Back to the sea

Libyan and Egyptian smuggling networks are back to work thanks to the strong demand for mobility by Syrian refugees heading to Europe after escaping the war.

The numbers tell the story. Since the beginning of the year until September 30, 30,100 people arrived in Italy via the Mediterranean, of whom 3,000 are Somalis, 7,500 Eritreans (nothing new so far) — and, above all, 7,500 Syrians, according to the UN. We can see that the Syrian disaster is the main flywheel for new smuggling routes toward Europe.

So far the Syrian war has left with 4 million internally displaced persons and 2 million refugees, the UN says. The refugees all live in camps fitted out in Syria’s neighboring countries: Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, Jordan and Egypt.

But the war has been on going for three years now and some of those fleeing it have decided to try and reach Europe to ask for political asylum. So far, it is only a small portion: 7,500 out of 6 million, or about 0.1 percent. For them, as for Eritreans and Somalis, the sea is the only way out of war: in European embassies their passports are wastepaper. Their only option is to put themselves in hands of the smuggling networks that can transport thousands of people to Europe’s coasts without passports. These networks are in the Libyan cities of Zuwara, Tripoli and Misrata, and Egypt’s Alexandria.

Only a year ago, these routes and networks seemed to have stopped working. Indeed, by 2012 the landings in Italy’s Lampedusa had almost completely ceased. After a record year in 2011 when 63,000 people arrived via the sea without passports — the same year as Libya’s civil war and the Tunisian revolution — the halt in arrivals to Lampedusa occurred partly because of the Euro crisis and partly due to the weakening of the Libyan and Tunisian smuggling networks.

Until then, two main routes insisted on Lampedusa: one Libyan and one Tunisian. The Libyan route had stopped working in summer 2011 with the fall of Muaamar Qadhafi’s regime and the consequent disappearance of Libya’s smuggling lords, who were well connected with the regime. The Tunisian route also faded in the fall of that year for three reasons: few Tunisian youth were willing to take to the sea because more than 25,000 had already set sail for Lampedusa in the first half of 2011, the brutal mass deportations from Italy that many had experienced were particularly harsh, and because — most importantly — a free circulation agreement signed between Libya and Tunisia that year had transformed Libya into the number one destination for Tunisian migration.

Thus only about 13,000 landings took place in Italy in 2012, and the majority of them on the Calabrian and Puglian coasts, through the Greek-Turkish route. Lampedusa was just a memory, and the island’s detention center was even shut down for a while.

It is important to note that this was not the first time that the Libyan route to Lampedusa had closed its doors. It also happened in 2009, a year that became infamous for mass deportations.

Between 2003 and 2008, around 120,000 people had landed in Italy from Libya. The average was 20,000 per year, but 2008 saw 36,000 arrivals. The business of sea crossings was in Libyan hands and had an estimated economic value of a few million euros per year. It wasn’t just corrupt police officials turning a blind eye to the system but the whole regime including Qadhafi himself, so that he could use the landings as leverage on the negotiations table with Italy and the EU.

Indeed, to convince him to put an end to the landings, they gave Qadhafi everything he demanded: the rehabilitation of his political image internationally, foreign investments, and even US$5 billion in compensation for war crimes committed by Italian troops during the colonial period. When the Italy-Libya friendship treaty was ratified in 2009, the colonel agreed to finally close the frontier.

The closure operation took only a few weeks. Italy began pushing shipwrecked migrants intercepted at sea back to Libya, a practice then condemned by the European Court of Human Rights in February 2012. Meanwhile, Libya beheaded the smuggling system with a series of targeted arrests of smugglers. As a result, between 2009 and 2010 landings from Libya completely stopped except for some small groups of migrants transported by local-level smugglers.

While groups and networks have now re-organized, largely in response to Syrian war refugees’ demand for mobility, a look at the latest figures shows that the situation is completely different from that of past years. In the last couple of years, landings have decreased sharply in both Spain and Greece, the Mediterranean’s two alternative frontiers. While arrivals diminish, departures increase disproportionately. 215,000 Latin Americans left Spain in 2011. 200,000 Albanians who used to work in Greece are now back in Tirana. Figures on Italy are not yet precise, but the trend is the same. According to ISTAT (the Italian national statistic agency) last year between 50,000 and 800,000 migrants left the country, fleeing the economic crisis to search for jobs elsewhere.

These are the astonishing figures, rather than the “new” Syrian and Libyan routes. This is the new route: of return, or of the escape from Europe in crisis.

But Europe, again, is incapable of grasping the opportunities of history on time. The decrease of migratory pressure on its frontiers is a one-off chance to experiment with a progressive simplification of visa and Schengen procedures and regulations, to let those few thousand young people who every year risk their lives in sea crossings travel comfortably by plane, with regular passports.

After all, Europe has already taken brave choices with Eastern countries, liberalizing Albanian visas and annexing countries such as Poland, Slovenia, Romania and Bulgaria, the countries of origin of half of Italy’s migrants, where people have in effect partial freedom of movement.

Only with such brave choices can Europe relieve its conscience of the heavy burden of political responsibility for at least 19,142 dead at its ports (Fortress Europe). Whether or not to welcome migrants is not today’s problem. The problem is the right to travel.

An original version of this article appeared in Italian in ReddattoreSociale. 

Translated by Laura Cugusi.