Already a thousand migrants have died in shipwrecks in 2024:let's not call them accidents

The last two shipwrecks off the coast of Calabria, with at least 65 victims, reopen the wound of migration policies, amid merciless numbers and accusations.

• Two shipwrecks in one night off the coast of Calabria, at least 65 victims:there have been more than 800 deaths in the Mediterranean since the beginning of the year, a thousand according to NGOs.
• The survivors of one of the two boats were rescued in Roccella Jonica, where the Doctors Without Borders team is present.
• The accusation of the NGO:“The silence of the institutions that have constructed an emergency on the table is shameful.”

In 2024, at least 800 migrants will already die while attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea in makeshift boats involved in tragic shipwrecks, according to data provided by the United Nations.An updated account of the latest, double disaster that occurred on the night between 16 and 17 June, off the coast of Calabria, which just over a year after terrible Cutro massacre, has once again become the theater of the drama of migration, with two shipwrecks that caused the death of at least 65 people within a few hours.A completely partial account, however, because after 48 hours the searches for what should be around 60 missing people, according to the survivors' stories, have still not returned a single body.This double tragedy, Doctors Without Borders accuses in these hours, weighs on a "shameful" institutional silence, a silence that ignores the pain of those who survive, an inhuman emptiness that cannot be tolerated.There is no response from Italian governments and European institutions, their inertia has emptied the Mediterranean of search and rescue means and resources". starting from the so-called Cutro decree, who instead of facilitating relief efforts on the emotional wave of a tragedy he had caused 94 completely avoidable victims, complicated them further.Doctors Without Borders, among other things, speaks of over a thousand deaths since the beginning of the year, six per day:a discrepancy compared to the UN data which is explained precisely by the difficulty of finding many of those missing from the shipwrecks, who will never have a name or a burial.

Those two shipwrecks in the space of a few hours 

The two boats involved in the latest shipwrecks on 16-17 June, loaded with migrants from different parts of the world, could not withstand the force of the waves and crashed into the rocks.Rescuers recovered the bodies, including many children and a newborn:among the 65 bodies found, there were at least 14 deceased minors, of which 9 were male and 5 were female.

According to what has been reported by the United Nations agencies that in various capacities deal with migration and minors, UNHCR, IOM and UNICEF, in a first shipwreck the victims lost their lives due to suffocation on the lower deck of the boat they were traveling on:51 survivors were brought to safety in Lampedusa by ship Nadir of the NGO Resqship, who rescued the wooden boat that left Libya.The countries of origin of the people on board are Syria, Egypt, Pakistan, Bangladesh.In the second accident, after being rescued by a fishing boat and transferred to a merchant ship, 11 survivors were rescued by the Coast Guard in the Ionian Sea and taken to safety in Roccella Jonica together with the body of a woman, while 64 other people, as mentioned, are still missing at sea.

According to the survivors' reconstruction, the boat's engine had left eight days earlier from Turkey, would have caught fire, causing the hull to capsize 110 nautical miles from the Italian coast.The survivors and those missing at sea come from Iran, Syria and Iraq, and among the survivors there are also 2 accompanied children and 2 women.The UN Refugee Agency, the International Organization for Migration and the United Nations Children's Fund have "deep condolences for the dozens of victims of two new accidents in the Mediterranean, the news of which arrived today with the rescue of survivors".

The testimony and accusation of Doctors Without Borders

The team of Doctors Without Borders in Rocella Jonica, where the organization has been present since 2022, it has mobilized to offer assistance, including psychological assistance, to the people who survived the latest shipwreck which occurred on the night between 16 and 17 June in the Ionian Sea.“The scene was heartbreaking, traumatized people in front of us, the pain was tangible.Seeing a relative or friend drown is always horrible,” he says Shakilla Mohammadi, intercultural mediator of Doctors Without Borders in Roccella who was at the port to witness the disembarkation of the survivors.“I talked to a guy who lost his girlfriend.Survivors spoke of 66 people missing, including at least 26 children, even a few months old.Entire families in Afghanistan would have died.They left Turkey 8 days ago and had been taking on water for 3 or 4 days.They told us that they were traveling without life jackets and that some boats did not stop to help them."

“The surviving people are still very confused.All of them are hospitalized in various facilities in the area and do not yet realize which of their family members is alive and who has died at sea.Entire families have been destroyed.There are those who have lost their wives, those who have lost a son, a husband, a friend or a nephew", he says instead Cecilia Momi, head of humanitarian affairs for Doctors Without Borders who is providing psychological support to the survivors of the shipwreck“They are all in a state of strong psychological and physical trauma.Many of them have severe sunburn, a sign that they probably spent several days in the sun."MSF has been offering healthcare in the hottest theaters of war and natural cataclysms for decades, and the fact that it is forced to operate in the same emergency modalities in Italy should give pause for thought.A thought that brings Marco Bertotto, director of Doctors Without Borders programs in Italy, to a real indictment:“Six deaths a day are something more than the demonstration of a failure of the Italian authorities, above all they expose a humanitarian tragedy built around the table, measure after measure, by the various governments that have followed one another in recent years”.

Instead of concrete actions to avoid other tragedies at sea, such as strengthening search and rescue activities in the Mediterranean or creating legal and safe routes to reach Europe, according to MSF and all sea NGOs, the Italian authorities and European institutions have consciously chosen lethal policies of deterrence, violence at the borders, forced pushbacks, agreements with third countries that persecute migrant people and the systematic criminalization of those who try to rescue those in danger at sea.The end result was “causing entire families to disappear, swallowed up by the sea off the Italian coast.In the aftermath of yet another massacre at sea, the pain of the survivors and the families of the victims demands answers, actions and responsibility from Italian and European institutions to prevent further deaths".How to say, and as we have already said: let's not call them accidents.