Lucia and Massimiliano enter the Lampedusa church in silence. “We are from Turin, it is our last day of vacation on the island and we have come to leave this bag of clothes for migrants who may need it,” they say. While Massimiliano looks for the priest, Lucía stops in front of the altar, where there is only a simple Christ on a cross made with the oars of the fishermen’s boats, and she utters an emotional prayer.
Many details in the parish of San Gerlando and the devotion with which its parishioners approach reflect the conscience of Lampedusians and tourists like this couple from Turin, knowing that this paradise island in the Mediterranean is also the first line of the migratory flow that the coast emits. North Africa towards southern Europe. In an urn there is a small nativity scene in which the manger is a boat and Mary, Joseph and the child save a black-skinned person from drowning in the sea. A Bible and Koran recovered from a shipwreck frame the scene. The small image was donated by Pope Francis in 2013, the year he visited the largest of the islands in the Pelagia archipelago.
Lampedusa has been marked by that date. Then the world focused on this point, the southernmost point in Italy, very close to the Tunisian coast, just 113 kilometers away. Now 10 years ago, on the night of October 2 to 3, 2013, one of the most tragic shipwrecks that the Mediterranean has ever experienced occurred. A boat with more than half a thousand migrants and refugees, mainly from Somalia and Eritrea, sank a mile from its cliffs. The Lampedusian fishermen themselves rescued many people from certain death. There were 155 survivors but 368 people died. And that trace of tragedy and death has remained.
“Lampedusa does not want to be like Ellis Island, where in the last century they took immigrants who arrived in New York, many of them Italian,” recalls Giovaninno, who runs the factory store on Via Roma – Lampedusa’s main avenue. of natural sponges that his family has been collecting from the Mediterranean seabed for several generations.
In the middle of this September, Lampedusa recorded an unprecedented peak in arrivals that overwhelmed the authorities. Between the 11th and 13th, around 8,500 migrants and asylum seekers arrived. The island’s first reception center, with capacity for less than 400 people, collapsed and it was the islanders themselves who welcomed and fed up to 10,000 new arrivals. Lampedusa has been witnessing the incessant flow of migrants knocking on Europe’s doors for 30 years. “We are used to the arrival of migrants but this summer was not normal,” adds Giovaninno. This September, like 10 years ago, the archipelago has experienced a turning point.
The people of Lampedusa remember that fateful moonless night a decade ago as if it were today. The trauma is palpable in the air and every October 3, a procession of fishing boats and Coast Guard vessels parade from the port of Lampedusa out to sea, towards the site of the terrible event, throwing prayers and flowers. On land, hundreds of people march with banners demanding: “Enough of deaths at sea”, “Enough of invisible deaths.” The day is marked in Italy as the Day of Remembrance and Reception, with commemorations in all cities. Activists, NGOs and anonymous people – from the island and beyond – gathered in Lampedusa call for a humanitarian turn in Italian and European migration policy.
“Those who are forced to cross the sea are forced to risk their lives because there are no legal and safe alternatives to reach Europe. They constantly die at sea in the attempt to reach Europe,” Emma Conti, spokesperson, denounces to this newspaper. from the local NGO Mediterranean Hope.
That October 3 a decade ago was sad and marked an ‘awakening’, but then many more came and some denounce that the situation has become normal. A few days later, another 200 people died in these waters and since then, shipwrecks with hundreds of bodies have been cyclical. “There have been more than 27,000 deaths in the Mediterranean Sea in these 10 years,” Chiara Cardoletti, representative for Italy of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), explains to EL MUNDO. Of them, 22,300 have lost their lives in the Sicilian Channel alone, making the central Mediterranean route one of the deadliest on the planet.
“This is a striking sign of what has not improved at all in these 10 years and highlights the serious gaps in rescue capacity in the Mediterranean. UNHCR has long advocated and reiterates its call for the creation of a rescue capacity robust and predictable state-led search and rescue, together with regional cooperation agreements that ensure the predictable disembarkation and processing of refugees and migrants rescued at sea. This solution, which requires the prompt support of the European Union in a spirit of shared responsibility and solidarity with the countries of first landing, has not been agreed upon in years,” says Cardoletti.
The tragedy 10 years ago made the Italian authorities react, launching a rescue and rescue operation, under the name ‘Mare Nostrum’, which lasted for just over a year. This was followed by the ‘Triton’ operation and the ‘Sophia’ mission, in which the European Union was involved, which ended in 2020.
NGOs also got involved with their own search and rescue vessels. But after this decade trying to prevent people fleeing war, violence or poverty from drowning at sea, in recent years they have denounced the obstruction of their work by the Italian and European authorities. “Any person who is at sea in danger of death must be rescued and considered as a person rather than as a ‘migrant,'” Juan Matías Gil, head of search and rescue operations at sea for Médicos Sin, said in a statement. Borders. “How many more people have to drown before someone does something in the right direction?”
In the small cemetery of the island, between the whitewashed walls and the green of its trees, the migrants and refugees who did not make it are buried in unmarked graves. Only one grave identified and with a photo stands out among the others. It is that of Yusuf Ali Kanneh, who was born in Libya on April 6, 2020 and died in the Mediterranean on November 11, 2020. He was six months old. His parents, who survived, ask themselves at his burial: “Why so soon, my child?”
