A boat carrying migrants enters the port of Lampedusa. Photograph: Filippo Monteforte /AFP/Getty Images
Who are the people who die in the Mediterranean on an almost daily basis? And why don’t we care? The Guardian has worked with a team of reporters from five other European newspapers to track a very 21st-century odyssey
The boat sank quickly.
One minute Fahad Abdul Kariem was wedged into the hold, legs apart so that another migrant could sit in front of him. The next, the Mediterranean swell was rolling the vessel, the motion aggravated by the scores of African and Indian migrants clinging to the roof canopy. And everyone was in the water….
In those desperate moments in late August, Ayman became another statistic, one of the more than 2,500 people who have died or are missing feared dead after trying to get into Europe across the Mediterranean this year. It’s also a record year for arrivals – 160,000 in the first nine months of the year, already more than double the total for the previous record in 2011. More than 90,000 people have been fished out of the water by the Italian navy.
Why is 2014 proving such a terrible year? The answer is a combination of factors: war, upheaval and economic rout on Europe’s periphery; the cynicism of smugglers who can charge as much as $10,000 (£6,200) to move a person from A to B, even if B is the bottom of the ocean; the breakdown of law and order in one of the principal conduits for migrants – Libya; the Italian rescue mission which paradoxically may be encouraging more people to risk everything in overladen fishing vessels ill-equipped for the job.
Even for those who make it, the reality of life in Europe as an asylum seeker or economic migrant is likely to prove crushing. They aren’t hard to spot: hanging around in the Sicilian countryside, huddled at the railway stations of middle Europe, mustering in the cafes of Athens or in the ghettoes of Amsterdam or Stockholm. For some, the odyssey will come full circle. They will go back home defeated. (Read more…)