Sixth Anniversary of 368 Drowned Immigrants Close to Lampedusa

I was going provide an essay for this newsletter on the curious parallels between Helen Lamb’s Three Kinds of Kissing and Sigmunds Skujiņš’s Nakedness, which both concern the secrets and often tragic lies of adolescents, and are set around 1970, one in small-town Britain and the other in the then small-town society of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Latvia. A fascinating subject and it will only be postponed to late November, because today when I opened my paper in an Italian café I found a much more compelling but less enjoyable task for this month’s newsletter. No literary flourishes here, but it goes straight to the heart and reminds us of the too often forgotten and most important moral question facing Europeans at this time (unlike Johnson’s repetitive charade which is never out of the media).

Most of the substantive points are contained in this interview, but it is worth reflecting here that the people of Lampedusa see this human tragedy unfold on a daily basis and knowing the facts are therefore moved in the way nearly all humans would be, if the mainstream media shared those facts rather than concealing them, occasionally exploiting them and encouraging general amnesia. I have taken this interview from the pages of il manifesto (3 October 2019) without their permission because I believe that this great institution would prefer that the news is spread as widely as possible and as quickly as possible, and I will notify them. The article and interview are by Carlo Lania (questions in bold)

Allan Cameron

Former doctor on Lampedusa remembers the day of the shipwreck

“What I remember of that night is that I would prefer not to remember it at all.” Pietro Bartolo still can’t shake off the sight of that horrific shipwreck off Lampedusa which cost the lives of 368 migrants, almost all of them Eritreans. “During the thirty years I worked at the surgery on that Sicilian island (he started in 1988, editor’s note), I examined and treated tens of thousands of migrants. I was also there on 3 October 2013, when a large boat carrying more than five hundred men, women and children capsized a few hundred metres from the port. “I know that tomorrow (now today, editor’s note) will be a terrible day,” he says in Brussels where he has been working as vice-chairman of the LIBE Commission. “Last night I dreamt of the first child I saw dead.”

Who notified you of what had happened?

The first phone calls were around five in the morning, but the survivors arrived around eight o’clock. I was not well because a month earlier I had suffered a stroke, but I was there because during the night there had been other boats coming in. So when the harbourmaster’s office notified me of the shipwreck, I was already at the quay. Half an hour later, the first local boat arrived having saved forty-nine people. Fiorino and Grazia used to take tourists on boat trips, and they had been up all night. Towards morning they heard cries for help and when they arrived they were traumatised by what they saw. The young woman was crying desperately because she hadn’t been able to save more of them. I examined the survivors who were all covered with diesel, because when the boat turned over it emptied its fuel tanks into the sea. Half an hour later, Domenico’s fishing boat arrived with seventeen young people and some dead bodies. The firemen had put them in body bags, and that’s where a miracle occurred.

Why?

I took a girl’s pulse to confirm her death and it seemed that I could feel a beat and then another one. We rushed her to the surgery where we put her on drips and did all we could to save her. In the end that girl who had been zipped up in a body bag was able to make it and now lives in Sweden.

Did you immediately know of the gravity of what had happened?

The harbourmaster’s office had warned me, but I didn’t think that there would be so many deaths. When I returned to the quay, I found 111 body bags. I was so sickened that I vomited and cried. I had to examine the corpses, and therefore open the bags. I was fearful of what I would find: a child, a woman. These are experiences that change your life, and you start to ask yourself questions. One thing that made a big impression was that inside the bags there were so many children dressed for a party. Their mothers had got them ready for their arrival in Europe. They were just three hundred metres from the port; can you believe that, three hundred metres? They had plaited hair or smart shoes to show that they were children like any others, just like ours.

Over recent years there have been many, many shipwrecks, and people have often argued over the appropriateness of showing the bodies of those who have drowned at sea. What do you think?

Those bodies need to be shown, as do the marks of torture, suffering, burns and beatings. These things have to be made known; we all need to know the truth about what migrants in Libya are going through. People mustn’t think that those who escape are terrorists, diseased or coming here to steal our jobs. All this mendacious and twisted propaganda has only created fear. Lies that have deceived Italians. We close our borders in the name of security, but who considers the security of these people.

Was this tragedy in Lampedusa a truly European one?

This tragedy occurred in Lampedusa, the entry port to Europe, and we are all responsible for what occurred and all of us should settle our accounts with history.

In a few days there will be a meeting of foreign ministers in Luxembourg to discuss the agreement just signed in Malta. What do you think of the agreement that’s been reached?

Let’s say that it has been a small step forward because four countries – Italy, Malta, Germany and France – have got together and tried to sort out the migration situation in the hope of extending the agreement to all member states, as should rightly happen. Obviously there are some things I disagree with, such as the fact that they continue cast aspersions against the NGOs who have made up for the inactions of Italy and Europe. And we need to stress once more [our condemnation] of cooperation with the Libyan Coast Guard, when we all know what happens to migrants when they are picked up by their launches.