Beitrag vom 08.10.2013

Sowetan, Johannesburg

EDITORIAL: Drowned migrants deserve better

DROWNING in a choppy sea when your overcrowded ship capsizes, because fire has broken out and the passengers are seized by panic, is a horrible way to die. For the disaster to happen only a kilometre from your destination, in sight of an unwelcoming Eldorado from which you will probably be expelled even if you reach its shores, must make it even worse. The loved ones you left behind in your stone-hearted homeland are up to their necks in debt you incurred to make the illegal and perilous journey on the family's behalf. They may never know what happened to you.

That was the appalling fate of up to 300 African men, women and children, mostly from the closed dictatorship of Eritrea. Their vessel sank on Thursday off the Italian island of Lampedusa, Europe's most southerly outpost in the Mediterranean Sea.

By Monday, 194 bodies had been recovered. The islanders have witnessed the tragic outcome of dozens of shipwrecks but never on this scale. Yet the local fishermen are not inured to the awful fate of people they never knew. They sailed out to the point where the ship went down and laid their own wreaths.

The shock in Italy is so great that immigration law may be softened as a result. Pope Francis prayed for the dead. Lampedusa was the first place he visited outside the Vatican after he was elected in July. He went to pay homage to the tens of thousands of desperate migrants over the past decade who were willing to take any risk to leave Africa and squeeze into Europe. Unknown thousands have died in the attempt. A powerful glimpse of their fear and sacrifice is provided in Moussa Toure's 2012 film La Pirogue (The Canoe) about the terrors of the route from Senegal to the Canaries.

Yet five days after the latest trauma, the African Union (AU) still has got nothing to say — not even a word of condolence. The top item on its website is a workshop on land policy.

How can this be? Is it because the reasons for which many young Africans are so desperate to leave some countries — the lack of jobs, opportunity and freedom — demand a deep and painfully honest reflection by our societies and our leaders? The hundreds who were lost at sea last week deserve a posthumous explanation for the reasons every AU summit draw a veil over the way President Isayas Afewerki runs Eritrea.