Did NATO Leave 62 Africans to Die at Sea Off
Libya?
09 May, 2011 | By Vivienne Walt (TIME)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.")
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.
.Courtesy
Libya?
09 May, 2011 | By Vivienne Walt (TIME)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- 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
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.")
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.
.Courtesy
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