it launched Operation Sophia, with patrolling warships seeking to destroy suspected smuggling vessels close to the Libyan coast. Though they often get involved in rescues, the effect has been to make the route riskier without much reducing the number trying it. This year 3,173 migrants are known to have died or gone missing in the central Mediterranean, up from 2,794 in 2015 (the real numbers will be higher).

Once one group of people-smugglers has been identified and arrested another will pop up, says Calogera Ferrara, an Italian prosecutor in Palermo. And their methods also shift in response to changing policies. As their wooden boats have been destroyed, they have switched to flimsy rubber dinghies, which are hard to spot on the horizon and carry barely enough fuel to reach international waters, where the migrants on board have a chance of being picked up. One of the men rescued by Dignity 1 says that the smugglers gave him a satellite phone with which to call the Italian coastguard, and told him to throw it overboard afterwards so it could not be traced back to them.

The routes African migrants take to reach the Libyan coast form a web across the continent (see map) along which are strung safe houses, brokers and drivers, loosely linked by personal connections. Many pass through Agadez in northern Niger, the last settlement before the Sahara desert. A dusty city of 120,000 souls, it was founded a millennium ago for caravans of camels carrying salt and gold to west Africa. Now its trade is in people.


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