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Voyages Of Death For Somali Immigrants,International moves to end flow of small boats trying to get to Europe.
Johannesburg, October 24, 2003 (Business Day): THE death of more than 70 African illegal immigrants off the coast of Italian island of Lampedusa this week has moved Italy to appeal for the application of more efficient and restrictive immigration policies in Europe.
According to French daily Le Monde, an Italian trawler discovered a small boat carrying 13 corpses piled up on one another, and 15 survivors.
The trawler captain Stefano Valfré said he and his men thought the small boat was empty but as they got nearer they were confronted by a "Dantesque and horrifying sight".
"The corpses of the immigrants were stacked up on one another and you could not distinguish between the dead and the survivors. The survivors were using the dead bodies to shelter from the cold and the strongest among them could just move their fingers," he said.
The first accounts given by the immigrants, most of them from Somalia and Chad, revealed that they had left Libya on October 3, hoping to reach the Italian coast in two to three days. But bad weather and a breakdown of the 12m boat's engine decided otherwise.
As the boat drifted endlessly in the channel of Sicily and food stocks were dwindling, passengers started dying. Some of them, a survivor told Libération, decided to swim to shore but drowned.
"There were 85 of us when we left Libya," said another immigrant to Le Figaro. "A great number of us died and we threw their bodies overboard."
The tragedy has reopened the debate on the capacity of African countries to monitor efficiently the immigration flow to European countries.
Italian Minister of Home Affairs Giuseppe Pisanu, who was at that time attending the conference of the G5 Ministers of Home Affairs, took the opportunity to appeal for the ending of these "humans tragedies which weigh heavily on Europe's and Africa's conscience," reported Le Monde.
A few days earlier, seven illegal immigrants had drowned while trying to reach the coast of the island of Lampeduna.
The Sicilian island, which was stormed in June by 3500 illegal immigrants, seems to have become a new target of what immigrants smugglers ironically dub the "journeys of hope".
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