Italy/Spain/Tunisia/Malta: Migrant deaths in the Mediterranean
01 August 2004
The flow of reports of migrants who die attempting to reach Europe's shores showed no signs of abating in the summer of 2004.
On Saturday 7 August, a merchant ship rescued an inflatable launch that was heading for Italy with 73 African migrants (reportedly from Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Ivory Coast) on board, exhausted and suffering from hypothermia. Two of the would-be migrants died during the rescue operation, and testimonies by survivors indicated that a total of 26 persons, whose bodies were thrown into the sea, had died during the nine-day journey from Libya.
On 13 August, six people survived, one person died and 32 disappeared when a dinghy carrying sub-Saharan migrants from the Western Saharan coast to the island of Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands capsized. The vessel had been approached by a
Guardia Civil patrol boat, eight kilometres from its destination. The boat had been detected by the SIVE hi-tech coastline surveillance system that is operating in the Canary Islands and part of the Andalusian coastline. Its headquarters is in Algeciras (Cadiz). This was the fourth incident of this type (when a vessel is intercepted by patrols and subsequently capsizes) in the Canary Islands since 2001. This latest incident caused the highest number of victims.
On 21 August, six sub-Saharan African migrants died in a shipwreck when their boat was only six metres from the Fuerteventura coast. On the same day, the dead body of a Maghreb-country national was found on a beach in Motril (Granada), a resort that has seen the arrival of many migrants since the SIVE surveillance system was established along the narrowest part of the Strait dividing southern Spain and Morocco. Kamal Rahmouni, the vice-president of the
Asociación de Trabajadores e Inmigrantes Marroquíes en España (ATIME, the Association of Moroccan Workers in Spain) has argued that the SIVE, which is due for a multi-million Euro extension, has caused an increase in migrant deaths because migrants now try to reach Spain using "longer routes", which means that "the possibility that they may not reach the coast alive increases". The body of a dead Moroccan was also found on the same day in Los Barrios, on the Cádiz coast.
Seven more migrants were reported to have disappeared in a shipwreck as they travelled from Morocco to Fuerteventura on 9 September. Twenty seven passengers from the same boat were rescued by the
Guardia Civil, after they had been alerted by a fishing boat; officers from the paramilitary police force claimed that there was little hope of the seven being found alive, as the shipwreck took place in high seas.
On 4 October, a wooden fishing boat carrying 75 would-be migrants (70 Moroccans and 5 Tunisians) sank after breaking in two because it was overloaded, soon after setting off from the Tunisian port of Sousse to Italy. The Tunisian authorities managed to rescue 11 survivors, but they also found 22 dead bodies and a further 42 people had disappeared in the shipwreck. It was thought unlikely that any of them would be found alive.
There were also reports from Tunisian fishermen of another shipwreck two weeks earlier, when 11 children attempted to travel from Capo Bon to the Italian island of Pantelleria on a small boat with an outboard engine. Only five of the children, the eldest of whom was 16, survived.
On 14 October, two migrants died 70 miles to the south of Malta, as the wooden boat in which they were travelling overturned while a coast guard patrol from Messina (Sicily) was reportedly rescuing its occupants.
ADNKRONOS, 14.10.04; El País, 16.7.04, 9-10.8.04, 14-15.8.04, 21-22.8.04, 9-10.9.04, 15.10.04: Il manifesto 5.10.04.