Did NATO Leave 62 Africans

to Die at Sea Off Libya?

By Vivienne Walt Monday, May 09, 2011

People board an International Organization of Migration ship in Misratah, Libya, on May 4, 2011

Christphe Simon / AFP / Getty Images

Did NATO pilots allow 62 Africans fleeing Libya to perish on the high seas because their mission did not include saving desperate migrants or because NATO's tangled bureaucracy had failed? That's the allegation roiling Europe after some of the handful of survivors, who drifted for weeks after a harrowing escape from Tripoli, told of having been spotted and then ignored by Western forces.

The survivors, whose story was broken in Britain's Guardian newspaper on Sunday, told of a group of 72 Africans migrants — men, women and a few children, from Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan and Nigeria — drifting on the Mediterranean for 16 days in late March and early April, as they watched their stocks of water and cookies steadily dwindle. Those supplies had been dropped onto their boat, they said, by a helicopter marked "ARMY," after its Ghanaian captain had phoned a refugee organization in Rome to send help. The organization quickly alerted Italian military authorities. (Watch TIME's video "Somali Refugees from Libya Put on a Show in Tunisia.")

 

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Somali Refugees from Libya Put On a Show in Tunisia

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The helicopter pilot signaled to the passengers that a rescue vessel was on its way, the survivors said. It never arrived.

Days later, survivors say, two helicopters lifted off from a nearby warship — believed by Guardian reporters to have been France's Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier — and flew low over the refugee boat. The passengers held up the two babies onboard, to show the pilots the desperation of their plight. The pilots flew away.

Then, as the boat drifted, its fuel tanks empty, the passengers began to die of starvation, one by one, until just 10 were left alive. "Every morning we would wake up and find more bodies, which we would leave for 24 hours and then throw overboard," Abu Kurke, an Ethiopian survivor, told the Guardian. By the end, he said, "Everyone was either praying or dying." One survivor perished shortly after the boat finally docked back in Libya, in government-held Zlitan, near Misratah, on April 10.

Despite the gruesome conditions, those aboard the stricken boat clung desperately to their humanity. After their parents died, the two infants were kept alive by others who were near death themselves. "We saved one bottle from the helicopter for the two babies and kept feeding them even after their parents had passed," explained Kurke, who said he survived by eating two tubes of toothpaste and drinking his own urine. "But after two days, the babies passed too, because they were so small."

The tragedy of the 62 migrants who died at sea was just one incident in a mounting death toll of Africans fleeing Libya across the Mediterranean. U.N. refugee officials estimate that about 800 African migrants have drowned trying to flee the conflict. On Monday, a boat carrying 600 people capsized off the Libyan coast, and U.N. officials say that about 400 people were rescued. Two separate boats, each believed to have been carrying hundreds of people, have simply vanished at sea in recent months. And on April 6, about 250 people drowned when their boat sank off the Italian island of Lampedusa. (See pictures of Libya's rebels.)

But the fate of the passengers of the 72 migrants on the boat from Tripoli was especially troubling because of the claim that they were spotted on two occasions by coalition aircraft. "There was an abdication of responsibility," says Moses Zerai, a Rome-based Eritrean priest called by the boat captain for help before his satellite telephone's battery went dead. "That crime cannot go unpunished just because the victims were African migrants and not tourists on a cruise liner."

Stung by the accusation of indifference, NATO and E.U. officials have been scrambling to distance themselves from any blame for the fate of the 62 dead migrants. NATO spokeswoman Carmen Romero told reporters in Brussels on Monday that "NATO vessels are fully aware of their responsibilities with regard to international maritime law on safety of lives at sea." French officials originally said the Charles de Gaulle had not been in the area, and then said they could not comment when the Guardian produced documents proving that the warship had been in that location.

Even before the allegations over the migrants, European officials had been on a collision course with refugee organizations because of their efforts to stanch the flood of migrants fleeing Libya as well as neighboring Tunisia. Hundreds of Tunisians have been turned back from Europe in recent months, and France has threatened to reimpose its border controls with Italy, removed decades ago under the E.U.'s Schengen agreement allowing document-free travel across the Continent, in order to stop the influx.

Most desperate among those fleeing the turmoil in Libya are hundreds of thousands of sub-Saharan Africans. Shortly before the no-fly zone was imposed in mid-March, I ventured into Tripoli's St. Francis of Assisi Church, where hundreds of illegal African migrants converge every day seeking legal help for themselves and detained friends and to swap information about how to get to Europe. "We have tried to get to Europe many times, but we have failed," said Joseph Zewdu, a 21-year-old Ethiopian refugee. "I was at sea for eight days. Eight people drowned. Then Libyan people arrested us and took us to prison."

For years, Muammar Gaddafi had allowed his country to serve as a transit point for Africans heading to Europe. In 2004, Tripoli Airport still displayed a sign welcoming "African brothers" to Libya. But thousands who flew there found their way to Europe blocked, and migrants from Nigeria, Ethiopia, Sudan and elsewhere have populated entire neighborhoods in Tripoli, working menial jobs in the Libyan capital while hoping to reach Europe. A typical Mediterranean crossing involves a smuggler's fee of between $2,000 and $3,000, which migrants spend years scraping together by washing windows, baking bread and cleaning streets around the capital.

When the war erupted in February, even that precarious life collapsed for many migrants. Libyan landlords evicted many African tenants, and most embassies closed, leaving them with no way home, according to Bishop Giovanni Martinelli, the Italian cleric who runs the Tripoli church. "Usually they can find some kind of work and somewhere to live," he told me in mid-March, looking over the Italianate church, whose pews were filled with Africans. "But now they have nothing." This week, I found myself wondering how many of the people I had seen in those church pews or sleeping under makeshift tents outside Tripoli Airport had been among the 62 people who drifted to their deaths last month.

See Italy's troubling immigration deal with Muammar Gaddafi.

See "Fleeing Libya: Hundreds of Children Caught in Italy's Migrant Crisis."

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• Jack Shenker in Lampedusa
• guardian.co.uk, Monday 9 May 2011 21.07 BST

Migrants who successfully made the boat trip to the tiny island of Lampedusa, Italy from the unrest in north Africa receive assistance. Photograph: Francesco Malavolta/AP

Europe's paramount human rights body, the Council of Europe, has called for an inquiry into the deaths of 61 migrants in the Mediterranean, claiming an apparent failure of military units to rescue them marked a "dark day" for the continent.

Mevlüt Çavusoglu, president of the council's parliamentary assembly, demanded an "immediate and comprehensive inquiry" into the fate of the migrants' boat which ran into trouble in late March en route to the Italian island of Lampedusa.

Yesterday, the Guardian reported that the boat encountered a number of European military units including a helicopter and an aircraft carrier after losing fuel and drifting, but no rescue attempt was made and most of the 72 people on board eventually died of thirst and hunger.

"If this grave accusation is true – that, despite the alarm being raised, and despite the fact that this boat, fleeing Libya, had been located by armed forces operating in the Mediterranean, no attempt was made to rescue the 72 passengers aboard, then it is a dark day for Europe as a whole," Çavusoglu declared. "I call for an immediate and comprehensive inquiry into the circumstances of the deaths of the 61 people who perished, including babies, children and women who – one by one – died of starvation and thirst while Europe looked on," he added.

Çavusoglu's intervention came as news emerged of another migrant boat which sank last Friday, according to the UN's refugee agency. Up to 600 were on board the overcrowded vessel as it fled the Libyan capital, Tripoli.

Witnesses who left on another boat shortly afterwards reported seeing remnants of the ship and the bodies of passengers in the sea. The International Organisation for Migration, which has staff on Lampedusa, said it had spoken to a Somali woman who lost her four-month-old baby in the tragedy, and said that it was unclear how many passengers had managed to swim to safety.

According to testimony collected by UNHCR workers in Lampedusa, migrants on the second boat setting sail from Tripoli attempted to disembark when they saw the first boat sink, but were prevented from doing so by armed men.

The UNHCR has insisted that more communication is needed between coastguards, military and commercial ships to minimise migrant deaths at sea.

"We need to take heed of a situation that is very much evolving. We have to cooperate much more closely," said a spokesperson, Laura Boldrini, adding that ships should not wait for a problem to arise before attempting to help migrant boats. "Rescue should be automatic, without waiting for the boat to break apart or the engine to stop running," she said.

Following the Guardian report into the plight of the migrant boat left to drift in the Mediterranean after suffering mechanical problems, Natorejected suggestions that any of its units were involved in apparently ignoring the vessel. Officials pointed out that the Charles De Gaulle, a French aircraft carrier identified as having possibly encountered the boat, was not under direct Nato command at the time – although it was involved in the Nato-led operations in Libya.

"Nato vessels are fully aware of their responsibilities with regard to international maritime law regarding safety of life at sea," said a spokesman.

French defence officials denied that any of their ships were involved. "The [Charles De Gaulle] was never less than 200km (160 miles) from the Libyan coast," read a statement. "It is therefore not possible that it could have crossed the path of this drifting vessel which came from the Misrata region. If this was the case, it would have obviously come to the rescue of these people, in some way or another."

In 2010, the statement added, French naval vessels intercepted around 40 refugee boats and came to the assistance of more than 800 people.

Campaigners believe that calls for European ships to be more active in assisting migrants are now becoming more urgent. "All of these migrant boats are incredibly overcrowded and these are desperate people," said Professor Niels Frenzen, a refugee law specialist at the University of Southern California. "Given the hundreds of deaths we know about – and many more we probably aren't aware of – any migrant boat that's being observed right now is by definition a vessel that is in distress, and one which needs rescue."

Frenzen added that with Nato, the EU border agency Frontex, national coastguards and other unilateral forces all operating simultaneously in the Mediterranean, there was an "incredible mess of overlapping missions and jurisdictional confusion over the boundaries of different search and rescue regions".

"We've got this incredible concentration of ships and aircraft in that sea, many of which are there under security council resolution 1973 [which authorises military operations in Libya], the primary purpose of which is to protect civilian life," he said.

The UN refugee agency issued a warning for all vessels to keep an eye out for unseaworthy migrant boats in the Mediterranean.

>via: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/09/refugees-libya