Two years later, in 2013, the Pope went to Lampedusa to welcome the African migrants to Italy!
The Pope welcomes the African migrants to Lampedusa, Italy in 2013. See our post where he lectured Italians to be more welcoming, and to “cry” for the migrants. https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2013/07/09/pope-lectures-on-lampedusa/
Coffins of some of the 300 plus who died attempting to get to Italy.
A Somali ringleader has been arrested.
The story is a few days old, but every time I see a story like this one I am reminded of now UN Ambassador Samantha Power who played a huge role with Hillary and Susan Rice in pushing the US into our ‘adventures’ in Libya supposedly under the belief that it was ‘our responsibility to protect’ the people of Libya from Gaddafi who was able at times to keep a lid on the human traffickers attempting to move through Libya. Now the Libyan coast is lawless.
Italian police have arrested a Somali man accused of raping and torturing asylum seekers fleeing Libya on a boat which sank off the island of Lampedusa last month killing more than 365 migrants.
Mouhamud Elmi Muhidin, 34, faces charges of kidnapping, sexual assault, people trafficking and criminal association with the goal of aiding illegal immigration after he was identified by survivors.
Some 130 migrants from Eritrea told police they were held for ransom at a detention centre in the Libyan desert by people traffickers from Somalia, Libya and Sudan.
The migrants were forced to pay up to USD 3,500 for their freedom and their onward journey to the Libyan coast and a boat that due to take them to Italy.
Italian authorities have vowed to crack down on the people trafficking rings that have been behind the influx of more than 35,000 asylum seekers so far this year to the country’s coasts.
[….]
According to migrants’ testimony, the 20 women in the group were repeatedly raped and offered to Libyan visitors “as if they were a cup of tea”.
Photo is from this storyin which the Eritrean government blames the US for the deaths.
Reader Dave alerted us to a post at the ever-vigilantLimits to Growth blog to update our on-going reporting on the African boat people invasion of Europe. Be sure to watch the disturbing ‘youtube’ clip that you will never see on American news (maybe not on German news either!).
See our recent posts on Lampedusa here, especially see Cannibalism on the way to a free meal in Italy. See map of migrant routes to Europe, here.
In Germany, there’s a group of refugee demanders with a website called Lampedusa in Hamburg. The front page photo shows a banner reading, “We did not survive the NATO war in Libya to die on the streets of Hamburg,” which is kind of a double-down statement of Screw the West for ousting the dictator and now give us free stuff in Germany.
Hundreds of refugees and activists of the “Lampedusa in Hamburg” group took the streets of Hamburg on Wednesday to protests against the alleged unlawful treatment of migrants by the Hamburg Senate.
Protesters marched from the main station to the city hall and back in a 2-hour demonstration to also show their support to the victims of the recent shipwrecks occurred off the Italian island of Lampedusa.
Clashes erupted Tuesday night in Hamburg after around 500 protesters demonstrating in front of the squatted theatre “Roten Flora” reportedly threw stones and bottles to police, who used pepper spray and batons on protesters.
So, this is where we are after Obama’s three witches (including ‘responsibility to protect’ Samantha Power) helped bring down Gaddafi. He might have been a crazy dictator, but the invasion of African boat people out of Libya is now completely out of control and the consequences for Europe will be hard (impossible?) to reverse. Call it Gaddafi’s revenge!
Scene Of Cannibalism For The Raft Of The Medusa by Theodore Gericault
They were only at sea for three days but, what the heck, rather than starve (hardly possible in three days is it?), one of the aliens took a chunk from a dead man. That is perhaps the most dramatic moment of this fascinating tale from a Somali migrant desperate to cross the Mediterranean and find a new life in the land of milk and honey—Italy!
The story is here at Vice.com and below are some excerpts. You decide if the storyteller is for real (but maybe first revisit, Greenfield on the Hyena Cure!) (Emphasis is mine)
On Tahrib!
Hassan Ali is a 23-year-old Somali who survived gun battles and poverty in his youth in his native country before deciding in 2009 to embark on Tahrib, the perilous journey from Africa to the Italian island of Lampedusa.Thousands of Somalis make this trip every year, and this month it made headlines after a boat caught fire and capsized on October 3, killing over 300 would-be immigrants. Eight days later, a different vessel capsized in an accident that claimed at least 34 lives. Here, Hassan speaks about his troubled life before the trip and the horrors he experienced en route to Europe.
The cannibalism didn’t start until our second boat journey, from Libya to Lampedusa. We had already been traveling for ten days; people were dying and there was no food. I actually saw one guy cutting a piece of flesh from another man’s body.
Our Ali wanted to be an astronaut, but that wasn’t (understandably) possible in his home town in Somalia where squabbling clans were bringing AK-47s to mosques and shooting at ten-year-olds racing home. So, our young and desperate adventurer, upon reaching the age of 19, found enough friends and relatives to front him $800 to go on Tahrib (described as attempting to get to Europe, but one definition I saw was that it translated to ‘smuggling’—being smuggled or doing the smuggling wasn’t clear).
Mom thought he was crazy! That is what all Moms say!
I first heard about Tahrib on the radio when I was 19. There were people in Europe talking about their new lives and how they’d traveled there from Somalia by boat. It sounded like a good idea. After a while I told my parents I planned to leave. They were shocked. “Are you mad?” my mother said. “You’re a young boy, what has gotten into you?” I told them how I thought Tahrib was my only way forward, that I could only find a better life in Europe. They thought I was joking. When I called them from the first boat months later, they were terrified.
First boat was bad, but no cannibalism yet!
Our first trip was from Beled Hawo to Bosaso, a port city on the northern shore of Somalia. It wasn’t the worst journey, but we had hardly any food and the people who drove us there were being very cruel, shouting at us and hitting people occasionally. I was only a kid [editors note: Somalis are “kids” for a long time, I noticed that when they were leaving Minneapolis to join al-Shabaab, kids, just kids!] —I missed my hometown already and everyone seemed so sad even though they were heading off for this exciting new life.
Captured by Libyan armed men who extracted $300 from Mom and Dad for Ali’s release and then on to the merry Tahrib again!
All I wanted was to be back in Beled Hawo with my parents. I didn’t care if I ever made it to Europe. Even if, miraculously, we survived the journey, how would the Europeans treat us? Would I get a visa? Would I be thrown in jail? I was terrified.
The trip across the Mediterranean was the worst part—people were dropping dead and others needed a little protein with their bread and biscuits.
It took another ten days to find a boat from Libya to Lampedusa. Then the real horror began. There was only bread and biscuits on board and the heat was unbearable. People were dropping dead and the captain did nothing. People started eating each other: it was like something from a scary movie right in front of my eyes. That leg of the journey took three days. It felt like years.
Ali, the would-be astronaut, knows who to blame for all of this horror—politicians who don’t help Somalia! Of course that is the moral of the story after all! Ali continues:
Everyone knows that politicians in Europe and Africa are doing nowhere near enough to address the dangers of Tahrib. Otherwise all those people would not have died near Lampedusa this month. No one is addressing the real issues—the violence, the poverty—that led me away from Somalia.[Here is an idea—-how about if Somalis get their own house in order!—ed]
Postscript! Italy let me rebuild my life—-back in Somalia! WTH!
People tell me Lampedusa is beautiful. I have no idea. I can barely remember any of the landscape I saw: everything was so terrifying. But, Alhamdulillah [praise to God], I made it there alive and, amazingly, got an Italian visa after three months of being held at a camp. Some people I traveled with waited years and others never got one. I love Italy, though. I lived there for three years and made a small living working in various jobs. I may never be an astronaut but Italy let me rebuild a life that was destroyed. I’m back in Somalia now—not in Beled Hawo but another city. I hope I get to visit Italy again some day.
Life is harsh for Italians on Lampedusa and it has been made even more challenging with the arrival (or the sinking) of each new boat filled with African and Middle Eastern migrants that ends up on its shores.
Here is an article (from AFP), spawned by the mass drowning, well worth reading (hat tip: pungentpeppers) about the resentment the local residents have to refugees who, in life or in death, get more government benefits than they do. Lampedusa’s lament….
Lampedusa — Islanders on Europe’s southern edge have become used to tragedy and trauma, they see it every day in the thousands of asylum seekers who land on their shores — and they say they have had enough.
The locals of the remote fishing community on Lampedusa island rush to help every time but their patience is wearing thin as they see government funds allocated to migrants and not to them.
“Here it’s the dead that keep the economy going,” said Silvana Martelli, a waitress, as divers fished out bodies after a shipwreck in which over 300 African refugees are feared to have died.
“It doesn’t feel like our island anymore. There’s money to take care of the immigrants while the schools fall apart and rubbish piles up,” she said.
As European ministers discuss the refugee crisis at talks in Luxembourg on Tuesday, this type of local resentment is a concern for governments that see the problem before them but do not want to risk being seen as a soft touch on immigration.
With a resident population of just a few thousand people, Lampedusans are sometimes outnumbered by the new arrivals before they are transferred to asylum centres on the Italian mainland.
In a corner of the harbour, the blue and red fishing boats daubed in Arabic script that are used for the landings lie discarded —
Read on about problems such as burying this many people on a tiny island, here.
