Human Cargo Read online

  Rarely, in fact, do those arriving at Lampedusa make it to shore on their own steam. More often, their boats are spotted by the helicopters that patrol these coasts, or are picked up on the radar screens of the coast guard, who go out to meet them as they near land. The coast guard hopes both to net a scafisto, bringing his cargo into land, and to help a sinking craft, by taking its passengers on board, in order to conduct them into a secluded corner of Lampedusa’s large natural port, far from the eyes of tourists who might be offended by the spectacle of such bedraggled and confused new visitors.

  Comandante Rino Gagliano is the captain of one of the Italian coast guard’s middle-sized motor launches that patrol Lampedusa, though the more exciting tours of duty for the coastal police are farther north, along the Albanian coast. An Italian-Albanian agreement to try to stem the flow of migrant workers escaping the extreme poverty of Albania has succeeded in diminishing the numbers who manage to get out. Off the Albanian coast, says the comandante, he chases traffickers who have taken to putting four powerful engines on their fast rubber dinghies, with which they can easily outmaneu-ver the slower police launches. But the comandante is not really after excitement. His wife taught history at Lampedusa’s one secondary school until her early death not long ago, and he has a particular fondness for the island’s low white houses and its stark shoreline. He talks with sympathy about the desperate people he regularly fishes from the water, and the cups of good Italian coffee he takes pleasure in giving them: like all Sicilians, he is baffled by the idea of countries where coffee is not a staple of life. He says that rescuing boats about to sink takes priority, as it does under all the laws that have governed seafaring for many generations, over arresting scafisti as they hasten back toward international waters. Like all the sailors and coast guards who work these parts, he tells stories of asylum seekers flung into the sea at gunpoint so that the trafficker can get away faster, of boats so old and ailing and crowded that even small waves can sink them, of headless bodies found floating at sea. What haunts him is those he never sees: the refugees who are known to have drowned in these stretches of water, whose names are never recorded and whose bodies are never found. The “canale di Sicilia” he says, has become a cemetery. Of the 3,000 known deaths recorded by human rights groups of people trying to enter Europe in the last ten years, many are those who drowned in the waters that separate Italy and Spain from North Africa.

  The comandante, like the majority of the islanders, feels mostly sympathy for those so desperate that they will risk their lives in this way. To suffer so much is to merit recognition, assistance: the more the suffering, the swifter and more just the recompense. The tales of these travelers have come to fascinate the local people, for whom shipwrecks and endurance are part of the fabric of their history, something that reflects well on the strength and vigor of their island, its robustness in withstanding cycles of invaders and newcomers and in providing pioneers for new worlds elsewhere. The fact that the extracomunitari arrive with nothing, sometimes virtually naked, having shed or lost their clothes in rough seas, shorn, as it were, of their pasts, makes them appealing. There is pride in being the first to show off Europe, to vaunt all that it has to offer, as if to reassure the survivors of such terrors and hardships that the journeys have been worth it. The past is truly another country, and their hosts intend to make it so.

  In Italy, a country renowned, with exasperation and affection, for the confusion and corruption of its bureaucracy, the operation to corral and process asylum seekers appears almost streamlined. On Lampedusa, the extracomunitari are marched off into a Centro di Permanenza Temporanea, a Permanent Temporary Center, the absurdity of its name belying a system that those who run it claim is both humane and practical, but that in recent months has been cracking under the strain of growing numbers. Here, in a former military barracks, new arrivals are briefly interviewed, provided with clothes and a few necessities, and given cigarettes and permission to use a telephone. There is a sense of pride among the island’s yearlong residents that they have responded so calmly and generously to their unexpected visitors. Father Francesco, Lampedusa’s young and eager second priest, who for three months last year became acting director for the island’s CPT, speaks of a larder always kept full in anticipation of new refugees, of doctors on duty to care for those who have been at sea for many weeks, of having to fend off journalists after a sudden influx of boats. Though few of the asylum seekers described their reception so glowingly, Father Francesco talks about his permanent temporary visitors indulgently and says that they are given forks, but no knives, and no razors (they enjoy the services of the local barber), though there have been no attempted suicides on the island. Macaroni with meat sauce, he volunteers, is their preferred dish. Some arrive with scabies, others with malaria and heart disease, and many of the women are pregnant, but all are treated kindly, and those few who have died while he has been on Lampe-dusa have been given a corner of the town’s cemetery, where they lie together, under plain wooden crosses, in earth covered with geraniums and wildflowers.

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  BECAUSE OF ITS geographic position, at the southern edge of Europe, and its long coastline—over 4,500 miles—Italy has now become the first country of arrival for more asylum seekers than any of its European Union partners. A few go overland from the former Yugoslavia, but most arrive by sea, making the boat people of Italy—18,000 arrived in 2002 on Sicily alone; 20,000 in 2003—the seafaring refugees of our times. And of all times: Europe’s earliest migrants came by sea to Sicily, perhaps as early as 20,000 B.C., from east and west, and later by sea and land came Greeks, Carthaginians, Phoenicians, Romans, Saracens, Normans, Hohenstaufens, Angevins, Aragonese, Castillians, Austrians, Piedmontese, and the Neapolitan Bourbons. Over the centuries, Sicily has been conquered, abandoned, colonized, and recolonized by tyrants, kings, mercenaries, dukes, plenipotentiaries, and emperors. There is probably less Italian blood, so Sicilians say, in their veins than there is Greek, Arab, Norman, or Spanish. Positioned on the east-west and north-south routes in the Mediterranean, the island is fertile, with excellent natural harbors, but Goethe, on his travels at the end of the eighteenth century, described it as a morose place, though this was long before Palermo’s vast palazzi had crumbled, the fortunes of their families eaten up by feuds and generations of squabbling and idleness.

  Yet right up until the 1980s, Italy, particularly its impoverished south, was associated more with emigration than immigration. Between unification in 1861 and the end of the twentieth century, about 26 million Italians are said to have left home for the New World, driven abroad by the neglect and plunder of rich absentee-landowner families, so that as early as 1827 de Tocqueville, traveling around the island, described its interior as almost entirely devoid of human habitation. By World War I, some villages had lost most of their male population, and one out of eight Italian emigrants was a Sicilian. Though part of the new united and unified Italy, Sicily remained its most neglected area, and not until after World War II was it granted regional autonomy and its own Parliament.

  At first, influxes of migrants into Italy were treated as single emergencies and approached with leniency. In 1990, the then minister of justice, Martelli, annulled Italy’s existing reservation to the 1951 Refugee Convention—the reservation allowed refugee status only to European asylum seekers—and set up a single procedure for deciding refugee status, under a commission based in Rome. The decision procedure was to take no longer than forty-five days, during which the applicants would be housed and fed. But then came a large number of landings—Albanians in 1990 and 1991, Yugoslavs in 1992, more Albanians in 1997, Kurds in 1998—each dealt with under measures of temporary protection. Though Italy is a signatory to Europe’s various immigration treaties, it was only with the Napolitano Bill of 1998—which Italians regard as their first attempt at formulating a proper asylum policy—that rules were drawn up to govern procedures and the deportation of those deemed not to be bona tide asylum seekers. In man
y ways, even the Napolitano law was regarded as generous, since its right to asylum was broadened to include people suffering discrimination at home by virtue of their sex and their membership in particular persecuted ethnic groups.

  With Silvio Berlusconi’s 2001 election much of the leniency has vanished. Migrants seeking to work in Italy can no longer simply arrive and then look for jobs; they must apply for work permits first at the Italian consulate in their own countries, and once their contract is over, they must return home. Under the Bossi-Fini law, passed in 2003, those who arrive illegally on Italy’s shores may now be held for sixty days in a CPT for processing, after which those identified in preliminary hearings as coming from “safe” countries—hence the reluctance of asylum seekers to say too much about where they come from—or judged criminal or too blatantly in search of work, are given deportation orders. It was Umberto Bossi of the Lega Nord who declared that cannons should be set up on Italy’s coasts to deter would-be asylum seekers. Only around 10 percent—compared, say, with Sweden’s 50 percent or the UK’s 40 percent plus— of all who enter Italy illegally are said to be ultimately recognized as genuine refugees and given that status under the Convention. While they wait to be processed, they are released, like Roland and Mercy, to cope as well as they can, until summoned before a commission in Rome to put their case for asylum. However, since this process can now take up to a year or more, many have left their designated addresses long before the summons, to disappear into Italy’s vast black economy, or to drift northward illegally into other European countries. Only 20 percent of those who apply for asylum are reported to turn up in Rome for their interview with the commission.

  As of 2001, Italy was said to have over 1.5 million legal migrants and as many as 1 million illegal ones. On average, 75,000 of the latter are deported each year. (Only Greece expels more.) Over a third of Italy’s prison population is now said to be foreign. In 2002, it was reported that only 16 percent of the nation’s 50,000 to 70,000 prostitutes were in fact Italian; the rest came mainly from Albania, followed by Yugoslavia, Nigeria, and South America. The word extracomunitari has come to have distinctly racist connotations, and violent attacks on refugees, Jews, Gypsies, and especially on African and black immigrants, attacks previously almost unknown in Italy, have become widespread. Officially, Italy has no Maghrebini— people from Algeria, Tunisia, or Morocco—because the North Africans have earned the reputation of being involved in drugs and crime and so tend to fail the first screening process. After September 11, there was a sharp increase in the number of negative decisions handed down to asylum seekers.

  The Permanent Temporary Centers have attracted considerable hostility among Italy’s liberals, who fear that the secrecy and high walls, the rolls of barbed wire and hangarlike structures, conceal deprivation and ill-treatment. Sixty days, they argue, is a frighteningly long period to spend locked up, in total idleness, not knowing what will become of you. Migrants emerging from the CPTs complain of inedible food, extreme discomfort, and a pervasive despair and anxiety. Not long ago, Medecins Sans Frontieres carried out research into Italy’s sixteen CPTs. They found that in some of them, the refugees were kept in small enclosures, freezing in winter, boiling in summer; that the guards were sometimes brutal; that there was excessive use of antidepressants and tranquilizers; and that self-mutilation was endemic. A politician of the left, Calogero Micciche, amid considerable publicity, insisted on being allowed into Agri-gento’s CPT, which is housed in a former factory in one of the town’s newer concrete suburbs. Conditions inside, he told waiting reporters when he emerged, flustered by having his video camera confiscated, were appalling, with excrement all over the walls, and women detainees offering their services as prostitutes.

  After the fuss died down, those who are allowed to visit the centers officially, the priests, doctors, and welfare officers, expressed astonishment at his words, insisting that the CPTs, though indeed charmless since most are housed in former barracks and factories, behave honorably and generously toward the asylum seekers. “The paradox,” says Daniela D’Amico, who recently helped set up a new voluntary organization dealing with issues of migration in Agri-gento, “is that all these new laws which are designed to stop arrivals in fact make no difference. Migration, asylum, these are a social phenomenon of our time. We have lost the memory of our history. Immigrants are the myth of our particular culture.” The truth is that many Sicilians have mixed feelings about the asylum seekers: they are at least partly proud of the hospitality they accord their unexpected and unwanted visitors, remembering that the Italians, out of all the people of Europe, most softened the Nazi persecution of the Jews, so that of 60,000 Jewish Italians a third survived the war. They are also pleased with their apparent efficiency at dealing with such large numbers, and they are understandably reluctant to see in these detention centers anything but humane holding operations for a fair and just refugee policy. Sicilians regard themselves as rather apart from the people of the mainland, and with some reason: Cavour, the prime minister who achieved unification in 1860, and who had per-sonally never been farther south than Florence, once said in Parliament that he thought Sicilians spoke Arabic.

  A third of the migrant inmates have served prison sentences in Italy, for a variety of criminal acts, and are sent to the CPTs to await deportation. Those from Sicily may be incarcerated there or on the mainland, for as one center fills up, newcomers are shunted to those that currently have space. Clandestini, extracomunitari, illegal migrants, refugees, asylum seekers: nowhere is the muddle that surrounds migration more apparent than on the shores of Sicily, and nowhere is the line that separates those judged worthy to enter from those turned away more gray.

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  THE SHIPWRECK THAT; killed Happy and landed Mercy and her unborn child on the beach at Capo Rossello has had ripples all along Sicily’s southern shores. Something about the intensity of the freak storm, the extraordinary size of the hailstones, and the way that the survivors clung for so long to the lacerating volcanic rocks touched a chord with Sicilians more accustomed to tourists enjoying the tranquillity of their beaches. In the days that followed the accident, as journalists and television reporters flocked from all over Italy, people from miles around Realmonte arrived with offers of clothes and food. Dr. Palumbo is the village physician for San Biagio Platan], some twenty-five miles up into the mountains above Agrigento. He was having lunch, at three o’clock on a sunny afternoon, after a long morning with his patients, when I found him at home, surrounded by wisteria and orange trees. It was after his wife read about the bereaved Liberians in Realmonte, he explained, that he went to the prefect in Agrigento and offered to help. Dr. Palumbo knows all about the clandestini: he is the chairman of his local branch of the Misericordia, and the director of social services for the CPT in Agrigento.

  After Dr. Palumbo’s intervention, fifteen young Liberians, five of them women, moved to San Biagio, a small town set among high summer pastures, where the inhabitants were quick to come forward with offers of help. Like Father Giuseppe in Realmonte, Dr. Palumbo was proud of his patients’ generosity toward their visitors. His wife, a teacher, soon borrowed a room in a neighbor’s house and fashioned a classroom with a borrowed blackboard and chairs and books scrounged from the local school; she began giving lessons in Italian. One of the young Liberian girls found work as an occasional maid; several of the boys were invited to help out the local builders. I hough none could be officially employed, it was tacitly understood that they should be paid like everyone else while they were waiting for their claims for asylum to be heard, and that they should not stay idle and penniless. When one of the young women was found to be pregnant, and had her baby, the Italian woman who had become close to her offered to adopt and care for both mother and child.

  But soon, the warm relationship between the Sicilians and their Liberian guests seemed to turn a little sour. As Dr. Palumbo sees it, everyone understood that at first the Africans would be reluctant to talk much about
who they were and where they came from. But everyone assumed that their reticence would evaporate once they felt secure and appreciated. But it didn’t; if anything, it grew stronger. It was as if word had reached them that they should give away absolutely nothing about themselves, not even their real names. They began changing their names, and then their ages, and any details that they had previously let slip about their journeys. After he overheard two of the young men speaking French to each other, Dr. Palumbo began to wonder whether some were not in fact Sierra Leoneans or Guineans; he thought that they might have been primed by the smuggler to give as their home Liberia, a country so bedeviled by constant civil war that refugees believe that no European nation would feel able to return refugees to it. Several of the young women turned out to be pregnant; when one gave her age first as eighteen, and then as twenty-five, and then as twenty-two, Dr. Palumbo was at first amused, and then mildly irritated, and he begged her to find an age and stick to it, if only for the sake of convenience.