The Italian island of Lampedusa, situated between Malta and the
Maghreban shore, resembles a seagirt stone finger pointing west
towards the Gulf of Hammamet. Lampedusa’s harbor was long a
welcome sight for Punic, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Norman,
Habsburg, and Italian sailors, but in recent years it has
attracted another kind of wayfarer: the so-called
clandestini, those illegal immigrants and asylum-seekers
from Africa who, upon their inevitable detention in the island’s
Center for Identification and Expulsion, become popularly known
as poveri disgraziati, “poor wretches.”
With only 75 nautical miles separating the island from the
Tunisian port of Mahdia, and with only 300 nautical miles
separating it from Tripoli, Lampedusa was destined to become a
magnet for boat people. Estimates of the yearly influx of
clandestini vary, but in 2003 some 3,000 were said to
have made it to Lampedusa’s shore, and the following year the
number may have been three times as many. The island’s immigrant
reception center, a yellow warehouse designed to accommodate a
hundred or so souls, quickly proved woefully inadequate.
Pressing logistical issues necessarily gave way to even
weightier political ones. In 2003, Lampedusa’s mayor, Bruno
Siragusa, lashed out at Libya’s Brotherly Leader and
Guide of the Revolution, Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi,
for having “deliberately opened his borders with African
neighbors so that immigrants from other African countries where
we do have some control, are rushing instead to Libya to travel
to us.” Politicians at the national level, including on-again,
off-again Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, followed suit.
Meanwhile, an immigrant making the irregular crossing from Libya
to Lampedusa, and thereupon to the Italian mainland, would soon
discover that his or her new host nation lacks a true law of
asylum, prompting many to take advantage of the European Union’s
Schengen Agreement guarantee of freedom of movement to disappear
elsewhere in the continent, the better to avoid future
repatriation. Thus did the barren, calcareous island
of Lampedusa, with its fledgling population of
6,000, earn its nickname: La Porta
d’Europa, “the gateway of Europe.”
The Italian government’s solution to the escalating
humanitarian crisis — a series of expulsions to Libya taking
place between October of 2004 and March of 2005 — was destined
to come in for considerable criticism. Human rights groups cited
the potential for violations of the 1951 Geneva
Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which prohibits
the expulsion or return (refoulement) of bona fide
refugees, while the European Parliament issued an
April 14, 2005 resolution expressing concern over the
perceived illegality of “collective expulsion of aliens” under
the European Convention on Human Rights’ Fourth Protocol, while
noting the “deplorable living conditions of people
held in camps in Libya, as well as by the recent massive
repatriations of foreigners from Libya to their countries of
origin in conditions guaranteeing neither their dignity nor their
survival.” It was likewise observed that Tunisian law provides
for up to six months imprisonment for “leaving the territory
under irregular conditions.” The stakes for those who had
survived the perilous voyage to Lampedusa were therefore
exceedingly high, a matter not lost on outside observers.
Ignoring the aspersions cast at home and abroad, the
Berlusconi government nonetheless continued its efforts to combat
irregular Mediterranean crossings. Opting for a diplomatic
approach, the Italian government negotiated a 2008 Rome-Tripoli
pact ensuring that, in return for a five billion
euro Italian investment in Libya over 20 years (ostensibly
constituting reparations for the period of Italian colonial
rule), Gaddafi would agree to cooperate vis-à-vis stepped-up
naval patrols and immigrant “pushback.” Lampedusa would no longer
feature a “reception center,” but rather a Center
for Identification and Expulsion. The clandestine gateway to
Europe was being closed.
The outcry in the human rights community was predictably
clamant, with Bill Frelick of Human Rights Watch
calling the pact “a dirty deal to enable Italy to dump migrants
and asylum seekers on Libya and evade its obligations.” Criticism
mounted in the aftermath of a February 18, 2009
uprising in the Lampedusa detention facility, an event that
prompted the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network to send a
high-profile delegation to the island. Months later, accounts
trickled in of Eritrean refugees spending days and weeks in
rudderless boats, slowly starving and throwing corpses overboard,
while Italian ships passed by without deigning to offer
assistance, leading the Italian Bishops’ Conference to lament the
“new law of looking away.” The narrative of perceived Italian
callousness towards outsiders and minorities had already been
established by the worldwide attention paid to the
infamous Torregaveta incident in the
summer of 2008, when beachgoers carried on with their activities
notwithstanding the presence of the mortal remains of two
drowned, towel-draped Roma teenagers. Recent events surrounding
the treatment of Europe-bound refugees seemed to confirm that
Italians, and the Italian state, had indeed learned to look
away.
Activists and analysts within and outside of Italy pressed
home that very point, with some citing the Roman poet
Virgil:
What men, what monsters, what inhuman race,
What laws, what barbarous customs of the
place,
Shut
up a desert shore to drowning
men,
And
drive us to the cruel seas again.
Had not the Carthaginian Queen Dido allowed Trojan refugees
— the future founders of Rome — asylum along Africa’s shore?
And should not the ancient law of hospitality (which, to Hugo
Grotius, the father of international law, was “of
the highest sanctity”) take precedence over the “new
law of looking away”? This line of reasoning might pull
heartstrings or turn stomachs, but there are other considerations
in a world of sovereign states. As Thomas
Gammeltoft-Hansen and Tanja Aalberts recently
put it, the irregular migrant became “the
embodiment of the inability to protect and control access to that
most sacred property of statehood, the sovereign territory,” and
it was only a matter of time before the nations of Europe would
be forced to choose between sovereignty and humanitarian
hospitality.
The decision seems to have been made. Individual states,
led by Italy and Spain, have stepped up border enforcement and
pushback measures. Readmission and expulsion agreements between
European and African countries have been finalized. The EU border
agency FRONTEX (an appellation taken from the phrase
frontières extérieures, though the
organization’s ungainly official name is the
European Agency for the Management of Operational
Cooperation at the External Borders of the Member States of the
European Union) is now coordinating monitoring
efforts along the western and northern African coasts. The
capital of Gran Canaria, Las Palmas, now features a high-tech
coordination center where officials analyze immigration trends,
track the movements of peoples, and cooperate with surveillance
stations in Cape Verde, Senegal, and
elsewhere, a complex venture aided greatly by the EU-funded Sea
Horse advanced satellite system.
In late 2008, at the height of the wave of irregular
crossing to Lampedusa, Marco Minniti, a member of the center-left
Partito Democratico and shadow minister for the interior,
portentously declared that the declining situation on the island
was “the most powerful evidence that the government’s ‘fierce
face’ illegal immigration strategy has failed miserably [la
testimonianza più chiara ed evidente di come la strategia della
‘faccia feroce’ del governo sull’immigrazione clandestina è
miseramente fallita].” Yet it is increasingly clear that
precisely the opposite is the case. An August 3, 2010 report by
EURODAC (short for European Dactyloscopy,
the EU’s biometric common asylum registration system)
indicated a 50 percent drop in irregular crossings last year.
Italian authorities reported 7,300 irregular crossings in 2009, a
drop from 32,052 the previous year. Spain, which launched its own
faccia feroce pushback program, reported a drop from
7,068 irregular crossings to 1,994 over the same period.
Now it is the turn of Roberto Maroni, Italy’s interior
minister, to boast. “The Italian model of fighting illegal
immigration has produced exceptional results and we think it
should be copied by other European countries,” Maroni announced
upon the release of the EURODAC data, adding that the first three
months of 2010 showed a further ninety-six percent decrease in
arrivals when compared to 2009. No doubt those Tunisian miners
desperate to flee mass unemployment and violent police crackdowns
in the tumultuous Gafsa region, and who at present comprise the
majority of those detained in Lampedusa, will not be sharing the
Italian government’s enthusiasm, but such is the lot of the
clandestini, the poveri
disgraziati driven back to the cruel
seas.
An important lesson is to be drawn from the recent release
of EURODAC data on irregular crossings: sovereignty, even in a
purportedly post-modern Europe, still takes precedence over human
rights norms. Appeals to international and regional human rights
conventions, legal principles like non-refoulement, and
generalized notions of humanitarianism have had little or no
impact on Italian, or Spanish, exercises of national will in this
regard. In these economically tenebrous times, when immigration
policy inevitably becomes a salient domestic and international
issue, some nations have already reached the breaking point. It
does not go far enough to say that there is a “new law of looking
away”; Italian and Spanish policies with respect to irregular
crossings are more proactive than that. The pushback, with its
“fierce face,” has begun in earnest, and figures to be one of the
defining issues in European affairs over the coming years.
Tensions between the “soft power of humanity” and the necessities
of raison d’état will be on
permanent display in this arena, with decidedly global
implications, and with the diminutive island of Lampedusa
unexpectedly at the center of this legal, political, and moral
maelstrom.
