Rasta smiles easily and dreams of playing football for AC Milan. His hope is born from tragedy – this gentle, dreadlocked young man from Liberia lost 25 of his friends the night he came to Italy.
It was dark and Rasta didn’t see what happened, but he remembers the terrible sound of the collision. Along with hundreds of other migrants, he was crammed onto the deck of a small fishing boat that had left Libya early in the morning.
Survivors later said the captain must have been drunk when he rammed into the hull of a merchant ship coming to their aid.
“After the collision we just heard voices on the boat,” Rasta told me less than three weeks later. “’Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! God is Great!’ That is all you hear people are shouting.”
His friend Ibrahim is from The Gambia and on the night of 18th April he was also on board the sinking ship.
“I remove my shirt and my trouser… and go out. That time I am thinking whether I will die or not. People are, ‘Come and help me! Help me! Help me!’ Everywhere, people are shouting.”
Rasta and Ibrahim are among the 28 survivors of the worst shipping tragedy in the Mediterranean since World War Two. Nearly 900 people died – almost all of them trapped inside the hull of the boat as it sank 20 metres to the sea floor.
They were taken to a reception centre for migrants surrounded by orange groves in the Sicilian countryside. When I visited, I found it hard not to call it a ‘detention centre’ – hell, I’m from Australia, isn’t that what you call a place where you put people who arrive by boat and claim asylum?
The asylum seekers ended up at this Sicilian reception centre, where they're free to come and go. Source: SBS
Not here. While it’s far from perfect – soldiers have been posted at the gate since riots broke out last year, and the cooperative that runs the centre is being investigated for corruption – at least the migrants are free to come and go while their claims are processed.
Men from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Eritrea and Nigeria cycle and stroll around the orchards; or simply moon about the entrance smoking and chatting.
Life is bucolic but dull, which is probably why Rasta, Ibrahim and Diabite, a survivor from Ivory Coast, were happy for a chance to visit the nearby hill town of Mineo.
My colleague Fabiana and I were the first journalists they’d met, and they told us their tragic stories in a small bar off the main square.
“You knew,” I asked them, “that it would be dangerous to cross the water? Were you afraid of what might happen?”
“Of course, of course.”
“But you did it anyway. You were willing to take the risk.”
“Willing,” replied Rasta emphatically. “Because Libya is not easy.”
Perhaps the most surprising thing I learned from these young men was that they’d never originally intended to come to Europe. Libya itself was the goal.
Rich in oil and gas, it’s been a magnet for migrants from sub-Saharan Africa seeking work; but as the country descended into civil war and lawlessness, Rasta said that darker-skinned Africans found themselves targeted by criminal gangs.
“When you’re walking in the street, someone come and grab you, take away everything from you.”
“They will even kidnap you,” added Ibrahim. “These are small boys – they will kidnap you and take money from you. If you don’t have money they will beat you every day. You will call your people when they beat you. Your people will hear you shouting. If you don’t have money they will kill you.”
“Everyone is a gun man. Everyone has a gun.”
“If you are in Libya you can die… any minute, any second. That’s why people are leaving Libya to come here.”
It’s late in the afternoon, and as old men gossip over beer in the piazza outside, Diabite shows me scars on his face and missing teeth – the result, he says, of beatings he received.
All three survivors spent time in Libyan prisons, locked up until their families paid a ransom or they managed to escape.
Rasta says he would have been happy to go back to where he came from, or at least somewhere close by. But migrants in Libya are stuck between the sea and the desert.
To travel anywhere, without papers, requires the ‘help’ of traffickers – and crossing the Sahara is just as dangerous as the Mediterranean.
We stroll through the small town along narrow, cobblestoned lanes until we’re overlooking the surrounding countryside.
The migrants survived a shipping disaster that killed over 800. Because they're seeking asylum, they didn't want to show their faces. Source: SBS
In the hazy distance is Mount Etna, still capped with snow. Across the valley beneath us are the tidy rows of identical houses that make up the reception centre.
Before the migrants moved in, American military personnel stationed at a nearby air force base used to live there.
The irony is almost painful. NATO Base Sigonella played a vital role in the military intervention in Libya in 2011 – Gaddafi’s forces were bombed from there.
The fall of Gaddafi eventually unleashed anarchy, and now thousands of migrants fleeing Libya end up here.
Rasta, Ibrahim and Diabite quietly take in the view. They’re all haunted by the tragedy they survived. They wake in the middle of the night, shouting and terrified.
“If they want to stop this crossing they need to bring peace in Libya,” Ibrahim tells me. “If they have peace in Libya – this crossing will stop.”
See more of their story by watching
