They were undocumented migrants but above all they were inconvenient witnesses. So they were deported and abandoned in a no man’s land, without neither water nor food, along the Algerian border. They are the survivors of the shipwreck which took place on April 28 off Hoceima, on the way from Morocco to Spain, causing the death of 36 people, including two women and four babies. They accuse Morocco’s Royal Navy of having pierced the inflatable boat with which the victims were sailing, making it sink. Rabat denied any responsibility. Fortress Europe managed to reach them by phone, thanks to a member of a Moroccan Ngo. The declaration of three of the survivors coincide. The 9 meters long Zodiac, carrying about 80 passengers from Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon and Mali, departed at 2 o’clock a.m. from Hoceima, 150 km east of Melilla. Five hours later, it was intercepted in high sea. "The military came close - Fred cries on the telephone – and then one of them pierced with a knife the rubber dinghy." Within a few minutes the boat deflates, capsized and sank. People who couldn’t swim immediately drowned. A woman drowned holding her baby tightly to her chest. Not far away another woman and three babies disappeared among the waves. A total of 36 people died. In the meanwhile the boat of Morocco’s Navy went away. They came back only after one hour, with three motorboats which rescued the 42 survivors. They were transferred to the mainland in Hoceima and kept in detention for 48 hours, locked in a room, without neither water and food nor a bathroom. “Then they loaded us on a bus – told one of the Nigerian survived women – and left us at the border with Algeria, in a no man's land, it was far from Oujda”. After a long march by foot they managed to reach a camp of two hundred deported, amid the woods. “We built shelters for the night with plastic - explains one of them - we live on charity, many are sick." Life conditions are very bad, but coming back to Rabat, after the last raids in the city, is unimaginable. Meanwhile, seven of the 42 survivors died in the camp. They were not able to stand the shipwreck, the pain, the hunger, the thirst and the long march by foot.

Piercing an overcharged inflatable boat in high sea, making it sink and causing the death of 36 people, in English is called "multiple murder". But evidently in darija, the Moroccan language, it should be called in some other way, since no newspaper reported the news. For the umpteenth time, no one will pay nothing for the lives of the others. It is shameful. And it is even worst considered that 40 motorboats recently purchased by the Moroccan authorities were financed with European funds. It's always the same story. Europe contracts the patrol of its southern borders and closes the eyes on the crimes committed by its new gendarmes.

At least 101 migrants and refugees have died during the month of April 2008 at the gates of European Union. Five men died hidden in the hold of a cargo vessel landed in the Canary Islands; four people lost their lives along the border between Turkey and Iraq, drowned after being thrown into a river by Turkish police during a forced expulsion, and one Eritrean refugee was shot dead under the fire of Egyptian police along the Israeli border. Amid sea, apart from the 43 victims of Hoceima, 24 people drowned between Algeria and Spain and 24 between Tunisia and Italy, off the Sicilian coast, where in recent weeks a sharp increase in landings were registered, because of the good weather and the delay of Frontex joint patrolling start.

Just in the last week of April over 1,000 migrants arrived in Lampedusa, mainly north Africans and partly Somalis. On April 24 a shipwreck off Chebba, the closest point to Lampedusa on the Tunisian coast, made 23 victims. The day after, another tragedy happened 80 miles south of the island. During the night the Italian coastguard rescued, in Maltese waters, a ship carrying 241 passengers. They were transferred on the motorboats, but during the operations, two men fell into water. The petty officers Federico Nicoletti and Oronzo Oliva did not hesitate and plunged themselves at their own risk, despite the stormy sea. They managed to retrieve them, but unfortunately one of the two migrants died shortly after. An act of courage, which give honour to the two petty officers, who in fact will soon receive a prize by the Coastguard and by the Unhcr. A gesture which reaffirms the priority of life, in a Mediterranean where migrants are often rejected and sometimes killed, as a few weeks ago in Morocco, as in Greece in 2006, as also in Italy with the carnage caused by the Military Navy corvette Minerva in Lampedusa in 2006 and by the Sibilla off Puglia in 1997.

Figures on rescue at sea confirm the effort of the Italian coastguard. The 44% of 560 rescue operations at sea carried out during the first six months of 2007 by the Italian coastguard were done in Maltese Sar (search and rescue) waters, “many of whom were born in Libyan Sar waters”, says a note sent to the Foreign Ministry by the Coastguard in the month of October 2007. Maltese authorities do not cooperate. And the Libyans are worthless, as recently, according to indiscretions not yet confirmed, their coastguard would have fired on a migrants boat killing some passengers. Malta has a Sar area as large as Britain, too vast to be patrolled with its own means. Yet Malta will not reduce of one meter its Sar waters, because that area corresponds to a Fir (flight information service) area that fruits to the small State a right of passage for every plane flying over the area. In the meanwhile the start of Frontex joint patrol Nautilus III was again postponed. Malta, Italy, France and Germany are at loggerheads over who should be responsible for migrants saved in Libya's search and rescue area during the mission.

Gabriele del Grande
Roma - Italia
Blog: Fortress Europe

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