The Killing Seas
By HANS LUCHT
NYT
Copenhagen
EBO got nervous when, in the middle of one night in 2003, he was taken to the beach in Zuwarah by the Libyan smugglers and saw the challenge he had taken on. He and two other fishermen from Ghana had agreed to be captains of a boat filled with migrant workers from sub-Saharan Africa across the Mediterranean Sea to Italy. In exchange, they were to get free passage. They were told that they could refuse to go if the boat was not seaworthy or if the smugglers had overloaded it.
When they arrived at the beach the boat was already crammed with people waiting to push off. It lay so deep in the water that Ebo couldn’t even see the boat, only the passengers covering every inch of the deck. “Oh, my God,” he thought. “What have I done?”
Despite their reservations, Ebo and his fellow fishermen, whom I met in Naples, Italy, while conducting anthropological fieldwork among Ghanaian immigrants, made the journey and lived to tell about it. Many others didn’t.
For years, European countries paid Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi to control the flow of African migrants like Ebo across the Mediterranean — even if the methods were inhumane. Now, armed Qaddafi loyalists are forcing migrants onto the high seas to protest the NATO airstrikes in support of Libya’s rebels. African and Asian migrants are the pawns in this brutal geopolitical faceoff.
(More here.)
NYT
Copenhagen
EBO got nervous when, in the middle of one night in 2003, he was taken to the beach in Zuwarah by the Libyan smugglers and saw the challenge he had taken on. He and two other fishermen from Ghana had agreed to be captains of a boat filled with migrant workers from sub-Saharan Africa across the Mediterranean Sea to Italy. In exchange, they were to get free passage. They were told that they could refuse to go if the boat was not seaworthy or if the smugglers had overloaded it.
When they arrived at the beach the boat was already crammed with people waiting to push off. It lay so deep in the water that Ebo couldn’t even see the boat, only the passengers covering every inch of the deck. “Oh, my God,” he thought. “What have I done?”
Despite their reservations, Ebo and his fellow fishermen, whom I met in Naples, Italy, while conducting anthropological fieldwork among Ghanaian immigrants, made the journey and lived to tell about it. Many others didn’t.
For years, European countries paid Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi to control the flow of African migrants like Ebo across the Mediterranean — even if the methods were inhumane. Now, armed Qaddafi loyalists are forcing migrants onto the high seas to protest the NATO airstrikes in support of Libya’s rebels. African and Asian migrants are the pawns in this brutal geopolitical faceoff.
(More here.)
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