Who are the people who die in the Mediterranean on an almost daily basis? And why don’t we care? The Guardian has worked with a team of reporters from five other European newspapers to track a very 21st-century odyssey

Migrants’ tales: ‘I feel for those who were with me. They got asylum in the sea’

Migrants’ tales: ‘I feel for those who were with me. They got asylum in the sea’

The boat sank quickly.



One minute Fahad Abdul Kariem was wedged into the hold, legs apart so that another migrant could sit in front of him. The next, the Mediterranean swell was rolling the vessel, the motion aggravated by the scores of African and Indian migrants clinging to the roof canopy. And everyone was in the water.



“I was under the boat when my hand caught a lifebuoy that I clung to as the last resort,” Kariem said of the shipwreck off Libya this summer. “I saw bodies floating on the sea. Some were wearing lifejackets. One was a child. But I could not see where my friend Ayman was.”

In those desperate moments in late August, Ayman became another statistic, one of the more than 2,500 people who have died or are missing feared dead after trying to get into Europe across the Mediterranean this year. It’s also a record year for arrivals – 160,000 in the first nine months of the year, already more than double the total for the previous record in 2011. More than 90,000 people have been fished out of the water by the Italian navy.



Why is 2014 proving such a terrible year? The answer is a combination of factors: war, upheaval and economic rout on Europe’s periphery; the cynicism of smugglers who can charge as much as $10,000 (£6,200) to move a person from A to B, even if B is the bottom of the ocean; the breakdown of law and order in one of the principal conduits for migrants – Libya; the Italian rescue mission which paradoxically may be encouraging more people to risk every­thing in overladen fishing vessels ill-equipped for the job.



Even for those who make it, the reality of life in Europe as an asylum seeker or economic migrant is likely to prove crushing. They aren’t hard to spot: hanging around in the Sicilian countryside, huddled at the railway stations of middle Europe, mustering in the cafes of Athens or in the ghettoes of Amsterdam or Stockholm. For some, the odyssey will come full circle. They will go back home defeated.

Origins

It doesn’t matter where they come from. There is no shortage of broken states on the European periphery. They could be from Damascus or Dakar, Kabul or Khan Younis. They may be Somali or Sudanese, it doesn’t matter. We call them all migrants, but the word is unsatisfactory shorthand. It doesn’t come close to encompassing the desperation of the escaper, the fear of the clandestine, the boredom of the itinerant, the lung-filled panic of the shipwrecked, the desolation of those who actually make it only to find Europe doesn’t want them.

It doesn’t convey the scale of a group of more than 200 million souls (if migrants populated one country it would be the fifth biggest in the world). It doesn’t do justice to a global people-trafficking business worth at least $7bn (£4bn) annually.

Abraham Russom can count himself one of the lucky ones, if you consider it lucky to survive a shipwreck in which 366 fellow passengers died. His journey from the Horn of Africa to Scandinavia took the best part of six months.

“I crossed the desert on foot. I was four days in Khartoum. Two months in Libya. Two months in [the Italian island of] Lampedusa. In Rome, I ran away. And nobody stopped me, thank God. I arrived in Frankfurt by train, then by bus to Stockholm, where I made a request for political asylum.”

Countries are spitting out their people for different reasons: war, revolution, bad governance, dead-end economies, climate change, poverty, persecution. Or, as migrants themselves put it:



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Death at sea: Syrian migrants film their perilous voyage to Europe. Video by Antonia Roupell

“I had problems with the Taliban and had to leave Afghanistan in a hurry.” (Mohamad Ajub, 22, a farmer from Ghazni province)

“My house was confiscated by a Chechen jihadi after the advance of the Islamic State through Riqa.” (Ahmed Salih, a Syrian from Riqa)

“All Yazidi want to leave [Iraq] but most don’t have the money to get out.” (Salar Faez, 23, a Yazidi from northern Iraq)

”I have to get to Europe – it is the only way I can help my family.” (A Ghanaian stacking shelves in Tripoli, who did not want to be named)

“It was obvious that the regime’s grip was getting tight around my neck with the capture of two of my siblings within a fortnight.” (Bahjat Imam, a Syrian from Aleppo)

As for Russom, he left for more prosaic, though equally pressing, reasons: to escape the poverty and repression that has turned Eritrea into one of Africa’s most rapidly emptying countries. An estimated 200,000 Eritreans have left in the past decade – more than 3% of the population.

Routes

The journey to Europe does not go in a straight line. There are no timetables, reservations or 12-hour layovers in an airport hotel. This is an odyssey in the originalsense of the word – protracted, circuitous, not necessarily bound to end.

There are myriad routes. Some are circuitous, others take bafflingly convoluted detours. The average cost appears to be $5,000-$10,000. If it doesn’t work out, you don’t get your money back.

From Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and points further east, Turkey is one option, a conduit either to Greece across the Aegean sea or to the Balkans over land. But these land routes have become less viable in recent months, squeezed by border crackdowns. So some smugglers are routing their charges further south, to Egypt, and the beaches of Alexandria and Damietta, or else flying them to Algiers and Tripoli for onward shipment through the central Mediterranean.

From sub-Saharan Africa, all routes point north, either to Libya and Egypt for those from the Horn of Africa, or Morocco with its tiny Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, and Tunisia for those from west Africa.

Jimi Petros’s journey took 557 days. He walked away from his desert village in Eritrea with nothing but sandals on his feet. “There were two of us,” he said. “We followed a trail in the dark. The guide told us: ‘Don’t speak and do not turn on your cell phone.’” So they didn’t. “Even the smallest of lights could have caught the army’s attention. We were risking prison.” They arrived in Khartoum days later. Petros spent a year sweeping the streets to earn money for his journey northwards. He paid $5,000 to five human traffickers.

Bahjat Murad’s journey, which started in Aleppo last year, was no less bewildering. Having scrambled across the border with Turkey he paid $6,000 for the first leg of a voyage with no clear destination. “I was hurried to the bottom of the ship and locked in a tiny cabin for a week. I lived on biscuits and juice. I had no idea where the ship was going until a Turkish guy came one night and just said ‘Libya’.”

The routing options do not end there. The western Balkans is a notorious smuggling funnel for those desperate to get into an EU country, principally Hungary to the north or Bulgaria to the south. There are land borders further north in which migrants are regularly caught trying to get into Slovakia, Romania and the Baltic republics.

But if there is a hub, a clearing house for the complex, cynical and murderous business of trafficking migrants, then it is a place where the state is defunct and society disenchanted, where the border guards are biddable for $400, where the beaches are broad and where the sea lapping the shore stretches north to another far more promising coastline.

And that place is Libya.

Beaches

Libya’s version of the Mary Celeste sits bobbing up and down tied to a stanchion in Tripoli harbour. A battered black Zodiac craft, it was found by the naval coastguard drifting at sea, with no engine and no sign of the Somali migrants who had been on board.

Only their personal effects remain: passports, identity cards, mobile phones, bank notes and bleached photographs of family groups. “Some of these people we know, we’ve caught them before,” said one coastguard officer, who declined to give his name. “I suspect they are dead, because if they were picked up, they would not leave these things behind.”

Similar tableaux are played out each day along Libya’s 1,100 miles of coast, as bodies and abandoned craft are washed up on the beaches, a reminder of the human cost of the vast flow of migrants from this north African country.

Libya’s people-smuggling business is highly organised and hugely profitable. Traffickers offer two kinds of service. For the richer customers, mostly Syrians, $5,000 buys a crossing by Zodiac to France, a longer journey than Italy but a safer one because there are no naval patrols. For everyone else, $1,000 buys a place on a cramped fishing boat.

“I want the France option, everybody does, but I don’t have the money,” said Mohammed, a heavy-set Syrian who escaped fighting in Damascus and lives in a small Tripoli hotel as he hunts for a boat.

Eritreans comprise one of the largest groups in Libya, sustained financially by wire transfer from their compatriots already in Europa, and supported spiritually by St Francis Catholic church, which runs a weekly clinic for Christians.



“Many of the Eritrean women come here pregnant, we have to help,” said Sister Inma Moya, a Spanish nun. “Why so many pregnant? Because if you are a woman, in these situations, you need a man for protection for the journey, and so she travels with him, and so she becomes pregnant.” Tripoli is the main gathering point, but the smugglers themselves steer clear of the capital, preferring the more district locations such as Zuwara or Garabulli.

Zuwara is popular because it is close to Sicily, 300 miles north, and because it is populated by ethnic Amazigh (Berbers), who exclude outside security forces, giving smugglers a freer hand, according to Tripoli police. Garabulli’s attraction is that it is separated from the coastal highway by sandy bluffs, masking migrants from passing security units.

In contrast to the misery in which they trade, Libya’s people smugglers make big profits. A boat full of migrants each paying as much as $1,000 can rake in $250,000, easily enough to write off the cost of the boat should it founder. And they do.

“The traffic of human beings is a service widely requested on the market,” said one 35-year-old smuggler in Zuwara, who would not give his name. Sitting in an armchair in his new apartment, he revealed plans to buy a villa in Italy next year. “So far, none of boats I filled with people have sunk.”

“They’re very professional,” said Souad, a Syrian teacher who arrived by boat in Europe. “Our smuggler picked back roads. Every 300km [186 miles] we stopped at an empty house where we were given water and a sandwich. Always the same. Everything was very organised.”

A body on the beach at Zuwara. Photograph: Nancy Porsia

Libyan coastguards think smugglers could move three or four times as many migrants if they had more boats, but most only make a single trip, and new vessels are getting harder to find. Libya’s boat builders are frustrated because the onset of civil war cut deliveries of timber from Egypt.

Often the smugglers just hand the boat over to the migrants, to avoid arrest by Italian ships patrolling the Mediterranean. “They give one of the migrants the keys,” said Ben Suleiman, deputy commander of 20 support company, a militia that processes migrants in a temporary detention centre at Tripoli zoo. “They go to sea with no training.”

Some migrants do not get to sea at all. Abdul Rahman Ali, 27, from Niger, paid what money he had, $400, to get to the coast with two friends. One was arrested, while the other fell sick and abandoned the voyage. In Tripoli, Ali made contact with agents in Niger who work with people smugglers, but lacked the minimum $1,000 for a place on a boat. Trying to raise the money, he joined hundreds of African migrants looking for work each morning at a highway intersection, where he was arrested and taken to the detention centre at the zoo. His name was recorded and he was tested for Aids and hepatitis, and told he would be held until a bus was ready to drive him back to Niger.

“It was a hard journey to get here, we spent days in the desert in a 4x4, hiding under a tarpaulin,” he said. “Now I go back, but I will have to try again. In Niger there is work, but it is maybe 10 dinars [about £4] a day. Everyone I know wants to migrate.”

Ocean

For most migrants, the boat moment is bittersweet. On the one hand, this is the point they have yearned for, the culmination of all those miles on foot, all those thousands of dollars they cannot afford. On the other, the fear is palpable. Some will have barely been in the sea before. Most will know that the vessel they are being herded into stands at best an even chance in the robust Mediterranean swell.

Fahad Abdul Kariem, a Syrian refugee from Aleppo, was on a ship with friend trying to get to Europe when the engine broke down. He escaped to Denmark but never saw his friend again. Photograph: Mona Mahmood

In the dead of night Fahad Abdul Kariem and Ayman Karawani left the secret house where they had in effect been incarcerated for 18 days with nothing but the clothes they were wearing. They were driven to the Libyan beach where they found 600 people hustling for space on a boat built for less than half that number.

“We walked in the sea till the water reached our necks to get near the boats,” Kariem recalled. “All our passports and money got wet by the time we reached the plastic boats. Smugglers were throwing us on the boats in haste in fear of being spotted by the police.”

The Zodiacs took them to an old wooden fishing boat, perhaps 30 metres long. “You had to open your legs to allow another man to sit in front of you,” Kariem said. “The sailor was a young Tunisian guy who charged $10,000 for driving the boat. He drove for 10 km [six miles] and then the engine broke down.”

Water began to get in. Frantic bailout attempts failed.

Bahjat Murad was on the same boat. “An Italian ship emerged in the horizon and the smugglers managed to get in touch with its crew,” he recalled. “The ship sent a boat to inquire how to help and offered to get us life jackets and move a few kids and women to the Italian ship. All the Africans and Indians came on top of the ship, which began to shake left and right as water was filling the engine room rapidly. We were trying to hand a kid to the Italian boat but were pushed away by the high waves.

“Suddenly, the ship turned to the left and then capsized. All those who were on the roof automatically fell into the sea. Some people were clinging to the edge of the ship, others were struggling under the water. People were like autumn leaves scattered everywhere floating with their life jackets shouting and screaming. Some of them were crying as the life jacket was shredded, others were looking for their relatives. It was hard to breathe with the high crashing waves. Then the Italian boat brought some lifebuoys and released them around the sinking ship. I swam towards the Italian ship but the waves were pushing me backwards whenever I got closer. By a miracle, I managed to cling to a lifebuoy, where there were 25 people around.”

Ahmed Salih also got on an ill-fated boat.



“I walked in the sea till water reached my neck,” he recalls of his August shipwreck. “My rucksack got completely wet and all bottles of water we took with us were dropped by smugglers in the sea. There was a fight for lifejackets. All the migrants pressed towards the windows and the ship’s balance was shaken. It capsized in a few minutes. I was under the ship, unable to open my eyes in the salty water. I came out of the window up to the sea surface and clung to the edge of the ship. A family was sitting beside me, they managed to come upward too but their 20-year-old daughter could not.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A rescue mission off the coast of Libya, October 2014 Photograph: Darrin Zammit Lupi/REUTERS

“I was beating water with my feet and could feel a body underneath. I dragged it by the hair to the surface, it was my friend’s daughter. She was dead.”

Another group of migrants are only alive thanks to a quirk of fate: their boat was so rotten it sank almost immediately. They were still close to the shore and were spotted by Zuwara’s lone coastguard launch. They escaped with their lives – but few of them feel lucky.

“I paid all this money – $1,000 – just to end up back here,” said a 65-year-old Syrian woman from the Yarmouk settlement in Damascus. She flew to Tunisia to find someone to help her join her daughter in Stockholm. She paid smugglers to cross to Libya via Algeria, only to be robbed in the mountains. Months later she tried again, paying $2,000 to undertake the same dangerous trek. After weeks hiding in Zuwara, she paid her passage on the boat. “It sank from under us,” she said. “So here we are.”

A fellow Palestinian named Mohammed, sitting next to her wearing a black-and-white headscarf, gave a bitter smile. “We sailed for five hours, but then the boat engine broke,” he said. “We were refugees in Syria, then we were refugees in Lebanon, now we are refugees again here.”

Jimi Petros survived perhaps the most worst shipwreck of them all, the night in October last year when 366 migrants died off Lampedusa, the tiny Mediterranean island that has become a miserable byword for transitory migrants.

“I was out on the deck,” he recalled. “I wasn’t seasick, but my legs were sore. We were squashed in so tightly together that I wasn’t able to move them much. When the captain saw the lights of the island, he switched off the motor. Two boats passed us, but neither of them stopped. It was really bad. Water was coming on board and the motor wouldn’t turn on again. So the smuggler set a blanket on fire to attract attention. Then panic erupted on board.”

Petros had only been in the sea once before. A friend, Ahmed, had told him that the best way to float was to turn supine and pretend to be dead.

“I fell into the sea, fully clothed. My friends were screaming around me, but I couldn’t do anything. I pulled up my feet and I was able to kick off my shoes. I got dragged under and I swallowed some water. Then I remembered what Ahmed said. For four hours I prayed to God for my sins with my eyes fixed on the sky.”

Mainland

For those who are fished out of the sea – and there has been on average 500 a day this year – the misery is not yet over. Perhaps the real tragedy of the new boat people is that once they make it to Europe, they are hardly wanted.

Interned sometimes for weeks at a time at processing camps, migrants are quickly disabused of any notion that they have arrived in the promised land.

In Sicily, a principal transit point for Italy, cash-strapped local authorities have struggled to offer even the most modest shelter. Some migrants have been housed in sports halls; some in churches; some even in tents at the port. Many simply vanish as they set off on their journeys north.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Officials stand over the bodies of some of the African migrants killed in a shipwreck off the Italian coast in Lampedusa. Photograph: Ettore Ferrari/EPA

In some cases the ad-hoc reception strategy has caused discomfort among the local population, but in others it has generated solidarity. “I used to watch what was happening in Lampedusa on the TV and think: ‘Poor guys,” said Enzo Amato, who runs a makeshift, frequently overcrowded reception centre for boys in his old primary school in Augusta, eastern Sicily. “Now we’ve all been plunged into this new world. It’s become a mission for us all.”

After the Lampedusa tragedy, Italy scrambled a new force called Mare Nostrum to patrol the Mediterranean and rescue stricken migrant vessels. Since then the “military-humanitarian” operation has saved more than 90,000 people at a cost of €9m (£7m) a month.

“We asked early on … whether other countries would contribute money. But there was nothing. From anyone,” said an Italian diplomat in Brussels. Italy is now planning to discontinue the rescue service next month, when the EU border force Frontex is supposed to take over. Amnesty International has warned that this will endanger more lives as Frontex does not have a search and rescue mandate.



Rescued migrants are supposed to be processed in the country they first arrive in. In practice, Italy turns a blind eye to them heading north. Someone else’s problem.

“There is an unspoken truth that too many countries just don’t want refugees in Europe at all,” said one of the highest ranking EU officials dealing with migration.

And so people such as Mustafa Saidykhan, a teenager from Gambia, are left to make it up as they go along. “I drive trucks, that’s what I want to do. So I want to go to Germany,” he said, after being rescued and deposited at Reggio Calabria. But first he must go wherever the coach revving its engine at the port is taking him. He has no idea where that is. Ten days later he called to say he has made it 500 miles up Italy. It is just as far again to Germany and Mustafa does not yet have a truck to drive, just a plastic bag with a change of clothes.

Many migrants realise that the best thing to do is to slip through the net, to keep their options open.

Petros found it easy to do so. “The truth is,” he said, “when the police heard who we were, they let us go.”

From the Sicilian city of Catania he took a boat to Rome; from Rome, a train to Milan. He was ready to stow away in the boot of a car to go further when his aunt called him from Saudi Arabia, where she works as a cleaner. She lent him €800 and he was able to get a fake passport and plane ticket to Stockholm with a stop in Brussels. “I’d never been on a plane in my life. When I saw the clouds out of the window, I started to laugh,” he said.

For those who get to this stage, a long waiting game ensues for the asylum approval that would theoretically enable them to look for work on a continent where jobs are not exactly abundant.

Salar Faez, the Iraqi Yazidi, sees little future for himself in Bulgaria, where he was picked up. “It is impossible for me to live in Bulgaria,” he said. “It is too difficult for us refugees to make money or find work.”

Bahjat Imam is waiting for his asylum case to be resolved in Denmark, still haunted by the rolling ship, still missing his family back in Syria.

Ahmed Salih lives in a camp for Syrian refugees near the Danish-German border “waiting for my next interview”. “I’m glad that I could make it to Denmark, but I still feel for all the friends who were with me on board the ship. They got asylum in the sea.”

Mohamad Ajub, the Afghan farmer, is relieved to be safe but cannot find work in Bulgaria. He lives on €30 a month. “My idea was just to get to Europe, any country in Europe willing to accept me. I just wanted to live somewhere safe.”

Back home

Feet glued with sand, wet clothes wrapped up in a knotted blue plastic bag, Babacar Diagne is straight out of 10 hours on the sea. And he has not caught a single fish. The beach of Soumbédioune in Dakar is the scene of his new life. Twelve years ago, he left to go to Europe to fulfil a dream. It didn’t last. “At the time I really believed,” he said. “Europe, the paradise.”

The reality was different. Diagne tried his hand at many things: peddling bags and sunglasses in Genoa, washing dishes in Corsica, working at a warehouse in Florence. He had wanted to give money to his loved ones in Senegal. In reality, most months he was forced to get relatives to send money to him in Italy to pay the rent.

“The Italians have changed,” he said. “A few years ago, people helped out. But the atmosphere has become more hostile.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Babacar Diagne: ‘People look at you with disgust when you return.’

Eventually, Diagne scraped together the €450 to buy a one-way ticket, Madrid to Dakar. The plan had been to return like a king, with enough money to buy a boat, house, car and to send his children to good schools. Well, he is back all right, just without the house and the car and boat. The fishing is harder than ever.

“People look at you with disgust when you return,” he said. His aunts have scolded him: “They said: ‘Why are you here, why are you not in Europe? Other people managed it – look at their houses.’”

But when he is asked by the young people of Senegal, curious about the great, rich continent to the north, Diagne is honest. “I always tell these young men, ‘Stay here. You do not know what awaits you there. There is nothing. You will suffer.’

“But they don’t believe me.”

Reporting team: Nancy Porsia in Zuwara, Libya; Tobias Zick of Sueddeutsche Zeitung in Dakar; Chris Stephen in Tunis; Tom Westcott in Tripoli; Mona Mahmood; Niccolo Zancan of La Stampa in Gavle, Sweden; Ana Carbajosa of El Pais in Madrid; Lizzy Davies in Rome; Javier Caceres of Sueddeutsche Zeitung in Brussels and Kit Gillet in Sofia