The errors, flaws and falsehoods of the government's version of the Cutro massacre

news Publish tags Sources about us privacy
GratisForGratis

ValigiaBlu

https://www.valigiablu.it/piantedosi-informativa-camera-naufragio-cutro/

These people were in no condition to be saved.But really, in good conscience, is there anyone who believes that the government deliberately caused 60 people to die?Let's be serious.The issue is simple in its tragedy.No emergency communication has been received from Frontex.We were not warned.Nothing in this matter has anything to do with the government's measures with NGOs.

It took the Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, a week to comment the Cutro massacre, in Calabria, the most serious shipwreck since 2013 on the Italian coast which has so far caused the confirmed death of 72 people, including 28 minors, and around forty people missing.And he did so by blocking those who call into question the responsibilities of the Italian authorities in the opaque dynamics of the rescue chain and those who call for the resignation of the Minister of the Interior, Matteo Piantedosi, not only for his words of rare inhumanity immediately after the tragedy, but also for the rescue operation after the shipwreck had already occurred.«Every day the opposition calls for the resignation of a different minister.It's no longer news", said Meloni as if the request for resignation were more of a question of political skirmish.

Why the vice president of Copasir Donzelli and the undersecretary of Justice Delmastro should resign

 

But here, as in the case of the use of confidential information by the Fratelli d'Italia deputy and vice-president of Copasir, Giovanni Donzelli, and the undersecretary of Justice, Andrea Delmastro, regarding the alleged links between the anarchist Alfredo Cospito and some mafiosi, detained under the 41-bis regime, we are talking about the functioning of the institutions.The issue is, therefore, institutional as well as political and, in this specific case, requires clarity on the chain of rescue operations in the hours immediately preceding the sinking of the vessel with around 200 people on board which left four days earlier from Izmir, Turkey .

Demanding clarity does not mean believing "that the government deliberately caused 60 people to die", as Meloni states.It means getting out of the blame and passing the buck that has been going on for a week now between the Coast Guard (which reports to the Ministry of Transport), the Financial Police (which reports to the Ministry of the Interior) and Frontex (the European Guard Agency border and coastal).Among those who claim to have been consulted only for information and that the operation was carried out by the maritime police, while admitting that they could have intervened on the morning of 26 February but not having done so due to procedural issues (Coast Guard), those who claim not to be entitled to provide assistance because the intervention was configured as "law enforcement" (Financial Police), and who reiterates that they have "immediately sent a report" to all the Italian authorities and that they have done what is within their competence (Frontex).

Crotone shipwreck:a massacre in the shadow of institutional consequences on responsibilities

So far, the only certain thing is that - as can be seen from the press releases from the Coast Guard, the Financial Police and Frontex - the operation was immediately a police operation and not a rescue operation and that the indication by the State to launch the rescue procedures never started.From Rome, no one took responsibility for coordinating the rescue efforts.In his statements from Abu Dhabi, Meloni did nothing to unravel the problem and instead placed the responsibility on Frontex:«No emergency communication has arrived from Frontex.We were not warned."

The European Agency did not comment on the statements of the Italian Prime Minister, but limited itself to underlining that it had sent a report to all the Italian authorities and that «the classification of an event as "search and rescue", according to international standards , it is up to the national authorities."Frontex aircraft and drones «patrol selected areas beyond the EU's external borders as part of multipurpose aerial surveillance», explains Katarzyna Volkmann, from the agency's press office.“If anyone notices a boat in need of assistance, the agency informs the national authority responsible for rescue activities in the area and follows its instructions in line with international maritime law.”

An article published on The Press identify five clues present in the Frontex report that should have triggered rescue operations, instead of a police operation, but which were poorly considered or even ignored.

The Frontex report – we read in the article – was sent to 27 email addresses at 11.03pm on 25 February, five hours before the shipwreck.

  1. Before 11pm “the Flyng fish satellite monitoring system with which the Frontex vehicle is equipped picks up a phone call from a satellite device on board the boat and directed towards Turkey.
  2. Frontex also reported "opening of bow vents", i.e. the opening of the vessel's portholes probably to allow people to breathe.This must have already made us think of the presence of a boat with an excessive number of passengers.A Frontex source he then added to Euractiv that the Italian authorities were aware of this information.
  3. The report mentions "probable additional people below deck" and
  4. “Life jackets not visible”.
  5. Finally, the presence of just one "man outside deck" on a boat of that type could not be considered a common occurrence.And it should have set off some alarms.

The information transmitted by Frontex was quite eloquent.It remains to be understood why, in light of the information contained in the report, the intervention of the Italian authorities was classified as a maritime police operation, "law enforcement”, and not as a SAR, search and rescue event.Doubts that increase considering that the Air Force weather bulletin issued through official channels at 6pm on February 25th "with indications valid until 6am the following morning" spoke of "Northern Ionian wind 7, very rough seas increasing".In fact, when the two Guardia di Finanza boats went out to carry out the police operation, they were then forced to return due to the harsh sea conditions.

Why were the sea conditions and the information contained in the Frontex report not sufficient to launch a rescue operation at sea?Given the conditions of the sea and the vessel, why was the "official rescue" carried out by the Port Authorities - Coast Guard not triggered?And then another question that we have been carrying with us for a week now remains unanswered:why was the report from the MRCC of Rome, which occurred 16 hours before the Frontex alert, not followed up and no one intervened?

The Minister of the Interior, Piantedosi, did not respond to these questions and in his briefing to the Chamber and Senate, in addition to reconstructing the hours preceding the shipwreck, he limited himself to repeating the position that the majority of the Government has been reiterating since the hours immediately following to the Steccato di Cutro massacre.

In summary, Piantedosi he stated That:

1) There were no shortcomings in the rescue operations:the tragedy was caused by the criminal behavior of smugglers who decided to disembark at night, in the dark, in a place considered safer to escape checks:«After a 4-day crossing, having passed the archipelago of the Greek islands, again on the basis of the declarations, on February 25th, around 6.00 pm, the smugglers decided to stop off the coast of Calabria and wait for a favorable moment to disembark and avoid being spotted by the police."

2) At the time of Frontex's report, the vessel had no navigation problems and was in good condition, although overcrowded.There were no alarm signals and, therefore, the shipwreck cannot be the responsibility of the Coast Guard or the Financial Police who operated correctly.According to the information in the possession of the Coast Guard, «the vessel did not represent a dangerous situation;there had been no distress calls of any kind;on the scene there was a naval unit of the Guardia di Finanza dedicated to the event, which could have provided further elements through direct feedback and which, if necessary, could also have carried out rescue activities as a competing resource, in line with the forecasts of the SAR National Plan;the weather and sea conditions had not changed."

3) In the absence of a report of a situation of difficulty (distress), argues Piantedosi, the regulatory framework provides that the operation is configured as a maritime police intervention.Therefore, we were not faced with a context that required a rescue operation at sea.«To make the regulatory framework understandable, at the cost of some simplification, I would like to point out that operational interventions at sea can be traced back to two state missions, that of law enforcement and search and rescue (so-called SAR).[...] The activation of the entire SAR system cannot ignore the reporting of an emergency situation.Only and exclusively if there is such a signal, the SAR device is activated.Where, however, a distress is not reported, the operational event is managed as a police intervention, also due to what was previously observed regarding the rescue capacity of our naval units.This is exactly what happened in the case in question."

4) Since it was not a distress situation, and in the absence of an "alarm signal or request for help from the vessel in question", two Guardia di Finanza patrol boats were sent but, before 4, they were forced to go back "due to the current terrible weather and sea conditions".Shortly afterwards, "a telephone call for help arrives on the emergency number 112".Only from this moment, says Piantedosi, does the need for help for the Italian authorities materialize.When the rescuers arrive at Steccato di Cutro, the rescuers find before their eyes «the bodies of many innocent victims, children, women and men, lying on the shoreline, the shipwrecked people and what remained of the boat, stranded about 40 meters from the beach".

So far Piantedosi.But his reconstruction and his explanations show many flaws:

1) First of all, it is not correct to say that in the absence of an alarm signal, the intervention is automatically configured as a police operation.As Radio Radicale journalist Sergio Scandura explains, "you cannot put 'uber alles' the police operation at the SAR.[The boats] They are floating bombs ready to explode in shipwrecks, in massacres.International regulations say that these boats, precisely because they are overloaded, precisely because they are 'bombs', must automatically, by default, be considered in difficulty, in 'distress'.They are international lines (IMO, UN maritime authority), EU regulations on rescue.To the rescue, to the SAR the priority.The Coast Guard arrives on the target, assures and reassures the shipwrecked people with a megaphone on what to do to evacuate them (even with mediators on board).Women, children and the vulnerable are taken away first:you don't ask for 'footprints' from someone who is about to drown."

Furthermore, it is not even correct to say that the request for assistance is an essential factor in determining whether one is faced with a SAR or police event, adds Vitalba Azzollini on Twitter.

The 2020 SAR regulations provide that search and rescue operations can be activated based on objective evidence of dangerous situations, even doubtful or possible.

2) Piantedosi contradicts himself when he first says that the sea conditions were not dangerous for navigation, thus justifying why the maritime police operation was carried out, and then specifies that the two patrol boats of the Guardia di Finanza were forced to return due to the rough seas.“If the financial police vehicles had to return to port due to bad weather, how was it possible to consider a gulet that was sailing at the same time overloaded in that area as 'not' in danger?” asks Annalisa Camilli.

Finally, the minister wanted to give some contextual information to validate the effectiveness of government policies and insinuate a link between the presence of NGOs and deaths at sea.Among these, Piantedosi argued that «only in 2016, the year in which the humanitarian naval operation was still operating Mare Nostrum - launched in the aftermath of the Lampedusa shipwreck in October 2013 with 368 deaths, deploying a powerful air-naval device and with the presence of NGO ships - the victims in the Strait of Sicily were 4,574 according to data from the International Organization for Migration.In 2022, according to the same source, there were 1,377 victims."

Also in this case the minister's communications are imprecise to say the least. Mare Nostrum it ended in 2014 and the NGOs arrived later, precisely to fill that "void left by the States" which they often talk about in press releases, recalls Giansandro Merli.

In conclusion, how underlines Adriano Biondi, Piantedosi "made confusion in the reconstruction, he failed to precisely outline the chain of command and the responsibilities of the choices made in the hours in which the tragedy occurred;he indulged in very questionable technical considerations (for example on the configuration or not of a SAR event) and brutally simplified the distinction between rescue operations and those of law enforcement (central to understand what went wrong).A disaster on a formal level, even inexplicable, given that we are not talking about a press conference or extemporaneous statements, but about information prepared in time and in a climate that would have required great attention to every single step".

In fact, in his speech the minister defended the government's approach to the migratory phenomenon, which also emerged from his immediate statements immediately after the shipwreck, the result of a political culture carried forward with coherence:Migrations and their management are more a question of policing than of rescue.And whoever puts himself into the sea, after all, searches for it a little.It is this ideological system with respect to the phenomenon of migration that must be dismantled even before asking for the resignation of this or that minister.

If this does not happen, the possible scenarios are easily imaginable.Massacres like that of Cutro are destined to be repeated, since the duty to save lives has now been accepted - even promoted - as negotiable or derogable.And this is true on many levels, if we also think about the controversies that have arisen over the initials conditions of hospitality for survivors.So other rescuers, other doctors on other coasts will have to live with the bodies fished out of the water.Other survivors will have to weigh in whether to sue Italy, while living with unspeakable suffering. If similar massacres are repeated, an impact between institutions is destined to occur which will be harmful for Italy:because in terms of political responsibility, as seen, the only way to justify such conduct is to raise quibbled smoke screens, not being able to loudly admit the willingness to violate international conventions and treaties.Two days ago, after all, Meloni blocked the Piantedosi decree, and this means that the government, far from propaganda strategies, knows very well the rules of the game it is forcing, and when it is unable to force them it prefers to retreat hoping it won't be too noticeable.

What no one can imagine, however, is the overall human cost beyond migration policies.Because if precisely on the occasion of such a traumatic and horrible event the principle passes that it is possible not only to evade responsibilities, but even to shift them onto those who ask for them to account - as done by Meloni, who has cast the government in the role of the victim accused of in front of the microphones - then the majority will draw only one lesson.That is, that everything is worth it, that you can potentially get away with it easily.

Preview image:the Minister of the Interior, Matteo Piantedosi, during his information to the Chamber of Deputies

Licensed under: CC-BY-SA
CAPTCHA

Discover the site GratisForGratis

advertising

 

^