The day I assumed my duties in Valletta, on Wednesday 23 July 2008, the Maltese press reported that a boat laden with 28 men and two women had been intercepted six nautical miles off Marsaxlokk and had been handed over to the police authorities. This quasi-daily chronicle of suffering and exile now forms part of the daily life of each and every one of us, whether we live in Malta, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Germany or France. It is by reflecting on the past (shattered illusions) and of the future (improbable hopes) of the African boat people that a month after my arrival I contacted the crew of the aeroplane Falcon 50 that, leaving from Malta, patrolled the sea within the framework of the Frontex operation. The European agency Frontex has, since 2004, been coordinating civil and military officials responsible for gathering information on the immigration networks and for organising the nautical and aerial craft that monitor the external European frontiers.
I therefore spent a day in a plane flying above the Mediterranean. What did I see? Tunisian or Maltese fishing boats, sea turtles, giant octopuses, a whale, plastic bags, but also two empty capsized dinghies. Their passengers, illegal immigrants, had perished. In the event of shipwreck, one never knows exactly the number of missing persons. This type of dinghy, generally of bad quality, is the boat most frequently used by the smugglers, who also make use of fibreglass boats, often rendered fragile because of hasty construction; both are equipped with 40 horsepower Yamaha outboard motors. Dinghies and boats leave the shore overloaded with passengers, jerrycans with petrol, water and food supplies. The passengers, whose identity papers have in most cases been stolen, are left to themselves (the smugglers remain ashore) and their only instructions are to steer due north. They are sometimes equipped with a compass, GPS or satellite telephones (Turaya SO -2520).
The material used is always the same, a sign of the existence of structured, stable networks. Dinghies and boats made of fibreglass, always just about able to float, are fragile vessels and at the mercy of any gust of wind, and even a treacherous wave. Seen from the sky, the black dinghy made a dark spot on the sea. It is estimated that around one thousand immigrants die in this manner every year; it is one of the tragedies of our time.
The majority of these immigrants today hail from Somalia, Eritrea, and to a lesser extent, Mali, the Ivory Coast, Niger or Nigeria. All are ready to risk death in order to live in Europe. Each epoch has had its infernal voyages. The 20th century invented neither hatred nor indifference, but it rushed dozens of millions of men and women towards death or deportation. Every one knows how the criminal policies that ravage Africa, fatally sick with AIDS, now hurl entire populations onto lawless routes. Hope is a very long path, which may take months, even years. Constrained to work in order to pay for their journey, always robbed, often abused, sometimes abandoned to certain death in the middle of the Sahara, and subjected at every stage to aberrant travel costs, to extortion by all and sundry, transformed into slaves or prostitutes, and cheated, it is morally drained people who reach the African coast from where they may perhaps be finally able, after having paid US$1,000, to embark on a fragile boat (they all have often already spent between $1,000 and $1,500 dollars on their land journey). Numerous European experts confirm that the route of the illegal immigrants remains paved with the same horrors. But the truth is still to be construed, as Camus used to say, just like love, like intelligence.
At the beginning of December last year, Minister Brice Hortefeux announced that the following year France would be receiving 80 African immigrants from Malta. I then met Tonio Borg, the very nice Maltese Minister of Foreign Affairs at a reception hosted by the Franco-Maltese Chamber of Commerce at Villa Arrigo. We spoke about Christmas traditions in Malta, animated cribs, Corsica, Bonaparte (Tonio Borg’s office at the Ministry had been for a few days in June 1798, the office and bedroom of the French General); then I asked him what he thought of the French decision. “ Excellent! That proves that Europe is not just a pooling of our egoisms. You know, when I had spoken about this eventuality to a French Minister a few years ago, a woman, she had told me: ‘Ask for whatever you want, except that!’ We are moving forward.” Since that December day, the French and Maltese authorities have worked hand in hand. Before the end of next June, 80 immigrants should be boarding the plane to France. A few weeks ago, Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi evoked at great length before Bernard Kouchner this human drama and the problems the Maltese faced with these chaotic arrivals of illegal immigrants.
Every one understands that Malta, a European and Mediterranean country, should not remain alone.
The peoples around the Mediterranean have always sought the eternal promises of life.
This quest has often given people good reasons to abandon their villages, their cities and to go far away. Greeks, Phoenicians, Carthaginians had, in olden days, left their shores to follow in the footsteps of Ulysses.
Closer to us, in the middle of the 19th century, many French people, craftsmen from the suburbs, worker revolutionaries of 1848, embarked in the hold of barges, then on paddle frigates, and crossed the Mediterranean to go and found colonies in swampy regions or thorny maquis. And how many Maltese have left their island to go and settle in Alexandria, in Tunisia or in Algeria? And in the 20th century, how many crossings were there in the opposite direction? Peasants from the Rif, Chouf or Kabyl came to work in French mines and factories. Pieds Noirs (some of Maltese origin) came back to France with just a suitcase. All that was not bereft of pain. History is always both enthralling and frightening.
Today Ulysses is black, and dies at sea in the silence of the waves after months of distress.
This tragedy does not concern only the Maltese and the immigrants, but also all the European and African countries bordering both shores.
The Mediterranean, our common good, where we indefatigably seek the face of wisdom and of beauty, cannot become a cemetery.
M. Rondeau is the French Ambassador to Malta