Per la libertà di movimento, per i diritti di cittadinanza

Africa as Europe: better letting them die than setting a precedent

In this moment there are 400 men in the middle of the sea without water nor food. Maybe there are more, but we know for certain only these 400. They are off Mauritania since four days, according to what Cinzia Gubbini writes in the article we published in our website on february 7th.
We tried to get some information, to glance all the newspapers, today such as yesterday, hoping that someone talked, if not about some news, at least about the event.
But not a word has been said about it, in the middle of the printed sea press, where even the letters of angry women and their rich husbands find a place, such as all the smallest news able to tickl the morbid curiosity of the common reader.
Thus up to now it’s not possible to add any detail to what Il manifesto said. But perhaps we should write something about this lack, even in order to take out our indignation and sadness.
Obviously other similar events, much more famous, recall to our mind, first of all the ship Cap Anamur, that concerned our country and some of us from close up.

In 2004 it was still possible that something like astonishment surrounded this kind of news, and even that someone told the story of shipwrecked inmigrants who risked their lives, and even that someone listened to it.
Sure, at that time, such as now, there was no happy ending. Everything ended up with imprisonment and deportations, or with death. But maybe it was not possible yet to talk about hundreds of human beings with this coldness, in such a clear way, without any shame, on the contrary, being sure to have general approval.
400 men are in the middle of the sea since four days, without water nor food, and they aren’t staying on a boat fitted out for humanitarian aid, such the Cap Anamur was, but on a makeshift boat, such as so many that leave knowing there are good chances not to arrive.
They are almost all asiatics. They have already travelled all over the world. The last stop of their odyssey perhaps was Guinea Conakry, and now they are off Mauritania, to be precise off the city of Nouadhinbo, where some years ago the inhabitants knew the upheaval caused by suddendly becoming a transit area for subsaharan citizens going to Europe.
Africa is changing, together with its borders. Borders not only cross places, they transform it. European political choices and economical necessities (always closely linked one to the other) are still changing this huge, rich and ravaged continent, such as and even more they used to do during colonialism. Deciding in Madrid that Marocco has to become the leading country in the fight against illegal immigration and that it has to hermetically close its borders, means at the same time delegating to other countries the function Marocco had before in the immigration course.
Borders are moving. From the Mediterranean to the Sahara, and countries are changing with it. That’s why, in the diplomatic dispute to decide who has to shoulder these 400 shipwrecked people, listening to the declarations of the Foreign Ministers of Spain, Mauritius and Senegal we are astonished: they are identical. Nobody wants them, in order not to set a precedent. Moreover, there are no women nor children among the shipwrecked people, so there will be less emotional reactions from public opinion to answer to. Everybody is quarreling, quoting internal laws and paragraphs of international law. Africans such as Europeans, nobody cares that 400 human beings in this moment are abandoned in the middle of the sea. Or caring about them it’s not allowed anymore by the pitiless dynamics of this system.
The migrant people have left the way of Marocco for Senegal and Mauritania. Recently, since also these two countries have been involved in projects of combined seabords patrolling and detention, ships to Spain have started leaving even from Guinea. Thus migrations, through the way of their administration, contribute to plan the new geopolitical maps for the next future. Borders are changing, the attitude of the countries involved is changing, and also the way of immigrants is changing.
A new path comes out for each way being closed, even if thousands people are still dying. It’s a war, an incoming revolution with its own preventive counter-revolution, that does not consist in really stopping, physically, all these thousands men and women moving, but in dehumanizing them, wearing them out, making them arrive to our countries in the conditions decided in this part of the world.
400 men, in this moment, are abandoned in the middle of the sea. Nobody cares. They are just side effects.
by Alessandra Sciurba, Melting Pot