ROME (AP) — The first three months of 2023 were the deadliest first quarter in six years for migrants crossing the central Mediterranean Sea in smugglers’ boats, the U.N. migration agency reported Wednesday, citing nations’ delays in initiating rescues as a contributing factor.
The International Organization for Migration documented 441 migrant deaths along the dangerous sea route between northern Africa and Europe’s southern shores during January, February and March. In 2017, 742 known deaths were documented in the same period, while 446 were recorded in the first three months of 2015.
“The persisting humanitarian crisis in the central Mediterranean is intolerable,’’ IOM Director General Antonio Vitorino, commenting on the figures the agency released in a report.
“With more than 20,000 deaths recorded on this route since 2014, I fear that these deaths have been normalized,’’ Vitorino said. “States must respond. Delays and gaps in state-led SAR (search-and-rescue areas) are costing human lives.”
While this year has started out on a distressing note, IOM tallied higher numbers of people dead or missing in the Mediterranean in six other quarters since 2017, with the most documented in the second quarter of 2018, at 1,430
The true number of lives lost among migrants who set out on smugglers’ unseaworthy rubber dinghies or decrepit fishing boats is unknown because the bodies of people who perish at sea often are never recovered.
Many deaths only come to light when survivors recount that their vessel set out with more passengers than the number who ultimately making it to safety.
The International Organization for Migration said it also was investigating “several reports of invisible shipwrecks” — cases in which boats are reported missing, where there are no records of survivors, remains or search-and-rescue operations. It estimated that “the fates of more than 300 people aboard these vessels remain unclear.”
Without naming nations, the agency blasted policies aimed at complicating the work of rescue boats operated in the central Mediterranean by humanitarian organizations.
The report cited a March 25 incident in which members of the Libyan Coast Guard fired shots in the air as a charity rescue boat, Ocean Viking, was responding to a report of a rubber dinghy in distress.
“State efforts to save lives must include supporting the efforts of NGO actors to provide lifesaving assistance and ending the criminalization, obstruction of those efforts” by humanitarian groups, the IOM said.
The agency’s report said the deaths of at least 127 people so far this year came in six incidents in which “delays in state-led rescues in the Central Mediterranean were a factor.” The report’s authors lamented the “complete absence of response” in a seventh situation, in which at least 73 migrants lost their live.
The authors also cited a boat carrying some 400 migrants that remained adrift in the sea between Malta and Italy for two days before the Italian Coast Guard came to its aid.
