Abstract
Thousands of people are disappearing off the radar in the Mediterranean Sea and are never seen again.
The rubber boat was one of three to leave from Garabulli, Libya, overnight on 8-9 February. One of them was pushed back to the African coast by patrol boats. Another was rescued by Maltese authorities. The one with 91 migrants seemingly remained drifting at sea, calling for help that would not come.
“They were in complete panic and said the engine wasn’t working, the boat was taking in water and there were people in the water,” said Chiara Denaro.
A sociology researcher by trade, Denaro is also an activist with Alarm Phone, a group that provides a crisis hotline for migrants – to amplify their calls for help and document the silence and inaction of authorities.
Alarm Phone received a few calls from the migrants in the early hours of 9 February so, as usual, the activists alerted the authorities about the emergency and publicised it on social media. But nothing happened and, at around 5.30am, the group lost contact with the boat.
It was the beginning of a long silence. Because state authorities and militias in that area can save or push back a boat without the public knowing, Alarm Phone activists reached out to authorities in Libya, Italy and Malta as well as international organisations to try to find out what happened to the 91 migrants.
Some institutions showed no interest. Others mistakenly claimed the boat had been rescued, presenting flawed and conflicting evidence. Nobody knew. The group had disappeared, and what happened to them is still not clear. Denaro says that some bodies were found two weeks after the calls, but their identities were not established.
The story is all too familiar to the Alarm Phone activists. Migrants have been vanishing while attempting to reach Europe for years. The International Organisation for Migration’s Missing Migrants Project says that 20,000 people have died in the Mediterranean since records began in 2014 – although many consider the number an under-estimation. Two-thirds, or more than 13,000, are lost at sea without a trace.
But the sea crossing is just one step in their journey: thousands are also unaccounted for after reaching Libya, or after being returned to the country where war and human rights violations make it difficult to understand their fate.
What most disappearances have in common is the silence in which they happen, said Denaro. She said some people disappeared because of the dangerous nature of their journeys, but there were also “political choices that make it happen”.
It wasn’t long ago that Italy was not only not criticised for its border policies in the Mediterranean – it was even praised by some human rights activists. In October 2013, after two boats sank near the coast of Sicily, claiming the lives of at least 600 people, the Italian government announced a military operation that employed navy vessels to patrol much of the Mediterranean up to 90 nautical miles off the Libyan coast. The operation, codenamed Mare Nostrum, is thought to have saved some 150,000 lives in a little more than a year.
But as the migration crisis heightened, the backlash mounted against the operation in Italy and the EU.
“It was terminated in October 2014 as a political choice,” explained Arturo Salerni, the president of the Italian Coalition for Civil Rights and Freedoms (CILD) and a prominent human rights lawyer who, among others, represents the families of the victims of the shipwreck of 11 October 2013 in their quest for justice.
“From then on, European missions focused more on pushing them back than on rescuing them – and deaths rose,” he said.
Italy and the EU focused on creating deterrents for migrants trying to cross. First, in 2017, a centre-left Italian government signed an agreement with Libya’s Government of National Accord under which Italy provided funding, training and vessels to Libyan militias in exchange for tracking and retaining migrants – often in concentration camps where human rights abuses are well-documented.
Then, as NGO rescue boats attempted to make up for the lack of rescue operations run by Italy, Malta and the EU, Italy moved against them.
In 2018, then-interior minister Matteo Salvini closed Italian ports to NGO rescue boats. A year later, the country introduced steep fines for allowing rescued refugees to disembark.
According to critics, the policies turned the Mediterranean Sea into a place where the lack of third-sector organisations meant that human rights violations could be carried out with little risk, as Index has reported in the past.
“The little damage control that NGOs did could no longer happen,” said Salerni. “This not only increased the number of shipwrecks but also made it impossible to assess how many boats disappeared and how many people drowned.”
At least seven vessels carrying more than 400 people vanished without a trace in 2019 alone, according to IOM estimates.
Salerni thinks the disappearances have political value. “If the stories of the people who disappear, the families they leave behind, the severed relationships… if they came to light, it could push a part of the population – the most sensitive part – to demand that these things no longer happen, and these policies are discontinued,” he said.
A vessel holding Libyan refugees floats in the Mediterranean Sea while a Spanish Search and Rescue plane patrols over-head in 2017
CREDIT: Marcus Drinkwater/Getty
Seeing relatives disappear without any certainty of their deaths can wreak havoc in the communities of origin.
The husband of Oum El Kheir Wertatani, a Tunisian mother-of-three, left the country after the Arab Spring in March 2011. He called his brother the night he left to tell him about it but then was heard from no more.
Wertatani’s husband was one of about 500 Tunisians who attempted to cross the Mediterranean Sea in March 2011 but disappeared. Some families say they saw their relatives disembark in Italy in TV footage, but their fate remains unknown, and authorities in Tunisia and Italy have been unable to provide any information about them.
An unmarked grave in a Sicilian cemetery of a refugee who died at sea while trying to reach Italy. Many refugees who do not survive the journey are never identified
CREDIT: Sean Gallup/Getty
Because authorities have provided no evidence of their relatives’ deaths, the families refused to accept them and began searching and campaigning.
“The entire first year after my husband’s disappearance was a nightmare,” said Wertatani. “It was difficult to go and search. It was difficult to believe that what happened happened. And it’s difficult to believe and understand that they reached Italy and they did not call.”
The group has been pressuring institutions on both sides of the Mediterranean for nine years to obtain more information about their loved ones – largely to no avail.
The condition of the people who vanish at sea and their families, as in Wertatani’s case, has drawn comparisons by some to that of the Desaparecidos, the young activists who were forcibly disappeared under Argentina’s dictatorship. According to recent research by Emilio Distretti, a senior teaching fellow of politics and international studies at SOAS University London, the term helps survivors, families and activists to make institutions accountable and call out the disappearances and border deaths as part of a concerted strategy.
Enrico Calamai, who served as the Italian vice-consul in Argentina between 1973 and 1977 and helped some young people to flee the dictatorship, is one of the most vocal advocates of the term New Desaparecidos.
“[The migrants] die in a media vacuum,” he explained. “When they arrive in Europe, they are only numbers – nobody knows who they are: they are bare data, deprived of substance and bodies. They disappear without public opinion feeling the natural emotion of the act.”
While he notes that there are differences from what happened in Argentina during his tenure, he says it is very similar.
“People disappeared, but those who weren’t a parent or had links to the disappeared would not react, because they perceived them [as] ‘other’, like something different. There is the same indifference in Italian and European public opinion today.”
The indifference seems to continue when the disappeared come under the spotlight and are made visible to public opinion. On 29 June, an aircraft operated by NGO Sea-Watch sighted a dead body trapped in the remnants of a halfsunk rubber dinghy.
“We do not know what happened there,” SeaWatch head of aviation Neeske Beckmann said in a video statement, “and especially what happened to the other people on the rubber boat.”
The crew asked authorities to recover the body. Italian media picked up the case, and a petition started to pressure authorities to act.
Two weeks later, it was still there.