Human Cargo (10 page)

A spit of barren, flat, rocky land, the island looks, on the map, like the skull of a primitive, long-jawed creature, its nose tapering to a thin wedge. The property of the feudal princes who founded Palma, on Sicily’s southern coast, in the early seventeenth century, the island is bare, baked hard and dry for many months of the year into a uniform stony whiteness. Lampedusa is neither pretty nor, with its jagged, limestone cliffs, hospitable. The author of
The Leopard
, last in the line of Lampedusas, never even visited it, though the family retained a rampant
gattopardo
—the word is more properly translated as “ocelot”—on their coat of arms. According to legend, the founder of the Lampedusas was Tomasso, “the Leopard,” commander of the Imperial Guard of the sixth-century Byzantine emperor Tiberius, whose daughter Irene he married; the island was a gift in recognition of services rendered.

Lampedusa was once thickly wooded. Today, the dozen or so stunted pines that are its sole trees lie almost parallel to the ground, bowed by the winds that blow from the west. In the autumn, hunters come from Sicily and the mainland to slaughter the protected hoopoes and golden orioles migrating to winter in Africa, and leave their spent cartridges scattered between the rocks and wild herbs on the low hills; but otherwise Lampedusa is popular mainly with scuba divers, fishermen, and tourists in search of sun, heat, and the deep
and unpolluted waters that surround the island. Once a NATO base, it was discovered by Italians overnight, in the summer of 1986, after Colonel Muammar Qaddafi fired two missiles toward Italy. They landed a dozen miles off the coast, bringing journalists to the island and in their wake several thousand tourists, who slept on mattresses on the ground until enough rooms and hotels could be built to absorb them. Dry stone walls, demarcating plots of land long since abandoned to stones and wildflowers, stretch away from the single small town, where the uncontrolled building of summer shacks has made the island resemble the rest of Italy’s ruined coast.

Lampedusa is where Italy ends and Africa begins. Spring and summer, on the long calm days, the refugees arrive almost daily, in their battered and crumbling boats, frightened, unsure, expectant. Experts in asylum matters, who study the flows of refugees and their journeys to the north, call the way to Lampedusa the blue route after the blue waters of the Mediterranean; and it enjoys a lucrative share of the estimated $5 to $7 billion revenue of the world’s traffic in smuggled people. Gangs reported often to belong to the same Mafia as those that traffic in drugs run complex shipping networks that involve large boats carrying 600 or more
clandestine
illegal arrivals, for the first part of long journeys, transferring them to small, ancient, unseaworthy craft for the final stretch to shore. Since arrivals seem to mesh neatly with available space in Lampedusa’s single reception center, it is said that there is a
basista
, a spy or lookout, for Tunisia’s Mafia, who phones to say when Lampedusa is ready to absorb more newcomers.

On Lampedusa, I looked for people to tell me about their clandestine boat journeys from Africa, and I found Alex. Alex is a twenty-three-year-old Liberian who, having lost his family in the civil war, spent eleven years with his sisters as a refugee in Cote d’Ivoire before deciding to escape the constant fear of being picked up by rebels and forced to become a soldier. He described a journey that began in Monrovia with twenty others, hidden on a large ship and not being told its destination by their trafficker, to whom they had each paid $200. For four days, while the vessel was still tied up
in port, without food or water, the young men hid in different corners. After it set sail, they were gathered together, then transferred, far out at sea, to a smaller boat. This took them to Turkey, where three of them were dropped off on a remote beach. They made their way to the nearest town and found some “black brothers” who put them in touch with a new set of smugglers. They paid over $1,000 each, then went into hiding. A few nights later, they were led back to the coast, put onto a small boat, and taken out to a larger one. On board were eighty-five other
extracomunitari
, all Africans, from Nigeria, Ghana, Sudan, and Tunisia; all but four were men, reflecting the fact that most of the asylum seekers who make these hazardous journeys are men in their twenties and thirties, while the refugee camps across Asia and Africa are full of women and children for whom the journeys are too difficult.

The asylum seekers had been told to bring food and water for eight days. The weather was very bad, the seas were rough, and the boat developed engine trouble. It drifted without power for two days, sprang a leak, and began to sink. A fishing boat appeared. It came alongside and was able to take eleven people off—Alex among them—before the boat went under, drowning all the rest, including the four women. Alex, who could not swim, broke his hand when being pulled on board; his two friends were drowned. The fishing boat was extremely crowded, but it took them into Lampedusa; Alex was taken to a hospital and his hand treated. He still had $800, the rest of his life’s savings, hidden in his shoes. “They asked me a lot of questions,” he says, “but I didn’t really have much to tell them. I had planned for my life to be secure, and I wanted a place with peace of mind.” The Italians have given Alex a humanitarian permit to remain, a halfway measure that ensures him protection for a year and permission to work, if he can find work; the permit is renewable. But he has changed his mind about escape, for he has not found the life of an exile what he imagined it would be. “I want to go home to my sisters and my farm,” he says. “I don’t want to be alone.”

Rarely, in fact, do those arriving at Lampedusa make it to shore on their own steam. More often, their boats are spotted by the helicopters
that patrol these coasts, or are picked up on the radar screens of the coast guard, who go out to meet them as they near land. The coast guard hopes both to net a
scafisto
, bringing his cargo into land, and to help a sinking craft, by taking its passengers on board, in order to conduct them into a secluded corner of Lampedusa’s large natural port, far from the eyes of tourists who might be offended by the spectacle of such bedraggled and confused new visitors.

Comandante Rino Gagliano is the captain of one of the Italian coast guard’s middle-sized motor launches that patrol Lampedusa, though the more exciting tours of duty for the coastal police are farther north, along the Albanian coast. An Italian-Albanian agreement to try to stem the flow of migrant workers escaping the extreme poverty of Albania has succeeded in diminishing the numbers who manage to get out. Off the Albanian coast, says the comandante, he chases traffickers who have taken to putting four powerful engines on their fast rubber dinghies, with which they can easily outmaneu-ver the slower police launches. But the comandante is not really after excitement. His wife taught history at Lampedusa’s one secondary school until her early death not long ago, and he has a particular fondness for the island’s low white houses and its stark shoreline. He talks with sympathy about the desperate people he regularly fishes from the water, and the cups of good Italian coffee he takes pleasure in giving them: like all Sicilians, he is baffled by the idea of countries where coffee is not a staple of life. He says that rescuing boats about to sink takes priority, as it does under all the laws that have governed seafaring for many generations, over arresting
scafisti
as they hasten back toward international waters. Like all the sailors and coast guards who work these parts, he tells stories of asylum seekers flung into the sea at gunpoint so that the trafficker can get away faster, of boats so old and ailing and crowded that even small waves can sink them, of headless bodies found floating at sea. What haunts him is those he never sees: the refugees who are known to have drowned in these stretches of water, whose names are never recorded and whose bodies are never found. The
“canale di Sicilia”
he says, has become a cemetery. Of the 3,000 known deaths
recorded by human rights groups of people trying to enter Europe in the last ten years, many are those who drowned in the waters that separate Italy and Spain from North Africa.

The comandante, like the majority of the islanders, feels mostly sympathy for those so desperate that they will risk their lives in this way. To suffer so much is to merit recognition, assistance: the more the suffering, the swifter and more just the recompense. The tales of these travelers have come to fascinate the local people, for whom shipwrecks and endurance are part of the fabric of their history, something that reflects well on the strength and vigor of their island, its robustness in withstanding cycles of invaders and newcomers and in providing pioneers for new worlds elsewhere. The fact that the
extracomunitari
arrive with nothing, sometimes virtually naked, having shed or lost their clothes in rough seas, shorn, as it were, of their pasts, makes them appealing. There is pride in being the first to show off Europe, to vaunt all that it has to offer, as if to reassure the survivors of such terrors and hardships that the journeys have been worth it. The past is truly another country, and their hosts intend to make it so.

In Italy, a country renowned, with exasperation and affection, for the confusion and corruption of its bureaucracy, the operation to corral and process asylum seekers appears almost streamlined. On Lampedusa, the
extracomunitari
are marched off into a Centro di Permanenza Temporanea, a Permanent Temporary Center, the absurdity of its name belying a system that those who run it claim is both humane and practical, but that in recent months has been cracking under the strain of growing numbers. Here, in a former military barracks, new arrivals are briefly interviewed, provided with clothes and a few necessities, and given cigarettes and permission to use a telephone. There is a sense of pride among the island’s yearlong residents that they have responded so calmly and generously to their unexpected visitors. Father Francesco, Lampedusa’s young and eager second priest, who for three months last year became acting director for the island’s CPT, speaks of a larder always kept full in anticipation of new refugees, of doctors on duty to care for those
who have been at sea for many weeks, of having to fend off journalists after a sudden influx of boats. Though few of the asylum seekers described their reception so glowingly, Father Francesco talks about his permanent temporary visitors indulgently and says that they are given forks, but no knives, and no razors (they enjoy the services of the local barber), though there have been no attempted suicides on the island. Macaroni with meat sauce, he volunteers, is their preferred dish. Some arrive with scabies, others with malaria and heart disease, and many of the women are pregnant, but all are treated kindly, and those few who have died while he has been on Lampe-dusa have been given a corner of the town’s cemetery, where they lie together, under plain wooden crosses, in earth covered with geraniums and wildflowers.

•   •   •

BECAUSE OF ITS
geographic position, at the southern edge of Europe, and its long coastline—over 4,500 miles—Italy has now become the first country of arrival for more asylum seekers than any of its European Union partners. A few go overland from the former Yugoslavia, but most arrive by sea, making the boat people of Italy—18,000 arrived in 2002 on Sicily alone; 20,000 in 2003—the seafaring refugees of our times. And of all times: Europe’s earliest migrants came by sea to Sicily, perhaps as early as 20,000 B.C., from east and west, and later by sea and land came Greeks, Carthaginians, Phoenicians, Romans, Saracens, Normans, Hohenstaufens, Angevins, Aragonese, Castillians, Austrians, Piedmontese, and the Neapolitan Bourbons. Over the centuries, Sicily has been conquered, abandoned, colonized, and recolonized by tyrants, kings, mercenaries, dukes, plenipotentiaries, and emperors. There is probably less Italian blood, so Sicilians say, in their veins than there is Greek, Arab, Norman, or Spanish. Positioned on the east-west and north-south routes in the Mediterranean, the island is fertile, with excellent natural harbors, but Goethe, on his travels at the end of the eighteenth century, described it as a morose place, though this was long before Palermo’s vast palazzi had crumbled, the fortunes of
their families eaten up by feuds and generations of squabbling and idleness.

Yet right up until the 1980s, Italy, particularly its impoverished south, was associated more with emigration than immigration. Between unification in 1861 and the end of the twentieth century, about 26 million Italians are said to have left home for the New World, driven abroad by the neglect and plunder of rich absentee-landowner families, so that as early as 1827 de Tocqueville, traveling around the island, described its interior as almost entirely devoid of human habitation. By World War I, some villages had lost most of their male population, and one out of eight Italian emigrants was a Sicilian. Though part of the new united and unified Italy, Sicily remained its most neglected area, and not until after World War II was it granted regional autonomy and its own Parliament.

At first, influxes of migrants into Italy were treated as single emergencies and approached with leniency. In 1990, the then minister of justice, Martelli, annulled Italy’s existing reservation to the 1951 Refugee Convention—the reservation allowed refugee status only to European asylum seekers—and set up a single procedure for deciding refugee status, under a commission based in Rome. The decision procedure was to take no longer than forty-five days, during which the applicants would be housed and fed. But then came a large number of landings—Albanians in 1990 and 1991, Yugoslavs in 1992, more Albanians in 1997, Kurds in 1998—each dealt with under measures of temporary protection. Though Italy is a signatory to Europe’s various immigration treaties, it was only with the Napolitano Bill of 1998—which Italians regard as their first attempt at formulating a proper asylum policy—that rules were drawn up to govern procedures and the deportation of those deemed not to be bona tide asylum seekers. In many ways, even the Napolitano law was regarded as generous, since its right to asylum was broadened to include people suffering discrimination at home by virtue of their sex and their membership in particular persecuted ethnic groups.