The first thing to do, if you want to cut the number of refugees from Africa and the Middle East dying while trying to cross the Mediterranean, is to drop leaflets all along the Libyan coast teaching them about ship stability. Don’t all rush to one side when you spot a ship that might save you, the pamphlets will say, because your boat will capsize and you will drown.
That’s what happened last weekend off the Libyan coast, where a boat filled with at least 700 refugees overturned when the people aboard spotted a Portuguese freighter and tried to attract its attention. At least 650 people died — half a Titanic’s worth of casualties — although the boat in question was only 70 ft. long. Only 28 people were saved.
So the second thing to do is to lock the European Union’s foreign ministers into a room until they agree to do something about the silent massacre in the Mediterranean. Something quite effective was being done until late last year, but they deliberately stopped it.
Until late last year the Italian navy was running an operation called Mare Nostrum that went all the way to the edge of Libya’s territorial waters to pluck refugees from the sea. The operation cost 9.5 million euros a month ($10.3 million), but it rescued 100,000 people from leaking boats or the open sea. More than half of the 170,000 refugees who landed in Italy had cause to thank the Italian navy, and only one in a hundred died.
The number of refugees arriving in Italy each month is around the same this year, maybe a little higher — but ten times as many people are dying on the way. That is because the EU’s governments, rather than sharing the cost of the Mare Nostrum project, asked Italy to shut it down and substituted their own “Triton” operation. Except that “Triton” is in no way an adequate substitute. It only gets a third of funding Mare Nostrum had, and it is only supposed to operate in Italy’s coastal waters, not farther out where most of the refugee boats capsize or founder. Even this year, with the Italian navy theoretically excused from duty, it has saved twice as many people as the pathetic “Triton” operation. Which, by the way, was intended to be pathetic. The argument the European governments made was that if you didn’t give the refugees the hope that they would be saved by the Italian navy, fewer of them would come. Right, so if you’re fleeing the civil war in Syria or the ghastly dictatorship in Eritrea, and you learn that the danger of dying on a Mediterranean crossing has gone up from one percent to 10 percent, you’re going to decide to stay in war-torn Libya instead?
“In many countries in Europe at the moment,” said Laurens Jolles, the UNHCR representative in Italy, “the (political) dialogue and the rhetoric is quite extreme and very irresponsible... It’s a fear of foreigners..., but it is being exploited for populist or political reasons, especially in election periods.”
Too true. Take, for example, Katie Hopkins, columnist for The Sun, a down-market right-wing British red-top (tabloid newspaper) owned by the estimable Rupert Murdoch. Last Friday, in an article headlined “Rescue boats? I’d use gunships to stop migrants”, she wrote: “NO, I don’t care. Show me pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in water, play violins and show me skinny people looking sad. I still don’t care.”
Saying that sort of thing is how she earns her living, but it also expresses the true sentiments of a politically significant minority not only in Britain but in most countries throughout the European Union. When the UNHCR appealed to the EU to resettle 130,000 Syrian refugees, Germany said it would take 30,000, Sweden (with a tenth of Germany’s population) took 2,700 –and the other 26 EU states only took 5,438 between them. So the drownings will continue.
