«I saw three-four lifeless children arriving with the waves… I saw them as they were stuffing them into the bags, naked, because the sea had stripped them. I’ll never forget the end of the world that was on that beach.” Antonio Ceraso he needs a break to fight back the tears. “You see,” she resumes her train of thought, “we Calabrians have been migrants like them; we too made the voyages of hope seeking fortune by sea. But they, today, make the journeys of despair. What hope can anyone who leaves with this sea, with these boats, in these conditions have? Antonio Ceraso is the mayor of Cutro and from yesterday the name of Cutro will be forever linked to a massacre of migrants. Another one.
The dynamics
A fishing vessel without a keel departing from Smyrna, in Turkey, it “slipped” on the forbidding waves of the sea force 4-5 and it arrived, we don’t know how, in front of the Calabrian coast, at the exact point where the Tacina river flows into the sea, in the Steccato di Cutro area, province of Crotone. Salvation was there, close at hand, in the dark of four in the morning. On board there was a still unknown number of people: someone speaks of 180, others of 250. Men, women and many children. Mostly Afghans, Pakistanis, Syrians, but also Iranians, Somalis and Palestinians. Another hundred meters and that old nut shell, which the traffickers have passed off as a safe trawler, would have landed on shore. But there were waves three to four meters high, currents too strong. And it doesn’t matter, now, whether that cart crashed into a shoal or whether it was a wave that broke it in half. The facts count: the dismembered boat, those poor people at the mercy of the sea. Those who knew how to do it and had the strength to swim to shore did it. For all the others there is no escape.
The victims
Thus, when darkness falls again, late yesterday afternoon, the number that imposes itself is that of dead recovered: 59 — 30 men and 29 women, among them 14 children and teenagers — which could go well over 100 according to an initial estimate made after speaking with the migrants themselves. And then there are the survivors: 81, according to the balance of the evening (59 hosted in the Center for asylum seekers of Isola Capo Rizzuto and 22 under observation in the Crotone hospital). Numbers, sure. But before numbers, human beings. The children stripped by the sea, as the mayor of Cutro says, or the men and women who yesterday morning were shivering numb from the cold and wind, wrapped up in colorful blankets waiting for the bus that would take them away. A load of suffering humanity fleeing a life of war, misery or denied rights. Who knows how many sacrifices it took to put together the money for the smugglers. Who knows if they knew, getting on board, that this was a one-way ticket to a country that doesn’t want them.
The traffickers
The traffickers of their lives certainly knew this. One of the presumed smugglers was identified among the survivors and the document of a second man was recovered but is not found, perhaps fled or perhaps missing. The Crotone prosecutor’s office investigates manslaughter, illegal immigration and manslaughter. The reconstruction of the shipwreck will also take into account the sighting of the vessel, on Saturday evening, 40 miles from the Calabrian coast. She was intercepted by a Frontex aircraft which passed the signal on to a lookout from the naval operations section of the Crotone financial police and a patrol vessel from the Taranto finance aeronautical group. They both left to try to reach the boat in difficulty, but the sea conditions were very bad and not being able to continue safely, both the lookout and the patrol boat returned to base.
«Ground Search Device»
In such cases, when nothing else can be done, the “land search device” is activated, which essentially means waiting for the boat to arrive on the coast, along the probable landing routes. So it was. And the boat has arrived, yes. In pieces. The currents have dragged some bodies even tens of kilometers further than the point of the shipwreck. Roberto Fasano is the commander of the Crotone fire brigade. With his men he rescued most of the dead, “many were children,” he says. “A horrible day.”