Blog

Italy Bangs the Door Shut on the Castaways From Africa

by Jason Horowitz
(New York Times, 07/22/2004)

PORTO EMPEDOCLE, Sicily, July 21 - Tied up at a pier in this slumbering Sicilian harbor, the Cap Anamur looks like nothing so much as an obsolete freighter ready for scrapping. Except for the Italian Coast Guard vessel standing guard, the only clue to its identity and its role in an international incident that is still shaking Italy is a small banner that reads "Germany Emergency Doctors."

Most of the workers loading and unloading fresh fish nearby ignore it as an eyesore, but some locals drive their cars around this dusty port to catch a closer glimpse. What they see is a humble ship outfitted with a 35-ton yellow crane used for lifting shipwrecked boats out of the sea and an onboard hospital temporarily bereft of patients. Its twin decks, designed to carry up to 400 people, are empty and quiet.

For weeks the Cap Anamur, operated by a German humanitarian group of the same name, drifted off this arresting Mediterranean coastline waiting for a country - any country - to welcome ashore its wayward cargo of 37 shipwrecked Africans.

It had rescued them on June 20, plucking them from a sinking rubber dinghy near Libya. The Africans claimed - falsely, according to the Italian government - to be refugees from Sudan's traumatized Darfur region.

Germany turned down their requests for political asylum. Malta, too. Italy, ever uneasy about illegal immigrants slipping through its long and porous shores, sent Coast Guard and police boats to keep the ship at bay.

So the 300-foot blue and white Cap Anamur, which arrived off Sicily on July 1, simply waited as the United Nations and the Vatican applied pressure and told Italy it was high time it did the right thing.

After a standoff that lasted almost three weeks, Italy acquiesced and opened its port.

Then it opened its jail cells.

On July 12, the Italian police arrested the ship's German captain as well as the head of the humanitarian organization on charges of aiding and abetting illegal immigration.

"They didn't expect that," said Giorgio Bisagna, the Sicilian representative for the Italian Council for Refugees. "Italy treated them like human traffickers. They even sequestered the boat. It left me perplexed."

The German activists were released after five days behind bars, but Elias Bierdel, the head of the group Cap Anamur, stands accused of smuggling illegal immigrants and risks up to 12 years in prison, the loss of the ship and a fine of $18,500 for every immigrant brought into the country. He has been banished from Sicily and two other Italian regions with a high frequency of illegal immigration.

"It remains totally absurd that people who do nothing but save life wherever and whenever be connected to illegal immigration," Mr. Bierdel said. "It's really stupid."

Mr. Bierdel insists that Europe's failure to deal with immigration adequately is the continent's greatest vice, and though he denies picking a fight with Italy, he obviously enjoys the debate he helped stir up. "We really hit a nerve," he said.

It is that provocative streak that has Italian officials doubting whether Mr. Bierdel's stated intentions to save the lives of desperate refugees were as honorable as he makes them out to be. They suspiciously note that the Cap Anamur arrived in Italian waters just as the issue of illegal immigration leaked back into national debate.

Italy's constitutional court this month struck down parts of a tough new immigration law that has drastically reduced the flow of illegal immigrants into the country.

"Cap Anamur's job is saving lives, and for that we have to give thanks," said Giuseppe Rando, the commanding officer for the local Coast Guard. "But why did he want to come to Porto Empedocle?"

Mr. Rando said that maritime laws dictate that shipwrecked people be taken to the closest port, but noted that the Africans were rescued near Libya. The Cap Anamur then navigated through Maltese waters before passing the Sicilian island of Lampedusa, which is often inundated with illegal immigrants.

"Why not Libya, Malta, Lampedusa?" he asked, and then provided the answer: "Publicity."

Justice Minister Roberto Castelli, who belongs to the Northern League, the largely xenophobic party that helped draft Italy's embattled immigration law, worried less about the German group's ulterior motives than about the consequences of its delivering the refugees.

"Italy is looking like the soft underbelly of Europe on immigration," Mr. Castelli said in a statement. "The Cap Anamur incident creates a precedent that risks being devastating for Italy."

But humanitarian groups and some liberal politicians here are more immediately concerned about the plight of the Africans, though there are questions about their motives.

Italy's Interior Minister, Giuseppe Pisanu, told Parliament on Wednesday that the Africans were not Sudanese refugees at all, but illegal immigrants hailing mostly from Ghana and Nigeria.

Some activists, like Mr. Bisagna, brushed that off as a mere technicality, arguing that most of Africa suffers under a human rights crisis. Nevertheless, Italy has turned down the immigrants' requests for political asylum and has sent them to a detention center in Rome awaiting expulsion.

Back in Porto Empedocle, Luca Lopez, a local diver who shuttled doctors to and from the Cap Anamur during the tense days of the showdown, dismissed the entire business as "just politics."

Mr. Lopez's 13-year-old nephew, Aaron, was not so cynical.

"Maybe the refugees stopped in Malta, or wanted to go to Germany, and then they came here," he said, standing on a rock between the littered port and the azure sea. "We're hoping that they don't get sent back. There are wars where they are from."

.
 

<-- back