“WORDS” in “SURVIVAL AND WITNESS AT EUROPE’S BORDER”
WORDS
Alessandro Marino: “Capitaneria, we are in the middle of the sea facing Tabaccara. Guys, come immediately, there are five hundred people in the water. Clandestini [illegals] are telling us that there are five hundred people in the water.”
Coast Guard: “Yes, received, Gamar. You need to tell me if it is a boat or a rubber dinghy. Motorboat Gamar, this is Capitaneria of Lampedusa, do you receive me?”
Alessandro Marino: “Look, we’re rescuing. Guys, there are plenty of people in the water.”
(Emergency call, October 3, 2013)
The panicky voice of a primary eyewitness, Lampedusan Alessandro Marino, in his phone call to the Harbor Master in Lampedusa, communicated the first recorded depiction of the scene. In the call, Marino does not name the event.1 What he sees are “plenty of people in the water,” “Five hundred persons in the water.” The people in need of rescue are not yet framed as victims nor have they become survivors—they are persone (“people” and “persons”), and clandestini (“illegals”). Human beings are about to die in front of the caller’s eyes, and, therefore, they are in immediate need of rescue. It is impossible to ignore what is happening or turn away at that moment; these people must be rescued. Marino does not seek the capitaneria’s permission to rescue, in fact, his friends are rescuing as he is calling. There is a sense of urgency—he has no time to answer the question “is it a boat or a rubber dinghy?” and say that the boat is nowhere to be seen.
The lack of distance is the key to the relationship of rights and duties in this scene. Marino sees drowning persons with his own eyes and is able to reach and help some of them. This conjunction of knowing about the disaster and the possibility of acting at the scene defines the situation as one in which involvement is not only possible but necessary. He calls the coast guard while his friends rescue those they can reach.
It is “the necessity inherent in the situation” (Boltanski 1999, 9) that applies in the event that Marino encounters. The necessity prompts people to help in a situation they have chanced upon, even if they had not wished to be in that situation. Political, religious, and general motives are not important in situations defined by such an immediate closeness to death. Marino rescues and calls for help although he names the people in need of help clandestini, illegals. It does not matter whether their being there is justified or legal. It does not matter what Marino’s political views on migration might be. If they had not intervened in the scene, Marino and others would have violated Article 98 of the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea (UN 1982). While under international law they had a duty to rescue (Pusterla 2020, 4), they risked violating domestic laws that criminalized facilitating entry of immigrants (Basaran 2014, 375–76). The drowning people had a right to be rescued, but only because the crew of Gamar was nearby. This right follows from their universal right to life under both international human rights law and European law (Mann 2020, 605–7). However, Vito Fiorino (2017), the owner of the leisure boat Gamar who was with Marino and six others that night, emphasized several times to me in an interview that when they chanced upon the disaster the group of friends did not debate whether or not to pull the drowning people to their boat. They acted spontaneously, Fiorino said. The necessity inherent in the situation guided their action.
While making the emergency call, Marino does not have a name for the event that he describes as “plenty of people in the water.” The only clue that he gives to the coast guard is the word clandestini, which opens up a space of shared understanding what the situation is about. The naming of the event comes later, and at a distance. Naming events is one central device through which people make sense of the world. They select and elevate some aspects of what they perceive and make them more salient; they frame events and situations. Erving Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life maintained that when people come to situations they look for clues that help them to contextualize and interpret what is going on (Goffman 1990, 1). This interpretation is largely based on their previous knowledge, and it is culturally shared. The term clandestini is a clue that prompts the coast guard’s question “is it a boat or a rubber dinghy?”
By naming events, people make certain reasoning devices more appealing than others, devices that explain the causes of the event and the possible solutions. Other devices that characterize a discourse are images, symbols, and metaphors. Theorists of media framing, such as William A. Gamson and Andre Modigliani (1989), have argued that competing discourses evolve and transform over time around any relevant policy issue. Frames are organizing ideas of a discourse, and the media is a central field where framings evolve. Journalists, photographers, political and religious leaders, activists, and other public figures frame events, interpreting them to the public. The media’s and their sources’ naming of what happened at sea near Lampedusa on October 3, 2013, conveys how the different agents gave salience to certain causes and responses and produced certain kinds of interpretative packages to understand death at the border. The different namings also highlight or hide certain figures and actors in the scene more than others. The construction and visibility of these figures is connected to the naming of the event.
Naufragio, tragedia, strage
The disaster became a key event in the Italian media: it was high on the news agenda and shaped the coverage of immigration news in general for a while (Zerback et al. 2020). The Italian media defined the disaster by using three terms in particular: naufragio, tragedia, and strage—terms that evoke different emotional, moral, and political registers. Naufragio, shipwreck, is the most neutral term. A ship—an object, a thing—has sunk. Tragedia, tragedy, assumes that there are emotions and affects involved in the event. It is unexpected, dramatic, catastrophic—an unfortunate event that is emotionally out of the ordinary. The emphasis is on the suffering. A shipwreck is certainly unfortunate, but it might be without great suffering. However, like shipwreck the term tragedy does not imply that there is necessarily an agent, a perpetrator. A shipwreck and a tragedy could be accidental whereas strage—massacre or carnage—implies there is a perpetrator. A massacre does not just happen but is made. In addition, a massacre necessarily has dead victims whereas a tragedy or a shipwreck could happen without a loss of life.
The disaster in Lampedusa came to be known as a strage in relation to four aspects—the place, the space, the date, and the category of victims: strage di Lampedusa (the place where it happened, e.g., La Stampa, October 6, 2013); strage nel mare (space where it happened: the sea, e.g., Repubblica Bari, October 5, 2013; Spagnolo 2013); strage del 3 ottobre (the date when it happened, e.g., La Repubblica Palermo October 12, 2013); and strage di migranti (the category of people who died: migrants, e.g., La Stampa, October 4, 2013; Galeazzi 2013). In addition, Giorgio Napolitano, the then president of the Republic, called the disaster “strage di innocenti” (Breda 2013), which is a biblical reference to the “massacre of innocents”: Herod the Great’s infanticide as reported in the Gospel of Matthew.
In Italian, strage is used to describe genocides and terrorist attacks but also natural catastrophes such as earthquakes. Central to the term is the intentional mass killing of humans or animals. In this sense, its dictionary definition is a synonym for massacro, which also translates as massacre in English. Strage would remind Italians of terrorist attacks such as the strage di Bologna, a neofascist bombing at the Bologna railway station on August 2, 1980, and another bomb attack known as strage di piazza Fontana of December 12, 1969, in Milan (Roghi 2020). In both these disasters perpetrators were sought although in the latter case it took decades. Therefore, the choice of the term strage also implies that what happened was human-made like the other stragi had been. In the context of border deaths at sea the media had not used the term strage widely before the Lampedusa disaster. Nevertheless, it was not the first migrant boat disaster to be known as a strage. The sinking of a ship carrying at least 283 migrants on the night of December 25–26, 1996, near Portopalo of Sicily is known as strage di Natale, the Christmas Massacre or strage di Portopalo (Balzarotti and Miccolupi 2016).
The emergence of the word strage in common discourse in the context of border deaths reflects the period of the humanitarian-security nexus in Italian politics that began when Enrico Letta of the center-left Democratic Party became prime minister in April 2013. Letta’s Catholic ethos replaced his predecessor Silvio Berlusconi’s anti-migration rhetoric (Crawley et al. 2016, 69). An example of the general use of the term strage in the context of border deaths is the debate in the Italian Senate on May 24, 2016, when a number of senators used the term in reference to the October 3, 2013, disaster when discussing the bill to establish a Day of Remembrance to commemorate migrant dead. Laura Fasiolo of the Democratic Party, for example, called it the “prima grande strage di Lampedusa,” “the first big massacre of Lampedusa” and Salvatore Torrisi of the Popular Alternative referred to it as “strage dei 366 migranti,” “massacre of 366 migrants” (Senato della Repubblica 2016).
The common usage of the term strage characterizes the brief window of a more humanitarian approach in bordering—a policy and practice that oscillates between humanitarianism and securitizing (Cuttitta 2018a and b). In 2018, when the right-wing Lega politician Matteo Salvini became minister of the interior, criminalization of civil rescue in the Mediterranean Sea became one of the government’s trademarks (Caccia, Heller, and Mezzadra 2020).
Rebeca Andreina Papa (2014) has observed that the Italian media—across different political leanings—had in 2013 begun to represent migrants as victims rather than threats. Reporting of the Lampedusa disaster, the Italian mainstream media, she argues, replaced the previously commonly used terms clandestini and immigranti, illegals and immigrants, with terms that shifted attention to the right to seek protection: richiedenti asilo and rifugiati, asylum seekers and refugees (Andreina Papa 2014, 86). The framing of migrants as victims was common also in the German and Belgian media’s coverage of the disaster (Zerback et al. 2020, 759). The media in Italy framed those crossing the border by boats as victims of the conditions they had fled, and of the Italian and European immigration and border policies. Among media sources that emphasized the role of Italy in the disaster was the Congolese-born minister of integration at the time, Cécile Kyenge, who criticized Italian laws that criminalized irregular migration dating back to the Bossi-Fini law of 2002 and the Maroni “security package” of 2008 (Cetin 2015, 386; Polch 2013). The conditions in Eritrea—the country that almost all of the people in the boat originated from—were described in the Italian media in general terms of poverty and conflict rather than in detailed contextualization (Andreina Papa 2014).
The prevalence of the term strage in the Italian media can also be seen as a result of a professional conversation among scholars, activists, and some journalists about language use in migration-related reporting. Two of the major outcomes of these discussions are the Carta di Roma, a journalists’ code of conduct signed in 2008 and the foundation of the Association of Carta di Roma in 2011 (Carta di Roma 2020; Bellu 2014). The journalists’ association provides guidelines about responsible journalism related to immigration issues. It does not address the naming of migrant disasters and border deaths specifically but the Code of Ethics sensitizes journalists to the connotations of language use and the choice of words in relation to migration. Critical migration scholars in Italy, such as Gianluca Gatta, have also replaced naufragio and tragedia with strage in their academic and popular articles deliberately so that the border deaths would be conceived as produced phenomena instead of naturally occurring accidents (see, e.g., Gatta 2014; Vassallo Paleologo n. d.).
Vergogna, le parole de scusi
On October 3, 2013, Pope Francis—a major media figure in Italy and globally—called the disaster vergogna, disgrace, which was widely reported in the global media (Yardley and Povoledo 2013). The media across Europe picked up on the idea and highlighted terms that translate as shame, shameful, or disgrace in the headlines. The German Süddeutsche Zeitung’s headline on October 6 was: “Europas Schande,” “Europe’s shame.” Le Monde titled its weekend front page on October 5, 2013 “Lampedusa: l’indifférence coupable de l’Europe,” “Lampedusa: Europe’s culpable indifference,” which echoed the pope’s speech during his first pastoral visit outside of Rome, in Lampedusa earlier that year, in July 2013. The pope had then used the phrase “globalizzazione dell’indifferenza,” “globalization of indifference,” in his address on border deaths (Pope Francis 2013b).
Vergogna and the English words shame and disgrace describe emotions. Someone feels ashamed or someone angrily accuses another person, as in “shame on you.” The headlines in Süddeutsche Zeitung and Le Monde do not impose the feeling of shame on external others but include their readers among those who should feel ashamed. They do not see the disaster as having been caused by Italy or any other particular country but by Europe collectively. Importantly, such discourse constitutes an actor on the scene, Europe: a community that is able to do wrong but also one that can have emotions and take responsibility.
The pope’s words, “It is a disgrace!” do not explicitly indicate any entity such as Europe or a group of people who should feel ashamed about the disaster. He spoke in the name of humanity, and he addressed everyone. “It is a disgrace! Let us pray together to God for those who lost their lives: men, women, children, for their relatives and for all refugees. Let us unite our efforts so that similar tragedies are not repeated! Only through the concerted collaboration of everyone can we help to prevent them” (Pope Francis 2013a). On the one hand, this all-encompassing definition of those who are responsible for the disgrace calls everyone to think of their own involvement. On the other, it does not distinguish between actors and therefore, when everyone is implicated, no one is specifically responsible. No one, necessarily, is a perpetrator.
However, the word “indifference” in the pope’s ceremony in Lampedusa earlier in 2013 (“globalization of indifference”) was again quoted in the news about the October 3 disaster (e.g., Galeazzi 2013), and that framing directs attention to a responsible figure—not an active perpetrator but an indifferent bystander who knows about mass deaths at the border and sees them happening (through mediation) but turns away from the suffering of others. The idea that indifference is globalized refers to the way in which migrant deaths at one border (Lampedusa) epitomize deaths at borders globally. The phrase “globalization of indifference” in relation to the October 3 disaster demands bystanders of border violence globally to take responsibility.
Italian prime minister Enrico Letta took the discourse of shame and disgrace politically further, to an (almost) apology. A video clip of his speech at the press conference in Lampedusa on the October 9, 2013, is titled on his website: “A Lampedusa una tragedia immane, l’Italia chiede scusa” (Letta 2013a). “A huge tragedy in Lampedusa, Italy asks for forgiveness.” In Lampedusa, at a press conference alongside European leaders José Manuel Barroso, Cecilia Malmström, and Italian interior minister Angelino Alfano, Letta stated on October 9, 2013: “The words we have said to all those we have met in recent days are also the words of apology for the defaults of our country in respect to a tragedy like this and the tragedies that these events entail and have entailed” (Letta 2013b).
While the headline on Letta’s webpage claims “Italy asks for forgiveness,” he actually did not issue an apology. He did not perform an action. Letta did not say, for example: “Italy apologizes” or “I deliver the apology of the state.” Instead, he interpreted what had been done and said by Italian leaders as parole di scusi, words of regret. He referred to three actions of the Italian government as parole di scusi: first, the national day of mourning that had been held on October 4, on the day of San Francesco, the patron saint of Italy; second, the visits to Lampedusa by the representatives of parliament and the government; and third, the state funeral to be held for the victims that he announced in the press conference. These actions, together with “the words we have said,” were the parole di scusi, words of regret.
There is a crucial difference: apologetic discourse or gesture is not the same as an apology which is a speech act—words that sincerely perform an action (Austin 1975). An apology is directed at someone—someone asks to be forgiven and someone else accepts an apology. After the Grenfell tower fire that killed at least seventy-nine people in London in 2017, Prime Minister Theresa May apologized in the immediate aftermath of the fire: “That was a failure of the state—local and national—to help people when they needed it most. As Prime Minister, I apologize for that failure” (Murphy 2017). After the collapse of a motorway bridge in Genoa and the death of forty-three people in 2018, Italy organized a state funeral but did not apologize. The apology was expected from Atlantia, the company that maintained the bridge. It only apologized in 2020 for fear of losing its construction deals with the government. The apology then was directed to “the families of the victims and to all Italians” (Landini and Suzzi 2020).
Public apologies by a state are a recurring feature of historical justice movements (Neumann and Thompson 2015). Apologies for historical injustices are either followed up by corrective measures such as reparations or perceived to be an end in itself—done in lieu of material reparations. In state apologies for past wrongs, the core elements include definition of what has been wronged and to whom the apology is directed. Enrico Letta was not clear what exactly were the “defaults of our country” that the “words of regret” were aimed to correct (Letta 2013a). Nor did he seek an apology from a specific group of people, such as the victims’ families and the survivors. In fact, the apology (if one interprets Letta’s words as such) might as well have been directed to the Lampedusans or the Italian people who suffered as witnesses of mass death.
Even the actions that Letta interpreted as parole di scusi were not performed in the presence of those related to the victims. For example, the way in which the “state funeral” was organized in Agrigento, Sicily (which I examine in more detail in chapter 4) reflected a symbolic performance for Italians rather than a ritual that would have been meaningful for the survivors of the disaster or the surviving family members of the dead. Italian-based representatives of the Eritrean government—the regime that many people on the boat had fled—were invited to the official memorial ceremony. Diasporic human rights activists who oppose the regime protested their presence (Estefanos 2016). Against the wishes of survivors and many victims’ families, the dead had already been buried in various cemeteries in Sicily, and without their relatives having been present. Even those family members who were among the survivors of the disaster were prevented from participating in the ceremony. Letta claimed the funeral was “in una logica di compartecipazione a una sofferenza drammatica,” “in a logic of sharing a dramatic suffering” (Letta 2013a). The logic of “a shared suffering” directed attention to the ones who share a dramatic emotion. It could have referred to the Lampedusans who filtered the shock and sadness created through witnessing of mass death through the media. They suffered on behalf of a European mediated audience as they performed their witness testimonies in the media (about media witnessing, see Frosh and Pinchevski 2008; 2014). Without mourners the massive dying at Europe’s borders would have seemed disturbingly undignified. Nevertheless, relatives of the victims and survivors and their grief remained invisible.
Letta himself acted two important performances of parole di scusi. One was to symbolically grant Italian citizenship to the dead. On the national day of mourning, October 4, 2013, he declared: “The hundreds who lost their lives off Lampedusa yesterday are Italian citizens as of today” (Ansa 2013). It was a speech act but only a symbolic one. Letta was not in a position to actually grant citizenship to dead people. The speech did not result in any other actions, duties, or rights that a granting of a formal citizenship would normally entail. For example, the surviving children of the dead did not inherit the citizenship of their parents. Furthermore, the survivors of the disaster were excluded from citizenship, even at a symbolic level. They were not granted any performative role in the official memorial ceremony that took place in Agrigento, Sicily.
In death, migrants were worthy of inclusion into the body politic—they turned into “innocents” as in Napolitano’s “strage di innocenti” (Breda 2013), human beings of no history or sins. They were innocent to the extent that it did not even matter that Italy was not their actual destination. But as living survivors, the migrants were not eligible; on the contrary, they were potential criminals, suspected of having violated the law as they had crossed the border without documentation. They were confined in the centro accoglienza (the so-called Welcome Center) in Lampedusa. Not even their relationality to the dead (the “citizens”) was acknowledged. The purification of the victims as “innocents,” to mere biological human bodies, qualified them for Italian “citizenship.”
Some of the Italian media interpreted Letta’s phrase parole di scusi as an apology and even amplified it by making an analogy to a public state apology made on the same day, October 9, 2013, in front of a community that had lost more than 1,900 members in a dam disaster fifty years ago in Longarone, Veneto, in North Italy (Brambilla 2013; L’Ancora Online 2013). The president of the Italian senate, Pietro Grasso, issued the apology on behalf of the state in a service that commemorated the victims of a tsunami created by a landslide at the Vajont Dam. In its reporting of the state apology L’Ancora Online drew a parallel to Letta’s parole di scusi: “Eyes are downcast, evidently embarrassed, along the avenues of a cemetery in the mountains of Veneto. A knee bends, and a hand reaches for a small white coffin, on the southernmost island of Sicily. At the two geographical extremes of Italy, almost at the same time, on October 9, 2013, apologetic words come from the top of the state” (L’Ancora Online 2013).
The newspaper’s parallel refers to Letta’s performative pose of bending one knee and pausing to look at and touch a white coffin holding a child’s body at the Lampedusa airport hangar where hundreds of coffins had been arranged for a commemorative service on October 9, 2013. This performative pose is the second gesture of “words of regret” that Letta performed himself in addition to granting citizenship to the victims. It can be seen as a visual metaphor for asking forgiveness. The performance of kneeling at the coffin might call to mind Willy Brandt’s Kniefall in Poland during the commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising on December 7, 1970.2 Brandt performed an impromptu gesture of forgiveness rather than a planned and choregraphed state apology.
In Veneto, the analogy between the two disasters and two (presumed) state apologies was made also in the ceremony itself. The mayor of Longarone, Roberto Padrin, announced a one-minute silence for the victims of the Lampedusa shipwreck (Ribattuta 2013). Corriere della Sera described the act as “the most moving moment” in the memorial service that commemorated those who had died in the dam disaster fifty years earlier (Ribattuta 2013).
FIGURE 2. Still image of Enrico Letta’s performative pose. © European Union, 2013. EC—Audiovisual Service/I-082382 (9 October 2013), director: Catherine Vandezande.
The analogy with the Vajont Dam disaster opened a rare opportunity to conceive the shipwreck as a produced disaster rather than an accident. The community of Longarone had waited for fifty years for the state apology to conclude the series of downplaying and cover-ups of the human responsibility for the tsunami. The state and the authorities had claimed for years that it was a natural disaster. Documentary films and international television series revealed the human involvement in the disaster decades after.
The minute of silence for the Lampedusa victims during the commemoration of the Vajont Dam disaster was an act of solidarity from the community of Longarone that recognized the victims of the Lampedusa disaster and the living family members. The Longarone community memorialized the deaths of their own and of others, simultaneously. In doing so, they recognized that there are survivors of a disaster and surviving family members of the victims that live on after a disaster. They avoided ignorance in the sense that they not only commemorated their own dead and received the long-awaited state apology for their own community, but expanded this civil recognition to others who (by coincidence) were dealing with the loss of their loved ones at the same time. This commemorative act created a critical rupture in the state apology. In the context of the history of the Longarone region and an apology that was received after fifty years, the issues of injustice and human responsibility were brought to the fore in their community. The parallels between the two disasters are a reminder that injustices are not necessarily forgotten, and that they continue to haunt. Through the analogy between the two disasters, the Longarone community created solidarity across time and space and cultivated an imagination of a common world where the mourning relatives and suffering communities here and there, then and now, shared the right to justice. The community constituted a relational form of citizenship between people who shared similar experiences of loss due to disaster and the state’s neglect of their rights. The transgression of anticipated distinctions between the groups cultivated a shared identification, a disaster citizenship.
Disaster
While I agree with those journalists and scholars in Italy who use the term strage that it is a more appropriate naming for border deaths than tragedy and shipwreck, I have decided to call what happened on October 3, 2013, a “disaster.” Massacre, in English, would not capture the process that leads to mass death at the border, because of its reference to direct killing. Admittedly, like the other available words in the register, such as accident, shipwreck, and tragedy, everyday connotations of the term disaster also fail directly to address the productive and processual nature of the event and the existence of responsible agents. The Oxford English Dictionary defines disaster as “a sudden accident or a natural catastrophe that causes great damage or loss of life.” In itself, the term does not imply responsibility, agency, or deaths in the same ways “massacre” would. The survivors and relatives of the victims call the disaster hadega or Lampedusa’s hadega, which is Tigrinya and means “incident.”
In academic literature, defining the term “disaster” is complicated, as the anthropologists Anthony Oliver-Smith and Susanna M. Hoffman (2002) note. However, they identify the key characteristic as a conjunction of two factors: a vulnerable human population and a potentially destructive agent. Both factors are embedded in natural and social systems that unfold as processes over time. According to Oliver-Smith and Hoffman, the core of the anthropological study of disasters is therefore to examine disasters not as suddenly occurring events, but as processes that are produced in a specific context with its historical, social, political, economic, and cultural ties. As an academic concept, disaster includes the notion of agency and responsibility and the understanding that the effects of a disaster are felt unequally. Oliver-Smith and Hoffman emphasize that a single destructive agent affects populations disproportionally: some are more vulnerable than others, and this vulnerability, too, is a production. A disaster is multidimensional and involves multiple subjectivities.
These conditional conjunctures have been critically examined in the anthropology of humanitarianism (e.g., Ferguson 1994; De Waal 1997). A central critique laid out by scholars has been that states and international organizations, including those providing disaster relief, have ignored the politics underlying disasters. Solutions to disasters such as famines, for example, have been technical rather than political. This technocratic approach universalizes disasters and interventions rather than recognizing their particularities and specific historical, political, and cultural conjunctions.
While the term “disaster” may evoke popular connotations that contribute to the tendency to understand border deaths as unexpected events needing technocratic solutions, other connotations of the word support the use of the term. It is known to describe not only adverse events resulting from natural processes but also those that result from deliberate human actions and inactions, such as fires, explosions, collapses, and massacres. Furthermore, the term “disaster” refers not only to the massive number of deaths but also to the lack of attention to human life. The word disaster in the context of October 3, 2013, can also imply a disaster of humanity, a disaster of responsibility and ethics. This meaning of disaster also encompasses bystanders—indifference to the mass deaths at Europe’s borders is a disaster of humanity. Such definition of a disaster requires what Ariella Azoulay (2012) calls “civil imagination,” a discourse that “insists on delineating the full field of vision in which the disaster unfolds so as to lay bare the blueprint of the regime” (Azoulay 2012, 2).
When people drowned off Lampedusa, it seemed that they were killed by the sea, with no trace of a human perpetrator. On the surface, it looked like an accident. But the perpetrators and the bystanders were many, and they were both in the vicinity and far away from the sinking boat. The actions and inactions that led to the deaths had long temporal and spatial roots, but there were also very immediate human involvements that produced death. Various perpetrators would be called out on media platforms, in courtrooms, and in activist demonstrations. Human rights, border, and migration activists demanded that Italian and European political leaders take responsibility for the structures and conditions that produced border deaths. Activists were also involved in supporting a civil court case against Sicilian fishermen who had failed to provide assistance to the ship. Eritrean oppositional and human rights activists in Europe accused the Eritrean regime, while diasporic groups that supported the regime blamed the “West” and members of the diaspora who had encouraged Eritreans to follow their aspirations for a better life.
Criminals who operated human smuggling networks were on everyone’s list of perpetrators. Italy invested significantly in investigating human smuggling, using the elite anti-Mafia unit with the Palermo prosecutor’s office in the investigation. In research on the smuggling networks that facilitated the fatal journey of October 3, 2013, Paolo Campana (2018) identified 292 actors—spanning from the Horn of Africa and Libya to Sicily, the rest of Italy, and finally to Northern European countries, Canada, and the United States (Campana 2018, 2, 7).
In the years to come, the ones who were sentenced were the facilitators—the Tunisian “captain” Khaled Bensalem (eighteen years in prison in 2014) and the six Eritreans living in Italy who were sentenced to prison for human trafficking (up to six years and four months in 2016) (DDA 2014; Il Fatto Quotidiano 2016). In 2016, Italian authorities, the Sudanese police and the British National Crime Agency arrested a man thought to be one of the most wanted human traffickers, Medhanie Yehdego Mered (“the General”), in Sudan. Eritrean diaspora and media outlets in Europe, notably the Guardian and the Swedish public service broadcaster SVT, revealed the mistaken identity, and Medhanie Tesfamariam Berhe was released in 2019 (Tondo 2019).
In addition, a civil court case initiated in 2017 concerning the fishing crew of the Aristeus of Mazara del Vallo, Sicily, led to seven fishermen receiving sentences of five to eight years in prison in 2020 for failing to provide assistance or notify authorities about a boat in distress (Tribunale di Agrigento 2020, 3–4). The case against the crew of the Aristeus was raised by two human rights NGOs: Gandhi Charity, founded by Eritrean Italian human rights activist Alganesh Fessaha, and Progetto Diritti, which provided support to relatives of the victims. The Aristeus case was then disputed in the courts (final decision pending at the appeal stage3).
The fishermen and the smugglers, however, were the easy targets that could be held accountable. Not even Khaled Bensalem denied his responsibility. Crying in a televised interview on RAI TG2 he said, in Italian: “I am responsible but the whole tragedy is not my fault. It’s not my fault (Bensalem 2014).” Bensalem recounted the events in the television interview, similar to the testimonies of the Eritrean survivors that in 2020 appeared in the court proceedings against the Aristeus crew (Tribunale di Agrigento 2020) and Adhanom’s testimony quoted in the beginning of this book: the appearance of two ships that came close and directed their spotlight on the migrant boat while it was still afloat. Bensalem implies that there were others who saw the boat in distress but turned away. Investigations on why the migrant boat was not detected when it approached Lampedusa and stopped less than a kilometer off the island at midnight did not lead to charges against authorities or to public investigation.
This continues to perplex many of those who have investigated the disaster—lawyers, activists, journalists, and cultural producers, such as filmmakers and writers. Lampedusan collective Askavusa produced a documentary film with a local filmmaker, Antonio Maggiore, in 2015 titled I giorni della tragedia (The Days of the Tragedy) and published a civil investigative report Lampedusa 3 Ottobre 2013: Il naufragio della verità (Lampedusa 3 October 2013: The Sinking of the Truth) (as of this writing, Askavusa has updated the document twice, on 3 October in 2017 and 2018). In Germany, Antonio Umberto Riccò wrote two plays Ein Morgen vor Lampedusa (That Morning off Lampedusa, 2014) and Das Boot ist voll! (The Boat Is Full!, 2018) that discuss the contradictions in the public narratives of the disaster and shed suspicion that the authorities hide failures in the search and rescue operation. Elsewhere, I have analyzed these cultural interventions as “civil investigation” to capture a form of agency to correct an injustice. In reference to Ariella Azoulay’s (2012) notion of “civil imagination,” I argue that civil investigation is both a product and a producer of civil imagination—a capacity to see the world in terms of conviviality (Horsti 2021).
Lampedusa is a militarized island with radars that monitor movements at the sea border. An Eritrean who had lived in Italy for ten years by the time of the disaster and who was a member of the initial investigating team of Italian authorities told me in a telephone interview that the first investigation’s main aim was to identify the facilitator who operated the migrant boat and smugglers with whom migrants had had contact along their journey. Other aspects, notably, the eyewitness testimonies of survivors who were on the two large vessels were not of primary importance in the investigation.
The processes that make the border murderous and the agents who are involved in the making of the border are far removed from the circumstances under which the necessity to rescue would actualize. It is therefore more difficult to personify the responsible agents and to demand that they take responsibility. When tracing the responsibility for the disaster, one could begin with the Isaias Afwerki regime, which many on the boat were escaping from. In my conversations with survivors, almost everyone said Eritrea’s indefinite national service was why they left the country. National service prevented them from partaking in what one survivor called a “normal life”: doing work for reasonable pay and having a family with whom one can spend time. Some had also been confined for their oppositional opinions. (See similar results in Crawley and Blitz 2019; Belloni 2019, 103–5.)
Survivors’ blame of the regime was complex, however, and their views reflected the diversity of opinion and affiliation which Mohammed (2021) has described in the Eritrean diaspora more broadly. While open-ended national service was reason to leave, some survivors also noted that Eritrea had been sanctioned by the international community and pushed into isolation. Eritrea’s national service was introduced in 1994, after independence, as the “school of the nation” to serve military purposes but also to rebuild the country after the war of independence. In fact, some survivors felt somewhat guilty for having left the country, as one of them told me almost ten years after the disaster, “for selfish reasons.” Some survivors, however, blamed the regime for the disaster, and had become only more vocal as time passed.
Second, the people on the boat had been forced to choose this dangerous route because few countries accept resettlement refugees through UNHCR programs (Fleming 2013). For example, in 2017, UNHCR expected Europe to accept over 300,000 refugees in need of resettlement but the actual admission of refugees through the resettlement program was 17,413 persons (UNHCR 2018). The needs vs. submissions rate was just 6 percent. In 2013, only 1,027 Eritreans were resettled in Europe through the UNCHR program (UNHCR 2021). The people on the boat were very likely to have been recognized as refugees: Eritreans were the second-highest nationality in asylum recognition rates in Europe in 2008–2018 (Hatton 2021, 6).
Third, the people had chosen this Central Mediterranean route, the deadliest border crossing zone in the world (IOM 2022), because intensified bordering of Europe prevented safer mobility. Physical barriers and surveillance have been erected to prevent border crossing elsewhere, and legal means of mobility, namely the family reunification process, have been tightened (Block 2015; Jeholm and Bissenbakker 2019; Pellander 2021; Pannia 2021). Digital border surveillance has also played a role in producing vulnerability. Some of those on the boat had mobile phones, including Bensalem, but they threw them into the sea when they saw the lights of the island and the other boats nearby. They were afraid of being identified, which would require them to seek asylum in Italy. Without their phones, they could not call for help when water started entering the boat. These are the structural, national and international, invisible, and not-easily-personifiable processes that produced the disaster. Activists, critical politicians, and journalists are among those who stress that other European governments, alongside the government of Italy, were responsible for the lack of safe passage and withholding the right to seek asylum.
The violence of the border is far removed from the agents that are implicated in it. In this sense, border deaths are caused by what Rob Nixon (2011) has termed slow violence: “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (Nixon 2011, 2). Nixon developed the idea of slow violence by considering the pain and suffering that result from environmental neglect or disaster. Similarly, drowning off Lampedusa seems “to happen” rather than “is made.” In a scenario of mass deaths characterized by slow violence, the only potential perpetrators are those who can be identified as proactively creating conditions for the disaster (smugglers) or bystanders who do not respond to their duty of rescue under the Law of the Sea (fishermen). The states that prevented the people from traveling safely are removed from the scenario of death by temporal and spatial distance.
These multiple human, technological, and institutional agents and actions, in Lampedusa and far away, in the moment of the disaster and long before, produced the disaster in conjunction with one another. The attributes of violence and injustice are invisible: water, wind, and waves to carry out the slow violence. Maurizio Albahari (2015) calls such processes “crimes of peace”: results of “ambitions, laborious, and resilient administrative, political, and ideological work of maintaining a ‘system’ that has proven crumbling and volatile and that keeps proving unjust, violent, and unequal” (Albahari 2015, 21). The disaster was produced by structural inequality, failed administration, bad policy, and unreasonable law. The states could prevent these “crimes of peace,” but they do not do so in the name of sovereignty. The process is similar to “a regime-made disaster” that Ariella Azoulay (2012, 1–5) examines in the context of the Israeli government’s destruction of Palestinian lives and homes. Destruction is “part of an organized, regulated and motivated system of power that is nourished by the institutions of the democratic state,” Azoulay (2012, 2) argues.
Disasters at the European border are the product of a power asymmetry that makes certain populations vulnerable to the destructive agency of natural forces. While the violence is very familiar to some populations, to others it remains invisible. The Mediterranean Sea features as a space of leisure or a space of livelihood for some, while it is at the same time “a death-world”—to use Achille Mbembe’s term—for others. In the context of colonialism, Mbembe argued, death worlds are “unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead” (Mbembe 2003, 40). This condition explains why it was so unproblematic for Letta to incorporate the innocent dead into the body politic as “citizens” while leaving the survivors confined and the children of the dead “citizens” without the rights normally given to citizens. In the European imagination, migrants were not alive as social and relational beings before drowning in the sea.
In one sense, then, the disaster in Lampedusa was a massacre of migrants, a “strage di migranti”: people categorized as migrants were massacred by actors that were spatially and temporally removed from the actual scene. Citizens of Europe—the opposite of noncitizens—were not massacred. However, through the massacre, it was possible to incorporate dead migrants into the body of citizens, as Letta’s declaration demonstrates. This incorporation required imagining the migrants as innocents, giving them a bare humanity without past or future, without relationality or a social life. This posthumous citizenship was not a citizenship in any meaningful sense. Rather, it was a performance, constituting a position of benevolence by the one who granted this “citizenship,” Italy.
In another sense, however, strage is a much broader disaster, not only limited to the realm of migrants and symbolic unreal “citizens” but one that expands to Europe more broadly. This is the meaning that my work underlines by choosing to use the term disaster to name the drowning of at least 366 people near Lampedusa. Foremost, it is crucial to note that the disaster impacted most severely those who had to take the dangerous route and the victims’ families. But, in addition, it affected communities and societies in Europe and beyond, and those communities are not separate from other communities but connected. The notion of “Europe” also includes diasporic citizens and residents who lost their relatives. In order to understand the whole picture of the disaster, one needs to see beyond the dichotomy between noncitizens and citizens and terms such as “strage di migranti” or “migrant disaster.” There are multiple connections that unite Europe and the refugees who were on the boat: colonial history, economic exploitation, military involvement, and present-day diasporic family ties.
I propose that the disaster be conceived of as the outcome of a network of interconnected actors that emerged in the scene of the disaster, long before it, and in the afterlives that developed from it. To name the October 3, 2013, event a disaster is an attempt to gain a holistic vision of it: an understanding of the event not as a suddenly occurring event but as a process in the conjuncture of European morality and responsibility, the repressive regime in Eritrea and its global entanglements, and as the outcome of a failure of global responsibility in refugee protection. To understand the disaster in these terms requires seeing others not as separate from “our” life but as people who coexist in the same world governed by the same regimes that have produced the violent border. To recognize the disaster as a process leading to killing is to recognize the people on the boat as people of a shared world entitled to a life.
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