But the unstable situation on the Libyan shores, in the throes of an escalating civil conflict, together with the unreliability of the so-called Libyan Coast Guard, allows boats to evade the patrol boats of the Libyan militias and reach Malta’s search and rescue zone anyway, where Malta’s authorities are responsible for the coordination of rescue operations.
Once on the island, Malta is left alone to deal with high numbers of asylum requests, as no redistributive agreement with the EU members is currently in place. The assumption that Malta can manage the proportions of the migration crisis of the central Mediterranean alone is simply ludicrous.
And this is why, Malta’s authorities are resolving to less orthodox methods to deal with the issue. Recent journalistic investigations led by Italian journalists at the newspaper Avvenire have revealed Malta’s illegal and secret strategies to counter the growing number of arrivals.
Between 10 and 13 April, four migrant ships contacted Alarm Phone, a volunteer-powered hotline constantly kept open for those in distress at sea. The four rafts had left from the Libyan coast but had no chance of crossing hundreds of miles of open water between Libya and Italy.
The route is technically impossible for overcrowded low-quality dinghies like the ones being used today by Libyan smugglers, and crucially, the fuel provision loaded on board is often insufficient. However, exactly on Easter day, two dinghies miraculously reached the Italian south coast. They had left Libya together, but had lost contact on the first night at sea. The first rubber boat, with 101 people on board, arrived in Pozzallo on Easter Sunday. The second boat, carrying 77 people, reached Capo Passero, the southeast point of the Sicilian mainland, the morning after.
But the central Mediterranean is not a place for miracles; and the investigations of Avvenire have since then revealed the inconvenient trick behind these miraculous events.
Based on direct testimonies of the asylum seekers on the first of the two boats, it became clear that both boats had separately ended up in Maltese waters. The first dinghy was intercepted by a patrol boat of the Maltese Armed Forces. Several of the people on the rubber boat had taken videos of the tragic scene: many of the migrants on board had thrown themselves at sea, despite not knowing how to swim, in order not to be taken back to Libya.
It was only when the outboard engine of the rubber boat broke down that the military desisted from threatening the pushback, and with everyone back on board, provided to the shipwrecked a new engine with enough fuel to continue the crossing for another 100 kilometres, straight to Italy.
Meanwhile, the day before the arrival of the second boat to Italy, the fisher trawler Dar Al Salam 1 had left La Valletta with no clear destination, disappearing from the tracking maritime charts soon after departure. A helicopter of the Armed Forces of Malta would guide the Dar Al Salam 1 and a second ship, the Tremar, to a boat of asylum seekers drifting in Maltese waters, having left the coast of Libya almost one week before.
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Valeria Alice Colombo | Radio Free (2020-06-16T00:00:00+00:00) Black lives should matter in the Mediterranean too. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/06/16/black-lives-should-matter-in-the-mediterranean-too/
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