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Voyages of the damned

They call it 'the pearl of the Mediterranean' - 33 square kilometres of limestone between Malta and Tunisia, wrapped in breathtaking beaches and beautiful blue water, and a magnet to tourists. But lovely Lampedusa also has a dark side.

Every year, hundreds of Africans lose their lives in the waters off the coast of the island in an attempt to reach the closest European port. Lampedusa is the closest and it is nearer to Africa than it is to mainland Italy. In order to escape war, poverty, famine and destruction, African immigrants undertake long journeys to Lampedusa aboard old boats and life rafts; it is a trip that usually ends in tragedy.

They come from various parts of Africa: Egypt, Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia, Ethiopia and Eritrea. Crammed in tightly against one another, men, women, and children travel through the cold night, hoping to reach the democracies of Europe that promise liberty, peace and riches. The trip lasts several days. Some passengers do not eat for weeks.

Once the boats get close to the island, the organisers of the trips attempt to sink the vessels. Aware of international law, these illegal 'skippers' know that once the boat has sunk or is sinking, the Italian police are obligated to save the passengers and give them emergency medical care.

And so, night after night, men, women, and children who are trying to find a better life are plunged into dark waters. Many of these immigrants get hypothermia and suffer from shock. Some of the women are pregnant. Many of them cannot swim.

Sadly, this jolting disembarkation is not the end of their suffering. A sad fate awaits those who are pulled from the waters in what are referred to as 'centres for temporary residence'.

Theoretically, centres for temporary residence are buildings where immigrants are momentarily housed in order to give them first aid treatment and register their names before sending them back to their home countries. In reality, the centre in Lampedusa is more like a military prison in Afghanistan or Iraq; it is surrounded by iron-wire fencing, tall metal gates and bright floodlights. Armed men patrol 24 hours a day. The immigrants sleep in buildings that are basically large metal hangars. They are dark, primitive places, where no outsider can go, not even journalists or members of parliament.

Last September, Italian journalist Fabrizio Gatti, 40, infiltrated one of these 'prisons' in Lampedusa. He lived there for a week with the other detainees and documented the inhumane conditions.

Gatti, disguised as an immigrant and sans shoes, threw himself into the waters off the coast of Lampedusa in a lifejacket. He waited 41/2 hours before anyone realised there was a man in the water. He was rescued and treated warmly by local residents, but a few hours later he was in a military police car. He told the Carabinieri he was Bilal Hirbahim el Habib, born on September 9, 1970, in the imaginary village of Assalah, in the district of Aqrah, in the Kurdish area of Iraq. He was then taken to the centre for temporary residence. There he was able to observe the hell that illegal immigrants in Lampedusa go through.

This was not the first time that Gatti had attempted to sneak into this type of place. 'In 2000, I snuck into a centre for temporary residence in Milan that was later closed because it did not respect the minimum standards of human rights,' he says. 'In 1999, I succeeded at entering a refugee camp in Switzerland together with people from Kosovo.'

His experiences also include two trips aboard a truck full of African immigrants headed for boat trips to Europe in the desert of Libya, where people lose their way and die of hunger and thirst. 'You realise how lucky you are to be a journalist and possess an Italian passport that allows you to escape ugly situations. It is real and true protection. But I have to admit, I was afraid of being deported to Libya. From there people never come back.'

It is from Libya that most of the old boats depart on their way to Lampedusa. But the hellish trip does not start in Libya. The immigrants have to first escape from their countries, usually travelling through the desert on a truck, struggling to stay alive. If they survive they will have passed only the first phase of the trip. The nightmarish boat trip awaits them. 'Twelve per cent of the immigrants die during the boat trip due to malnutrition, dehydration and other illnesses,' says Gatti. Since 2000, the number of declared dead has been 1,960. This does not count those never officially declared or those who die in the desert in the first phase of the voyage.'

The fishermen off the Sicilian coast are no longer surprised when they find corpses in their nets. For the survivors who reach the port of Lampedusa, the detention centres await them.

'I imagined that the conditions in the centre for temporary residence in Lampedusa wouldn't be the greatest,' explains Gatti, his voice rising in anger. 'But what I didn't expect was the behaviour of the military police in the face of the illegal immigrants. Many did not understand Italian or were too sick to speak or respond. So the military police began to whip them with their gloves, slap them or kick them.'

His tales do not end there: 'One day, a police officer forced a boy to watch a pornographic film on his cell phone. [This boy] was a practising Muslim and tried to cover his eyes with his hands. He didn't want to watch. The police officer then ripped his hands from his eyes and yelled: 'Look at what you learn'.'

The temptation for Gatti to react to the abusive situations he saw was strong but the risk of being found out was too great. 'I intervened on two occasions,' he says. 'One time the police sent a boy sick with scabies, a very infectious disease by the way, into the holding cell. He couldn't even sit down, his whole body was covered in scabs, but the police insisted that he sit down in the cell with everyone else to wait. We succeeded at getting them to let him sit at the front of the line with us.

'Another time, the police started deliberately beating some of the men, kicking and punching them. I yelled in English: 'Why are you beating them?' They made me leave the holding cell and tried to intimidate me, staring at me right in the eyes. It was a very tense situation. But fortunately everything was OK in the end.'

These temporary residences are an embarrassment for the EU, which has tried to keep them a secret. As a result, the inhumane conditions have not been widely reported. Despite the horrible fate that awaits them, countless immigrants continue to flow into the island.

'A considerable portion of Italians,' says Gatti, 'favour a solution [to increased immigration] that respects human dignity. But, on the other hand, a large portion do not see these people in a favourable light; a sentiment that is often manipulated by political parties that identify immigration as a terrorist or criminal threat.'

The process of cultural and religious integration in Italy is crippling. Whether in the north or south of Italy, you will never come across an African immigrant with a decent-paying job. The only jobs available to them are selling goods on the street, or working in factories for minimum wage.

'If we Italians can eat a good plate of pasta with tomatoes it is only thanks to immigrants,' Gatti says. 'It is they who work in the factories. In Italy, the decrease in the population is fortunately compensated for by the increase in immigration. They work for us, and we benefit from it. The entire country benefits.'

Regulating the boats full of clandestine immigrants, avoiding any deaths, improving the conditions these immigrants find themselves in and finding them legal work is, in other words, Italy's obligation.

'The new centre-left government is finally attempting to change the restrictive laws against immigration of the previous Berlusconi government,' Gatti says. 'Now for example, they are thinking of conceding citizenship [to illegal immigrants] after five years' stay in Italy instead of 10.'

But Italy alone can do only so much. Often, it is only used as a bridge to other countries, anyway.

'The most important duty lies in the hands of the European Union. It must open a round-table discussion and initiate a policy of distributing visitor permits,' Gatti says.

Lampedusa is not the only seaport that is seeing this type of tragedy. The situation on Malta is also very serious. Immediately after the island became part of the EU, boats packed with immigrants began arriving. Due to its small size and a lack of support from other EU countries, Malta has been unable to perform adequate water rescue operations. Hundreds have died in the waters off the coast as a result.

The situation in most of these port cities is getting worse every day. In the past few weeks, illegal immigrants have arrived in their hundreds.

Two weeks ago off Lampedusa, 24 immigrants, five of them children, disappeared when their boat sank. A few days later in the Canary Islands, 55 people lost their lives when a boat sank.

The illegal boat runs have become an exercise in people trafficking.

Like all illegal activities, it has its beneficiaries, mainly in Libya, 'where the trafficking of clandestine immigrants pays more than drugs', asserts Gatti. The ticket for a boat trip to Europe costs the equivalent of US$1,500 to US$2,000. It takes migrants years of hard labour to get that kind of money. Some sell their houses. Then consider that every boat carries about 350 passengers. The organisers earn anywhere from US$525,000 to US$700,000 per voyage.

And the skipper of these boats? He gets paid US$8,000 for this death run. But neither the deaths, nor the accidents, nor the risk of being sent home will halt immigration.

According to Gatti, 'many don't know what awaits them in Italy or at sea. And even if they did they would continue to come. The drive behind immigration is the economic-demographic disparity and there will always be immigrants no matter what price they must pay.

'I remember a boy who was about to be killed in the Sahara desert who preferred to swallow his ticket money [rather than give it up and live]. These are people who die of malaria or malnutrition. They are ready to face any risk. Many of them entrust themselves to God. But be careful, don't call them desperate. It's the opposite - these are people full of hope.'

And of course, in the end, some of them make it.

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