Last week, four refugee shipwrecks in three days left 110 people dead in the Mediterranean. The refugees primarily consisted of Libyan refugees trying to reach Europe. The deadly confluence of crises including Covid-19, increasing tensions, violence, and food insecurity has forced tens of thousands of people to flee that country.
The Libya-Italy Memorandum of Understanding on Migration (LIMUM), which was extended in February 2020, is a collaboration between Libya and Italy wherein the two combine resources and efforts to intercept refugee vessels crossing the Mediterranean and send asylum-seekers back to Libya where they’d be put in detention camps. The UN Migration Agency (IOM) recorded that in 2020, over 900 people have died or gone missing, and 10,300 refugees have been returned to Libya. Even these are considered undercounts, given the lack of proper documentation.
The shipwrecks last week, however, were dealt a different fate: that of negligence. The people on the dinghies and boats were primarily rescued by local fishermen or non-governmental organisations. Open Arms, currently the only NGO with an authorized rescue boat service across the Central Mediterranean, worked with another NGO, Italian Emergency, to rescue some of the people. Spanish and Italian port authorities have refused to authorize the operation of other rescue boats. In October itself, at least 30 Libyan refugees died trying to reach Italy. Many children have been a part of the body count, including a six-month old boy who drowned last week.
“All this took place just a few kilometers away from an indifferent Europe,” Italian Emergency wrote in a statement on the incident. “Instead of preparing a structured search and rescue system they instead continue to bury their heads in the sand, pretending not to see the cemetery that the Mediterranean Sea has become.”
