Human Cargo (8 page)

Today there is no alternative but to enter the European Union illegally, a fact that has played into the hands of smugglers, whose business is flourishing as never before, with strong links to the criminal underworld of drug smuggling and the trafficking of women
and children for prostitution. Eight hundred thousand people are said today to be transported each year across international borders, at a turnover of some $10 billion. In 2000, two UN protocols to the Convention on Transnational Crime were drafted, declaring that those “trafficked” for clearly sexual purposes were to be considered victims and entitled to assistance, while those who paid to be “smuggled” were deemed only to require “humane treatment.” To this day, there is virtually nothing to protect asylum seekers who use smugglers, though in practice they are often drawn into a web of exploitative relationships in order to pay off their debts.

Not surprisingly, then, untruths surround refugees. As hostility has increased toward those who arrive without documents, so anti-immigration campaigners have manipulated statistics to paint a picture of the West under siege by greedy migrants, and so the asylum seekers themselves have resorted to embellishing their pasts, the better to merit acceptance. It is not easy, for people who have fled violence, or persecution, or even just poverty, to handle truth, so anxious are they to convince their listeners, and so aware that what they say may be misunderstood or manipulated. A story is often told about the Vietnamese boat people who arrived in their thousands in Hong Kong and Bangkok in the late 1980s. UNHCR staff were sent out to interview them, in order to decide whether their fear of persecution at home was such that they were entitled to refugee status and resettlement in the West. The screening of the boat people became the largest and most expensive of UNHCR’s operations at the time.

Among the boat people were many unaccompanied children, some as young as six or seven. UNHCR staff quickly realized that the story these children told was always the same. Their parents were dead. Word, it seemed, had reached Vietnam that orphans would be quickly resettled and could become an anchor for their siblings and eventually for their parents, who would in fact turn out not to be dead at all and who would rejoin them in the West. In practice, only a quarter of these children were accepted; the rest were sent home. UNHCR staff working in the camps at the time remember how hard they tried to get close to the children, to explain
to them that their parents had sent them off on the boats not because they did not love them, but because they were to be the family’s passports to a future.

Women of a certain age arrived in the company of the small children, claiming to be their grandmothers. They had been told, it seemed, that their chances of resettlement were far better if they had small children in their care. When it became clear that it made no difference to their chances, they reappeared at the registration offices to say that the children were not theirs after all, and that they would prefer not to be burdened by having to look after them.

•   •   •

IN GENEVA, IN
London and Washington, in circles where refugee policy is made and discussed, the mood is one of despondency and confusion, fed by the anti-immigration lobby, which in turn feeds growing xenophobia. The gap between reality and Western rhetoric has never been wider; the need for coherent EU and global asylum policies, for burden sharing, for generous yet realistic measures has never been greater. Fewer than half of all people applying for asylum get it, leading governments to conclude that the majority are economic migrants, not in need of protection, who are abusing the process. No European country has proved able to establish fair, fast, and efficient systems to determine refugee status, and their inability to send failed asylum seekers home has undermined their credibility. Deportation is expensive and almost impossible to enforce, particularly now that decisions can take several years to reach, by which time the asylum seeker has laid down roots. Overstayers, those who fail to leave when their visas or papers run out, are simply tolerated, making it possible for the public to argue that governments are incompetent. The situation also encourages asylum seekers to regard their journeys as worthwhile, given that deportation may never happen. In any case, airlines are reluctant to accept deportees, who may refuse to board unless handcuffed, and ordinary travelers object strongly to becoming witnesses to forcible deportations.

Some $10 billion is being spent annually by governments to deal with a relatively small number of asylum seekers
*
—807,000 people applied for asylum in 141 countries in 2003—while humanitarian organizations find it impossible to raise a fraction of that money for the considerably larger number who remain in camps in the developing world. This $10 billion is about twelve times what UNHCR receives to look after more than 17 million refugees, displaced people, and others “of concern” to them around the world. Whether in Europe or North America, large sums go each year to patrolling borders: Canada takes in 13,000 refugees each year, but spends $300 million controlling its borders—ten times what it contributes to UNHCR. Today it is the world’s poorest countries, in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, that bear the burden for receiving the displaced: 90 percent of refugees in fact stay in their own regions. In 2000, when the countries of western Europe were complaining most loudly about the sacrifices they were making and the money they were spending on asylum seekers, the top receiving countries for refugees were in fact Iran, Pakistan, and Tanzania. In 2003, the Ivory Coast, Guinea, Liberia, Tanzania, Yemen, Burundi, and Sierra Leone all reported the arrival of substantial numbers of refugees.

Confronted by the global spirit of intolerance and unease, mindful of the ways in which Western states have taken to manipulating the definition of a refugee to suit themselves, Lubbers has launched a series of new initiatives intended to make governments reaffirm their commitment to UNHCR’s original mandate and to pay a fairer share of the costs for helping the world’s refugees. In the wake of criticisms about UNHCR’s failure to assess and analyze its own performance, its embroilment in scandals involving the sexual exploitation of people in camps, and its apparent reluctance to contemplate
institutional change, there has been much talk about improving and strengthening the implementation of the Convention, through monitoring bodies or special rapporteurs.

As of 2004, only about 145 countries of the world’s 190 have signed the 1951 Convention, and even those violate its articles every day.

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N
ene and Vera Sciortino were watching television when the storm broke. It started abruptly, a sudden torrential downpour, and by midnight a great gale had risen and hail began to fall—solid balls the size of potatoes, as Nene would later tell visitors when he showed them the holes in the table on his terrace. The noise these hailstones made on the plastic terrace roof was so loud that the Sciortinos were obliged to raise the volume on their television, so it was some time before they heard the cries coming from the beach. At first, Nene thought these shouts were all part of the game show that he and Vera usually watched on a Saturday night. Nene is an actor, a singer of Sicilian folk songs, a ruddy-faced friendly man in his mid-thirties; when he is not traveling around Sicily talking to conferences and seminars about the need to preserve the Sicilian language and popular
culture, he and Vera put on theatrical sketches for schoolchildren in the Greek temples at Agrigento and Selinunte.

As the cries and shouts continued, Nene got up and went to the window that looks out of their sitting room directly onto the long sandy beach at Realmonte, not far from Agrigento, on Sicily’s southern coast. Peering out into the utter darkness, he could make out only the white crests of the waves breaking over the sand. But then he saw some people running along the water’s edge. How absurd, he said to Vera, to go swimming on a night like this. The hail was still crashing down, and there was also lightning and thunder. But then more people came running; now Nene saw that they were gathering in a circle just in front of La Playa, a new bar on Capo Rossello, where on summer evenings foreign tourists come to dance to a small band. This being a Saturday in the middle of September, the dance floor was crowded, and when he and Vera put on their rubber boots and found an umbrella and trudged through the wet sand, they discovered the dancers standing at the water’s edge, in the pouring rain, pulling from the sea a number of gasping, sodden, half-naked young Africans, their clothes hanging in rags about them, their teeth chattering from the cold. As it happened, one of the members of the band spoke some English, and when the strangers had stopped panting and shaking and were able to speak, they explained in that language that they were asylum seekers and that their boat had struck the rock that juts out above the reef just offshore, not a hundred meters from La Playa. There were, said the young Africans, gesticulating frantically toward the sea, still many others on board, and the boat was sinking. They had reached the shore because they were swimmers. They didn’t think anyone else on board could swim. Some said they had sisters and brothers on the boat; one said that his wife was there.

The onlookers peering into the darkness could see nothing, though by now the hail was no longer crashing down, as Nene explains when he talks about the long night of the
naufragio
, the shipwreck. On that night, Saturday, September 14, 2002, a boat carrying 150 Liberian asylum seekers,
extracomunitari
, went down off Realmonte’s
popular beach. As Nene says, the night’s weather was catastrophic, a freak storm the likes of which he had not experienced in all his twelve years in his beach house, and the unfortunate Liberians were
disgraziati
, uniquely afflicted, to have chanced to try to come ashore that very night.

When the dancers at last understood what had happened, when the terrified Liberians had told them, again and again, the story of what had befallen them and it had been translated into Italian, the police were called. Soon the beach was covered in police cars, and carabinieri and marines arrived from the Guardia Costiera stationed not far away at Porto Empedocle. The fishing boats pulled up on Realmonte’s beach were too small to make any headway against the surf, and when a lot of calls had been made over the walkie-talkies and the mobile phones, it was found that there wasn’t a working rubber dinghy with a big enough outboard along the whole of the Sicilian coastline. By now, it was nearly three o’clock in the morning. A powerful searchlight was at last produced by the police; when its beam was cast toward the rock, not only could the boat itself be seen, tipped far over on its side and half underneath the water, but, to the horror of the onlookers, people could be spotted clinging to the rock.

As Nene watched, first one, and then another, slipped beneath the waves. The thunder had stopped, and in the lulls between the crashing waves, he could hear cries coming from the reef. The Vice Questore from Agrigento appeared, took off his clothes, and swam out in his undershirt and pants to the wreck. When he returned to shore, he was able to tell the crowd that help was needed for at least a hundred people. Boats from the various naval services stationed at Porto Empedocle at last came in sight, and it was not long before other sodden, bedraggled, gasping Liberians were being helped into La Playa and given hot tea and blankets. Almost none of them would take off their sneakers, even though they were full of water, because it was there that they kept their money, saved up with such painful slowness for this one, illegal, dangerous journey to the shores of Europe. Their eyes, Nene remembers, were very red, bloodshot, almost like fire.

The only one to take off his shoes was a portly, fair-skinned man with a large inflatable life jacket, whose pockets rather than his shoes were found to be bulging with dollar bills. He was assumed to be the
scafisto
, the trafficker, and the police led him to one side, where he sat in silence, refusing to answer any questions. Eventually taken to prison and repeatedly questioned, he began to talk, but then abruptly fell silent again and has remained silent ever since, because, say the police, he had been got at by the Mafia, who are known to run the network
of scafisti
along the shores of Tunisia. Some say he was Egyptian, others Libyan. Early on, he told a policeman that he was Palestinian, from Gaza, but when they questioned him about Gaza, he was vague.

As for the
extracomunitari
, they were happy to talk, but only about the horrors of the shipwreck, the hours of pitching at sea, the fear, the lack of water and food, the nightmare moment when the boat hit the rock and began to sink; on the question of where they came from, and who owned the boat, and where they were going, they would say nothing at all. By six o’clock on Sunday morning, there was very little left for anyone to see. The boat had by now partly sunk to the bottom of the shallow bay. Realmonte returned to the closing days of its long hot summer.