IT WAS no more than an inflatable dinghy. But 72 – 50 men, 20 women, and two babies – had clambered aboard, crowded on top of each other by the people smugglers, for the “18-hour” journey from Libya to the Italian island of Lampedusa. March 26th, 2011.
Fifteen days later the boat, which had floated helplessly for two weeks across the Mediterranean after running out of fuel, food and water, drifted back on to the Libyan coast. By then 61 were dead, and two more would die, victims of a trade in desperate people that claimed more than 1,500 lives in that sea last year.
The few who did survive, however, told a particularly harrowing tale of a tragedy compounded by repeated failures of ships and helicopters which sighted and even communicated with the clearly distressed boat to come to their assistance, or which refused to act on the repeated “priority distress” calls sent out by the Maritime Rescue Co-ordination Centre in Rome.
One military helicopter actually dropped water to the stricken vessel and then flew off, never to return. One fishing boat came up and told them they were heading the wrong way, then left them to the mercies of a rising sea. One large naval vessel came close enough for the boat’s desperate survivors to signal their distress, holding up dead babies for the crew to see, only then to disappear. None of the boats or the helicopter have subsequently been identified, no-one has come forward, and both Nato and the Spanish authorities have denied that their vessels were involved.
The story, first reported last year by the Guardian, is now the subject of a Council of Europe report which catalogues what is sees as a litany of human and institutional failings by organisations ranging from the coast guard and Nato to military and commercial vessels nearby. Ambiguity in some of the coastguard signals was compounded by confusion over which authorities were responsible for mounting a rescue, the report says. Despite emergency calls going out, the location and identity of the vessel being identified by coast guards, no rescue mission was organised. Author Tineke Strik told the paper the avoidable tragedy exposed European double standards in valuing human life.
At least 64 migrants have already lost their lives making the same journey this year. Continued failure to address issues like the delineation of national search and rescue zones means the toll will rise further. Disgraceful inertia fed by the political toxicity in European states of illegal migration will continue to take lives.