A Very Heavy Toll
Why are thousands of people still dying in the Mediterranean?
When the Ghost Boat disappeared in 2014, stories about masses of people dying at sea were still new. More than 200,000 crossed the Mediterranean Sea that year, stuffed into overcrowded, rickety old fishing boats and small inflatable dinghies—and at least 3,280 of them died. It was shocking.
Three years into the crisis, though, these stories have sadly become commonplace. The week in May in which over 1,000 people died might have been the worst in a year, but these tragedies have rapidly become just more grim moments in a steady stream of reports. Now the number of people who have drowned in the Mediterranean since 2014 is rapidly approaching 10,000, and there is no end in sight.
The Ghost Boat, which was known about by a handful of people but untracked by anybody, has become just one incident in a much larger procession of suffering that trudges on and on and on and on. And the gutpunch that used to be delivered by each new headline has faded into a consistent background murmur. As numbness sets in, you have to ask: Why is this still happening?
Last year, the European Union decided not to run a robust search and rescue mission in the Mediterranean. Saving people’s lives, many lawmakers argued, created an unintentional pull factor that encouraged migrants to attempt the dangerous sea crossing from Libya to Italy.
But a series of wrecks last April—1,200 people died when two ships went down—showed that this didn’t stand up to scrutiny. Desperate people were willing to risk their lives, regardless of European policy. Now ships from an EU-funded mission, the Italian Navy and Coast Guard and NGOs are all patrolling the central Mediterranean. And, after the deployment expanded early last summer, the death rate dropped.
So what accounts for the spike again this summer? Is something wrong? Could it be improved?
The frustrating answer, according to AmnestyInternational researcher and search and rescue specialist Matteo de Bellis, is… not really.
Little has changed in terms of the search and rescue assets deployed in the Mediterranean in the past six months. “This makes it difficult to understand why so many deaths have been reported in recent weeks,” said De Bellis—who I had previously spoken to in Episode 7.
Summer time is usually a busy time for migration, with calmer seas and warmer weather making basic conditions a little less dangerous. Moving ships and staff closer to the danger zone, improving coordination between the various missions, and deploying more vessels on good weather days (when traffic is heavier) could potentially prevent some deaths, he said. But even with improvements, however, people will keep dying.
The Italian Coast Guard often fields 10 to 12 emergency calls per day. When the weather improves and the number of boats crossing the Mediterranean surges, that number can leap to over 20.
The question, according to De Bellis, is how they can effectively respond when there are that many incidents in a single day.
During the week of the recent tragedies, there were almost 8,000 arrivals in Italy — a high, but unsurprising number considering the good weather conditions. “Every year we see departures picking up starting from April and then reaching a peak in May, June, July, August, and September. We should expect arrival crossings in the region of 20,000 to 25,000 per month every month during the summer,” De Bellis told me.
More efficient search and rescue efforts make a difference, but he suggests that—ultimately—they are not the answer.
“As long as we see tens of thousands of people crossing irregularly… we [will] continue to see incidents and a very heavy death toll,” De Bellis said. “We need to reduce the number of people that feel they have no other option than traveling that way. This can be done by European governments through the offer of safe and legal routes to people seeking to get to Europe.”
But there has been little progress on a political solution. It’s been almost two years now since the Ghost Boat disappeared, and with no new policies forthcoming history appears doomed to repeat itself. The difference, perhaps, is that we have become desensitized to the human cost: the situation has become the new normal.
Onward.
