The Italian Navy rescued 1,004 refugees and migrants on 14 August 2014. Some arrived barefoot, some children were shaking with cold. Men, women and children from Syria, Somalia, Gambia, Bangladesh and other countries were rescued. Credit: Amnesty International

By Matt Carr
MATLOCK, United Kingdom, Oct 10 2014 (IPS)

Since the end of the Cold War, the Mediterranean has become the most lethal of Europe’s barriers against irregular migration, having claimed nearly 20,000 migrant lives in the last two decades.  

And the first nine months of 2014 indicate that the phenomenon is on the rise, with more migrant deaths than in any previous year.

Last month, a report from the International Organization for Migration (IOM) reported that 3,072 migrants have drowned in the Mediterranean this year out of a worldwide total of 4,077 deaths worldwide.  These figures are almost certainly underestimates, because many migrant deaths in the Mediterranean are not reported.

In the same month, a report from Amnesty International on migrant deaths in the Mediterranean estimated that 2, 200 migrants died between the beginning of June and mid-September alone.“It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Mediterranean has become an instrument in a policy of deterrence, in which migrant deaths are tacitly accepted as a form of ‘collateral damage’ in a militarised response to 21st century migration whose overriding objective is to stop people coming”

The worst incident in this period took place on Sep 11. when 500 men, women and children, many of them refugees from Syria and Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, drowned after their boat was deliberately rammed by their traffickers in Maltese territorial waters.

This horrendous crime took place less than one year after the horrific events of Oct. 3 last year, when at least 360 migrants drowned when their boat sank near the Italian island of Lampedusa.

At the time, the drownings at Lampedusa prompted an unprecedented outpouring of international anger and sympathy.

Pope Francis, European politicians such as Cecilia Malmstrom (European Commissioner for Home Affairs) and Juan Manuel Barroso (President of the European Commission), and  U.N. Secretary-General  Ban Ki-Moon all joined in the chorus of condemnation and called on Europe and the international community to take action to prevent such tragedies in the future.

Twelve months later, these worthy declarations have yet to be realised.

Following the Lampedusa tragedy, Italy undertook the largest combined naval/coastguard search and rescue operation in its history – known as ‘Operation Mare Nostrum’ – to coincide with Italian occupancy of the Presidency of the Council of the European Union.    At a cost of nine million euros per month, the operation has rescued 100,000 people.

Yet despite these efforts, the death toll is already four times higher than it was in the whole of last year.  This increase is partly due to the rise in the numbers of people crossing, primarily as a result of the Syrian civil war and the collapse of the Libyan state. This year, more than 130,000 migrants have crossed the Mediterranean, compared with 60,000 the previous year.

A group of Somali women, among those rescued by the Italian Navy vessel Virginio Fasan, between 13 and 14 August 2014. Credit: Amnesty International

These numbers have tested the resources of Malta and Italy.  Some drownings have occurred as a result of a lack of clarity and coordination between the two countries over their mutual search and rescue areas.  In addition, Malta has sometimes been reluctant to rescue migrant boats in distress – a reluctance that some observers attribute to an unwillingness on the part of the authorities to accept them as refugees.

But the European Union has also been conspicuously absent from the unfolding tragedy on its southern maritime borders.

Despite numerous calls from the Italian government for assistance, it was not until August this year that the European Union mandated ‘Frontex’ – the European border agency – to undertake ‘Operation Triton’ in the Mediterranean to complement Italy’s search and rescue operations.

But Frontex is primarily concerned with immigration enforcement rather than search and rescue, and the joint operations that it coordinates are entirely dependent on resources provided by E.U. member states.

Glaring lack of response

It is at this level that the lack of response is most glaring.  There are many things that European governments could do to implement to reduce migrant deaths.

They could use their navies to establish the ‘humanitarian corridors’ between North Africa and Europe, as the U.N. refugee agency UNCHR once suggested during the Libyan Civil War.  They could facilitate legal entry, so that men, women and children fleeing war and political oppression can reach Europe safely without having to place their lives in the hands of smugglers. 

The European Union could also abolish or reform the Dublin Regulation that obliges asylum seekers to make their applications in one country only.  This law has placed too much responsibility on European ‘border countries’ like Malta, Italy, Spain and Greece, all of which have experienced surges in irregular migration over the last twenty years.

More generally, Europe could establish an international dialogue with migrant-producing countries to make labour migration safe and mutually beneficial. However, many governments clearly regard ‘Mare Nostrum’ as an essential moat between ‘Fortress Europe’ and its unwanted migrants.

Most migrants who cross the Mediterranean are refugees from nationalities that UNHCR considers to be in need of some form of protection under the terms of the Geneva Convention.   But in order to obtain this, they have to reach Europe first and undergo all the risks that these journeys entail.

All this has transformed the Mediterranean into what Amnesty calls a “survival test” for refugees and migrants. Few politicians will openly admit this because such an admission would directly contradict the values that the European Union has set out to uphold since the European project first took shape after World War II.

Most governments prefer instead to condemn the smugglers and organised criminals who profit from such journeys, and wring their hands whenever a particularly terrible tragedy takes place. Men who sink migrant boats or send them to sea without lifebelts certainly deserve to be condemned.

But, as Amnesty International points out, Europe’s ”woeful response” has also contributed to the death toll.  And it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Mediterranean has become an instrument in a policy of deterrence, in which migrant deaths are tacitly accepted as a form of ‘collateral damage’ in a militarised response to 21^st century migration whose overriding objective is to stop people coming.

Until these priorities change, migrants will continue to die, and 2014’s grim record may well be superseded.  Italy has already threatened to stop its search and rescue operations when its presidency of the European Union comes to an end later this year.

Amnesty International has urged European governments to fulfil their humanitarian obligations to save lives in the Mediterranean and warned that “the EU as a whole cannot be indifferent to this suffering.”

So far, there is little sign that anybody is listening.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

The author posts blogs on this and other issues at infernalmachine.co.uk/

By Matt Carr and - -
CALAIS, France, Mar 25 2012 (IPS)

It’s 10 am on Saturday morning and a group of migrants is clustered round the entrance to the Migrant Clothes Association in the Calais city centre, eating breakfast provided by the association. Inside, the warehouse is stacked with blankets, tents, trainers and clothes. Some of these will be distributed later by the association’s workers.

Volunteers at a food distribution centre in Calais. Credit: Lara Stanley/IPS.

Pascal Froehly, a volunteer, is a former English teacher. “I’m going to be honest with you, I wouldn’t have lifted a finger for them if I didn’t live here,” he says. “But I cannot ignore it, because it’s not humanly possible.”

The volunteers are part of a broad constellation of NGOs and charities that have sprung up over the last decade in response to the transformation of Calais into a migrant bottleneck.

The groups include established organisations such as the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), Medecins du Monde and Seccours Catolique – the local branch of the Catholic charity Caritas. Several local organisations are also active, such as the C’Sur collective, La Belle Etoile, l’Auberge des Migrants, and Association Salam, a charity that provides hot meals every evening to migrants in Calais and at other camps near Dunkerque.

Salam was formed by a small group of local residents in 2002, following the closure of the Red Cross reception centre at Sangatte. Now it has more than 300 members.

“When we first started we thought this would be just for a few weeks,” says its formidable founder Sylvie Copyans, while ladling out food at the distribution centre. “We didn’t think we would still be here ten years later.”

L’Auberge des Migrants was formed in 2009 by Christian Salomé, a former worker on the Eurotunnel and his wife Marie. During his 14 years on the tunnel, Salomé witnessed numerous incidents in which migrants were seriously injured or killed trying to jump onto trains or cross the tunnel on foot. He vowed to do something to help them following his retirement.

Each weekend he and a rotating team of French and foreign volunteers, some of whom are asylum seekers and refugees themselves, prepare the lunchtime meals at a former farmhouse about 30 minutes from Calais. Before setting out, the team always sits down for a ritual meal with whoever happens to be around. These gatherings are a microcosm of the multi-ethnic and multicultural society that Front National leader Marine Le Pen – and President Nicolas Sarkozy – have depicted as a threat to French national identity.

Organising these weekly meals and ensuring a constant supply of food from local factories and donors is a major feat of organisation and planning, all of which depends entirely on the goodwill of Christian and his team.

The local authorities allow them to perform these humanitarian tasks and discreetly facilitate their activities. But the focus of these organisations is somewhat at odds with the campaign of repression and police harassment of migrants that has been going on for the last two years.

Salomé is emphatically opposed to what he regards as the futile attempts by his own government and others to stop migrants from coming, and believes that they should be able to come to Europe freely to make their own choices and see the situation for themselves.

Solidarity with the city’s migrants is not limited to organisations. Some local residents have also become involved on an individual basis with the transient foreign population that has passed through the city. Some have put up migrants in their own homes – despite the fact that such activities are punishable by five years imprisonment or a 30,000 euro fine under Article L622-1 of the French Foreigners Law.

In Philippe Lioret’s powerful film Welcome, a Calais swimming instructor falls foul of the law after giving free instruction and a temporary home to a Kurdish asylum seeker who tries to swim the Channel. This scenario did not spring entirely from the director’s imagination. In 2003, two members of the C’Sur collective were fined more than 8,000 euros for taking migrants into their homes and helping them receive money transfers.

While researching his film, Lioret interviewed Philippe Longue, a local architect, who has put up some 300 migrants over the years in his Calais flat and his house just outside the city.

Longue first came into contact with the city’s migrants in 2007 when he met a Turkish woman in the street who was trying to rejoin her family in the UK. Since then he figures he has provided a temporary home to up to 10 migrants at a time, some of whom were convalescing after injuries suffered in attempted crossings.

Longue was arrested for these activities, and though he was not charged, police pressure pushed him to stop – which may have been the whole point of it.

Pierre Falk, a librarian from Boulogne, has also put up migrants in his small terraced house, and has carried bags across the Channel for migrants who have made the journey by truck.

Falk is cheerfully unrepentant about activities that have got him arrested on five occasions in different countries – though so far without being charged. A self-confessed depressive, he admits that helping migrants fulfils an emotional need and has become something of a compulsion.

“Always I’m searching for solutions for them,” he says. “When I see teapots in the garbage I retrieve them for migrants. I can’t say no – it’s a problem.”

Whatever their motivations, all these men and women have encountered at first hand the migrants and refugees who have been blown to their city by the world’s political and economic storms. And at a time when Sarkozy is promising to reintroduce border controls in an attempt to win far right votes, their actions reflect another concept of France – and a different Europe to the ‘fortress’ model that is currently under construction.

Excerpt:

By Matt Carr and - -
CALAIS, France, Mar 22 2012 (IPS)

It’s more than two years since French police demolished the migrant squatter camp in Calais known as the Jungle in September 2009. At the time the widely-publicised demolition was hailed by the French and British authorities as a major blow to the smugglers or passeurs who facilitated illegal immigration across the Channel.

At a migrant squat in Calais. Credit: Lara Stanley/IPS.

The local gendarmerie, the French Border Police and a permanent deployment of riot police have all contributed to this effort, through weekly and sometimes daily police raids on migrant squats, arbitrary arrests, evictions, and house demolitions.

In the last few weeks there has been a noticeable escalation in the frequency and intensity of these activities. Last Thursday police evicted 35 migrants from the dilapidated prefab buildings in the avenue Blériot known as Africa House, under the supervision of the sub-prefect of the Calais region Alain Gérard.

The following night police raided the food distribution centre where some of the evicted migrants had camped, destroying their tents and confiscating their belongings.

Since then there have been two more evictions from various squats and camps around the city. The authorities have also increased their checks and controls along the truck depots beyond the city near Dunkerque, where a shifting population of some 400-odd migrants en route to the UK have attempted to stay in order to escape the police harassment in the city.

Some local NGOs attribute this escalation to the French presidential campaign and the crackdown on legal and immigration by beleaguered President Nicolas Sarkozy; others talk of renewed pressure from the UK government to make Calais ‘migrant-free’ in preparation for the London Olympic Games.

Whatever the reason, these evictions have added a new ingredient of paranoia and anger to the harsh underground world that Calais’s migrants are forced to inhabit. When we tried to visit the roofless and gutted former lace-making factory in the Rue de Quatre Coins, we were chased away by a hyper-aggressive group of migrants who believed that we were in league with the police.

Despite the police pressure, migrants continue to converge on the designated food distribution centre near the Calais docks, where NGOs provide two or three meals a day throughout the year. The migrants include Iranians, Iraqis, Afghans, Sudanese and Palestinians. One Iranian arrived three days ago, after running into trouble with the authorities because of his religious views. Others have been here for months.

An Afghan named Hassan in his early thirties tells us how he had lived for 12 years in the UK and had two children and his own fast food business in Bradford, before serving six years for assault. On serving his sentence he was deported back to Kabul. Now after three months in Calais, he has agreed to accept a voluntary repatriation package to Kabul, even though it means that he might never see his children again.

His reasons are simple: “I can’t stand this any more. Europe is the worst place I’ve ever been to.”

Abed is another Afghan who has come to Calais hoping to reach the UK, with his 14-year-old daughter Fawzia. He has applied for asylum in France, leaving his wife and two other children in Greece. Until his appeal is successful they cannot join him in France and he cannot go there to see them.

The asylum appeal process in France is slow and there is no guarantee of success. Since 2009, 116 asylum seekers have been recognised as refugees and 12 have been granted temporary protection out of the 285 applicants that the local UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) office has dealt with.

Many migrants passing through the city are looking for work, not asylum, and their presence fluctuates according to shifting economic circumstances.

The city’s migrant population now includes a number of Albanians who have come from Greece. Among them is Roland, a tall, long-haired young man in his mid-twenties who lost his job as a result of the Greek economic crisis. He was headed for work in the UK.

“Greece is finished,” he says, “there’s no work for anyone now. The Greeks can’t even feed their own families.”

Whether looking for work, or refuge from war or persecution, these migrants constitute a surplus population that neither the UK nor the French government wants – but which they cannot get rid of.

Together with the tough policies, the Calais authorities have established the food distribution centre and even pay the rent for one of the NGOs that provides their daily meals. The authorities also provide migrants a winter shelter, a medical clinic and showers.

But none of this is publicly acknowledged, and the presence of a police car outside the food distribution centre is a reminder of the policy of toughness and deterrence that both the local authorities and the national government prefer to present to the public.

The sub-prefect of Calais recently boasted of his intention to drive the city’s migrants into Belgium, in a less than whole-hearted commitment to the principle of pan-European solidarity. And while some migrants have been dispersed, others continue to arrive, looking for costly passage across the Channel from the local passeurs, while they seek to evade the police.

Few people expect them to stop coming to a city that has become a symbol of Europe’s ruthless and dysfunctional response to 21st century migration. And with a president determined to mobilise anti- immigrant sentiment to stay in power, and the Pas-de-Calais region offering training facilities to Olympic athletes for the London games, the city’s migrants are clearly even more unwanted and superfluous than usual, and repression is the order of the day.

Excerpt: