“I Have Never Dreamed About Europe In My Life. But I Could Not Stay In My Country.”
Episode 7: Refugees running from conflict and repression face violence, kidnappings, and ISIS militants. But their biggest hurdle might just be the troublesome politics of the West.
Baraket Akefe was one of the lucky ones. He crossed from Libya to Italy in October 2004, years before there was a specific Mediterranean search and rescue mission to help refugees fleeing persecution in Africa and the Middle East—and he still made it. Like the hundreds of thousands who came later, he was smuggled on a small wooden boat from Libya to Italy. There were around 50 other Eritreans on board.
They spent more than a day on the water, but eventually the boat arrived at its destination.
“Thankfully, we arrived safe and sound at Lampedusa directly,” he told me, sitting in the soaring, faded marble lobby of an abandoned building in the heart of Rome that is occupied by more than a thousand homeless Eritrean refugees. By making landfall on Italian soil, Baraket— 35 years old now, with a reserved and serious nature—completed a route that is now largely theoretical.
These days, nobody arrives directly. Everyone is rescued, he told me.
Except when they’re not. By June 2014, when the Ghost Boat and its 243 passengers disappeared, there was a large deployment of ships and resources in the Mediterranean specifically to perform search and rescue operations. That year, an average of more than 400 people a day — or around 160,000 refugees — were picked up from the sea by the Italian mission Mare Nostrum.
We still can’t be sure that the Ghost Boat actually left the coast of Libya. But, if it did, considering the attention being paid to search and rescue efforts at the time, is it even possible that its journey did not leave a trace?
When Abrham left Libya in April 2014, he—like Baraket—was packed into the bottom of a small wooden fishing boat. In the cramped space under the deck, there were 80 or 90 other people. “You can’t even breathe because everyone is sitting above your head, and it was very hot because of the engine,” he told me over the phone from the Netherlands, where he now lives.
In total, the boat had more than 250 people on board. All of them were Eritreans, except for a handful of Syrians and the captain, who was Tunisian.
Like Baraket and tens of thousands of other Eritreans who have fled the country in recent years, Abrham left to escape indefinite conscription in the national service, and to give himself a chance at building a life. He had already served for more than 10 years as a dentist in military hospitals, but when his request to be transferred to a civilian administration was denied and the security forces started to monitor him, he fled.
“I did my best to stay in my homeland and stay with my family… But I was afraid for my life, so I left my beloved family and my beloved country.”
He did not want to come to Europe, but undertook the perilous journey because he felt like he had no other choice.
“I have never dreamed about European countries in my life,” he told me. “But I could not stay in my country.”
Abrham escaped from Eritrea in June 2013 with his close childhood friend, Gebsha. They crossed the border to Ethiopia together, navigated their way through the refugee camps on the other side, and then travelled to Khartoum, Sudan.
On March 19, 2014, Abrham left Khartoum for Libya. “Unlucky Gebsha. He started the journey after me,” said Abrham.
Instead of crossing with Abrham, Gebsha was among the 243 passengers of the Ghost Boat who disappeared on June 28, 2014. Abrham’s cousin and another close friend are also among the missing.
If the Ghost Boat passengers’ journey had gone according to plan, it probably would have looked something like Abrham’s.
The boat he was on left the shore in Libya in the middle of April last year. It was around 2 a.m. After eight suffocating hours in the oppressive dark in the hull, Abrham managed to climb his way to the upper deck — crowded with more than 150 people.
Around 6 p.m. the weather conditions in the Mediterranean worsened. Things got difficult.
“There were very high waves. There was wind. The one who was driving the boat fell unconscious. We were in the open sea with no captain on the boat.”
Passengers began to panic. They were screaming, jostling on the deck. Others started fainting—just like the captain had—as the vessel pitched in the waves.
In a stroke of luck, one of the Syrian passengers was able to maintain his composure and took over steering. His actions calmed the panic. The boat travelled for another four hours, maybe five, with the Syrian man at the helm before being located by a search and rescue boat.
“It was a big ship under the flag of the Italians and the European Union,” Abrham said.
By the next morning when Abrham woke up, the Italian navy vessel had rescued more than 1,000 people from a number of other boats. It was operating as part of the Italian search and rescue mission Mare Nostrum.
If the Ghost Boat’s journey had been like these, like most of the others in the Mediterranean last year, the same thing would have likely happened to it. But instead, the passengers vanished.
During Mare Nostrum there were five Italian navy vessels and a number of additional coast guard ships patrolling a search and rescue zone of more than 500,000 square kilometers—an area larger than the entire state of California. A number of manned and unmanned aircraft conducted surveillance, in addition to a system of coastal radars and an identification system that tracked the movement of registered vessels. Italian search and rescue boats also regularly responded to distressed boats outside of the country’s legally defined search and rescue area.
Even though more than 3,000 people died while crossing the Mediterranean during the time it was operating, Mare Nostrum was largely considered a successful search and rescue mission. The number of deaths was more a reflection of the perils of the journey—the unseaworthy boats, the poor conditions, the lack of trained pilots—rather than the effectiveness of the response.
Before Mare Nostrum, it would have been easier for a sinking to take place without being detected. At that point, there were no vessels specifically placed in the Mediterranean to perform search and rescue operations. Rescues still took place, but the coverage was much less.
“All states and all boats have an obligation to help a boat in distress at sea. What was not in place [before Mare Nostrum] was a proactive patrolling in the sea,” Mateo de Bellis, an Amnesty International researcher specializing in search and rescue missions, told me.
So, in the two decades of irregular migration from Libya before Mare Nostrum, boats were often rescued by whatever ship was closest to them—fishing vessels, tankers—or, like Baraket’s boat, they made it to the shores of Italy without assistance.
Mulugheta Nayu, a lean-bodied 44-year-old Eritrean in Rome, was rescued by Italian fishermen in February 2003. He left the coast of Libya on a 30-foot trawler crowded with 80 people on board. And since it was winter time, the weather was cold.
“All the night we had been picking out water from the boat with small cups,” Mulugheta told me on a recent chilly night while sitting in the courtyard of a refugee shelter where he works as a volunteer.
He was at sea for three days before the fishing boat found them. “It was early morning, it was raining, and the waves were coming,” he said, with the residue of a British accent in his English from the missionary schools of his youth. “We were just lucky.”
Before Mare Nostrum, those who were not so fortunate had limited chances. Sometimes, when a shipwreck took place or a distress signal was sent out, nobody came to search for survivors or recover the bodies. As I learned earlier in the investigation from the fishermen in southern Tunisia, at times there were so many corpses floating in the water that parts of the sea were not fishable.
As the Arab Spring in Libya and elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa gave way to repression, instability, chaos, and protracted conflict, the rate of people crossing the Mediterranean began increasing. But it was only after 360 people died in the Lampedusa tragedy in October 2013—and another 34 in an incident a week later—that Mare Nostrum was launched.
But after just a year, the political will for the operation had faded. At €9 million per month, the Italian government said the program was too expensive to finance on its own, and other European governments did not want to help with the expense.
In fact, many others—particularly the UK under Prime Minister David Cameron—pressured Italy to bring the program to a close. They argued that a successful rescue operation was a pull factor, attracting ever-increasing numbers of refugees to cross Mediterranean and seek asylum in Europe.
By the end of 2014, Mare Nostrum was gone. Triton, the joint European mission that replaced it, was much more limited in scope. It was conceived as a border control operation, not as a search and rescue mission. The result was that its area of operation was limited to about 30 nautical miles from Italy and Malta instead of the entire central Mediterranean.
Most shipwrecks take place not far from the coast of Libya, which means it often took the Triton ships six or seven hours to respond to a distress call. “When people have to wait four, five, six hours swimming, my experience is that the vast majority of people don’t make it,” said Amnesty International’s Matteo de Bellis.
But despite the political theorizing, scaling back the Triton mission did not act as a deterrent. At first, the number of people crossing in 2015 was the same as 2014. Then, in the early spring, the numbers started increasing. The difference: Nobody was there to help.
“The number of casualties was enormously higher,” de Bellis told me.
In the first four months of 2015, the number of refugee deaths was more than 30 times higher than the same period in 2014. By the end of April, more than 1,500 people had drowned.
After two tragedies over the course of one week claimed more than a thousand lives, European countries were forced to recognize the scale of the crisis and shifted their policies. An emergency summit expanded Triton’s search and rescue area and committed more resources to the operation. European governments—this time including the UK—joined with NGOs, such as Doctors Without Borders, and independently sent rescue vessels to patrol the waters off the Libyan coast.
The result was a conglomeration sailing under different national flags or belonging to NGOs carrying out missions. This patchwork arrangement was initially decentralized, aside from their communication with the Italian Coast Guard’s dispatch center in Rome, the MRCC. Earlier this summer, however, the independent boats that arrived in the Mediterranean after April were incorporated into a new European mission called Operation Sophia, and Triton continued with an expanded budget and resources and a larger operational area.
Sophia’s mission is a civilian, not military one: to combat smuggling by seizing and sinking the boats used by smugglers. It is not strictly a life-saving operation, but it does perform search and rescue activities.
Despite its conception, it has been arguably as effective as Mare Nostrum — in combination with Triton — at rescuing refugees, according to de Bellis.
“With the data we have, we think that the coverage is similar to Mare Nostrum and is satisfactory for the time being,” he said. “But we will have to see at the beginning of next year… we will have to see if there are enough resources at sea.”
If the refugee crisis slides out of the public’s attention, it would be quite easy for the political will to sustain a search and rescue mission to evaporate—just like it did a year ago. But for now, a conglomeration of European nations and NGOs are maintaining a considerable search and rescue presence in the central Mediterranean.
As I was sitting in the courtyard of Baobab refugee center in Rome speaking with Mulugheta, the volunteer, a group of Eritrean teenagers arrived off the bus from Sicily. The stories of how they were rescued reflected the patchwork of states now involved in the effort.
The newcomers filed through the gate, dressed in long pants and hoodies pulled close around their heads to protect against the cold. Most of them were wearing plastic sandals, some had socks, and some were carrying small plastic bags containing their handful of possessions.
Like the 35,000 other refugees who have passed through the door of this center since it reopened in May of this year, the new arrivals would be staying for anywhere between a couple days and a couple weeks before continuing their journeys.
The other refugees in the yard who had come before them were sitting in small circles, smoking cigarettes and talking softly. They grew quiet as the newcomers entered. In the dull orange glow from a floodlight above the building, the groups examined each other’s faces for signs of recognition. Some rose to embrace acquaintances they had met and later been separated from somewhere along the way. Others merely watched.
Later, sitting in a circle, a dozen Eritreans started to share their stories. All but two had been kept in an underground prison in Libya for about five months before they made it to the coast. During that time, they had not seen the sun and had only been fed through a slot under the door of their cells. When they escaped with 250 others, two were shot.
The young men, who were between the ages of 17 and 27, told stories of friends who were kidnapped and held for ransom by traffickers, and others who were taken by militants who they said belonged to the Islamic State. “We knew because they had the black flag,” one of them told me.
All of them had been beaten and abused. They had young faces. Some were quick to smile and laugh. Others sank back in their chairs and seemed to be lost in dark memories, their eyes turned inward. All of their faces hardened, at least momentarily, as they shared their experiences.
There were stories of girls who were captured, raped, and forced to be the wives of militants. Some of them escaped. Some of them were still in Libya. “They hate us,” one said. “No girl has arrived here without being violated.”
Once they made it to the coast, some of them left on small, inflatable Zodiacs. Others were aboard the larger wooden fishing boats. All of them were crammed on board with the other human cargo until they were rescued by Norwegians, British, Italians, and others. None of them had their fingerprints taken and all of them were heading further north — to England, Sweden, Germany, Switzerland.
After all of the trauma of the journey, the search and rescue system had worked for these young men. Could it have failed for the passengers of the Ghost Boat and nobody know that the failure had even taken place?
When I first started looking into the disappearance, all the experts I spoke to gave me the same answer: for a boat this size, with this many people on board, it was unheard of. Their answers intensified the mystery.
When I asked the same question of Amnesty’s de Bellis, his reply was similar. But there was a slight twist. Yes, it is unheard of, he said. But does that mean it hasn’t happened?
“It seems pretty obvious that there must be at least one sinking that was unknown,” he said. Just look at the number of crossings taking place, compared to the resources deployed. “It’s very likely that it happened in the past, and it may repeat even with the current patrolling operation… particularly if the people on board do not have a satellite phone.”
The satellite phone.
Ibrahim, the smuggler that Berhane Isayas had spoken to and argued with, said that he had not given one to the passengers of the Ghost Boat—a clue that seemed to indicate two radically different possibilities.
Before, I had been told that smugglers always gave their boats a satellite phone. The absence of one seemed strange enough to suggest foul play. Were the passengers of the Ghost Boat sold into slavery or captured?
Now, though, de Bellis told me that in his interviews with rescued refugees he had heard other stories of boats being sent without satellite phones. Abrham also told me that their was no phone given to the boat he was traveling on.
Perhaps the passengers of the Ghost Boat had embarked on their journey. But when it came time to make the critical call to initiate the rescue, they didn’t have the necessary equipment to do so. This could be the precise reason why the boat vanished without a trace.
The explanation I heard sounded rational. Although far from conclusive evidence, it was a theory worth exploring.
Even if there wasn’t a satellite phone on board, were there other ways to locate the boat? Would its journey have registered on radar or satellite systems surveying the Mediterranean, for example? Would other ships in the region have caught anything on their systems?
It seemed like the MRCC in Rome, the dispatch center responsible for coordinating search and rescue operations, would be the right place to turn to find answers. But it was difficult to get a response from the Coast Guard. After a week of waiting, we were denied an in-person interview and instead received a generic email response that answered none of our specific questions.
After much wrangling over the telephone, I finally reached Colonel Filippo Marini, the coast guard’s communications chief. On the phone he was more detailed. Most rescues are initiated by satellite phone calls, he told me, but sometimes refugee boats are spotted by other vessels, helicopters, or other surveillance systems.
Without knowing whether the Ghost Boat left, or exactly where it left from, Marini said it would impossible to know where to look for trace evidence. But, he said, the possibility of a trace did exist.
“You need to localize and clarify what we are talking about,” Marini said. “If [it was] very close to Libya, probably it will be the equipment systems, if these are still available, of the Libyan authorities… that will be able to see these vessels.”
With the help of of readers, we have identified 40 boats off the coast of Libya at the same time that the Ghost Boat would have embarked on its journey. If these ships were using the right kind of radar equipment, there is a chance that their systems could have registered its movement as well.
Factors like weather conditions and the size of the boat have an impact on what radar is able to pick up, and it is still unclear how far Italian radar and satellite surveillance actually reached. Marini could not give exact details, but said he would pass our questions on to technical experts for a more exact answer.
The information Marini provided didn’t complete the picture, but at least it gave a sense of the places we could look. Maybe we would be able to find the path of the boat recorded somewhere, or perhaps we could at least determine where it wasn’t.
At the same time, I had also been working on arranging an interview with Measho, the smuggler who is now in prison in Catania, Sicily, awaiting trial.
We knew from court filings and previous statements that Measho was at the farm outside of Tripoli with the passengers of the Ghost Boat before they left, and that he was one of the last people to see them before they disappeared. Speaking with him could be a big step toward tracking down the information we need inside of Libya—but I wasn’t sure if he would be willing to meet. He’d had bad experiences with other journalists, and what incentive did he have to talk?
When I was in Sicily speaking with the prosecutor in the Tokhla case, I met with the judge presiding over the trial. Both were open to the idea of me speaking with Measho. But that didn’t mean a lot without his permission—or his lawyer’s.
After doing some digging, I found her cell number and got in touch. She was also agreeable, but ultimately the decision fell on Measho.
Earlier this week I received a reply: He had agreed to meet.
The only thing left to do was navigate Italian bureaucracy. Interviewing him in prison requires permission from five different authorities. Now we are waiting on final authorization.
If all goes well, we’ll soon speak with one of the last people to see and interact with the passengers of the Ghost Boat. What information he has—or might be willing to give us—could provide critical clues into the fate of the 243 missing people. All we need is an official yes.
This story was written by
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