Another shipwreck, a foretold tragedy, has filled our land with death.

Our first thought is for the shipwrecked, their families, their friends. From tormented places - Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Syria - they sought a better future in Europe and found death. Our hearts are broken and we feel their pain.

Now, as the sea mercilessly returns with the bodies of dozens of childrenǝ, women and men, the reality and the hypocrisy of the government are ripped open, statements are flowing to cover their responsibilities and wash their consciences.

The Minister of the Interior, Piantedosi, while the corpses are still lying on the beaches of Calabria, insists on the campaign: we must 'stop the departures'. But the only departures blocked by the government so far are those of the civilian rescue ships. The only alternatives for thousands of women, men and children should be either death at sea or detention camps in Libya, Turkey or elsewhere.

Council President Meloni speaks of 'the responsibility of the traffickers'. But illegal trafficking only exists because there are no legal routes to Europe. In any case, she forgets to say that the humanitarian tragedy that has turned the Mediterranean into one big mass grave did not start today. She knows very well, Meloni, that without safe alternatives the traffickers will continue to proliferate and ply their trade. But the 'defence of the sacred borders of the homeland', this dirty propaganda that continues to pollute every debate on migration, needs its toll of innocent blood.

This umpteenth tragedy fills us with grief, but it will not stop us from investigating and questioning in the name of these and all victims.

More than 18,000 people have landed on the Calabrian coasts of the Ionian Sea in 2022, and for at least three years this has been one of the busiest routes: have our Coast Guard and the Guardia di Finanza operating in this area been provided with sufficient resources and men to protect the lives of the people arriving? What is still waiting for a new extraordinary Italian and European institutional search and rescue mission at sea here, as well as in the central Mediterranean?

And more specifically, with regard to last night's shipwreck, when did the competent authorities receive news of this boat in distress a few dozen miles off the Italian coast? What action did the European agency Frontex, which is also present in the area with a Romanian border police patrol boat, take, apart from aerial observation by the Eagle 1 aircraft that flew over the vessel at around 10.30 p.m. yesterday? Where was the MAI patrol boat, which has been operating between the port of Crotone and Roccella Ionica in recent days, last night? Were all the necessary measures taken in time to rescue people whose lives were in danger in a sea where weather conditions were rapidly deteriorating?

Faced with this umpteenth tragedy, we are sickened by the hypocrisy and propaganda. Instead, we call even more insistently for the opening of legal and safe entry channels to Europe, for the evacuation of the detention centres in Turkey and Libya, for Italy and Europe to set up an adequate institutional rescue mission at sea, and for the ships of the civil fleet to be allowed to operate freely and without being prosecuted.

MEDITERRANEA Saving Humans
26 February 2023