By:
Nick O’Connell
EU Political Analyst

Published:
27 December 2022

Migrants of the Mediterranean (MotM) was founded at an inflection point in Europe’s increased mishandling, and understanding, of traffic on the Central Mediterranean migration route in 2016. Years later, the relationships with hundreds of people who have made the journey to Europe continue.

Through its extensive Journey Story Archive, MotM is building an historical record that would otherwise go lost. It’s work that derives its impact from the deeply personal connections its correspondents build with the people profiled. In this sense, MotM is unique.

When we first launched The Beyond, the official blog at the organization, we wanted to create a library of resources to understand the wider geopolitical environment, providing the tools to put each Journey Story into a larger perspective. MotM Journey Stories underline the resilience, hopefulness, and drive of people crossing the Mediterranean. They also shed light on the harsh reality of these journeys, often filled with violence and cruelty.

On the other hand, The Beyond adds an additional, albeit most often frustrating, layer of context. It reveals an alarming trend of European governments going lengths to stop people from reaching its shores. These actions would border on the comical if they were not so inhumane.

When MotM Founder Pamela Kerpius first landed in Lampedusa, Italy in 2016, the country and the EU at large were still responding to the growing number of arrivals in a semi-coherent manner. Most joint operations at the time were still focused on saving lives at sea. NGO operations were not yet criminalized, although tensions between crews and authorities were already showing signs of fracture over rules of engagement in Search and Rescue areas. Yet, through her reporting and observations, Kerpius already alluded to a growing discomfort among Italians, evermore visible on an island that lives and breathes migration.

With increasing opposition to government-run rescue operations, countries like Italy began disengaging from the Mediterranean, shifting their focus instead from saving lives to closing borders and criminalizing those at sea, both NGO rescuers and migrants alike. In other words, institutions gave in to the allure of instant gratification offered by populist and far-right movements, ones that just said “No” to a problem – a show of might – that has contributed to the dehumanization of thousands of people. Many of whom, years later, remain living within Italian and European territory.

This has a consequence.

At its inception, MotM Journey Stories were shedding light on a reality that few knew of. Treacherous journeys through war zones, deserts, and the Mediterranean. Inhumane experiences of torture and abuse in illegal prisons across Libya. The near monopoly smugglers and militias hold on the lives of thousands. In other words, MotM was at the forefront of the worsening situation unfolding on this route.

Now, this reality is widely understood and studied across Europe, and no policymaker or even citizen can deny knowing about it. This is what we call a turning point. People can no longer deny the reality around them, hide behind ignorance, which may have been the case years before.

Instead we have moved to a period of complacency. The continuous vilification of those trying to reach Europe, the laws written to make non-governmental rescue at sea prohibitively expensive, and the direct European line of funding to the Libyan system of “migrant holding centers,” which are widely accepted as illegal prisons and detention centers; all of this must be understood for what it is, an acceptance of a system that acts against the integrity of humanity.

We do this in the name of border security. We do this for the chance to scapegoat an enemy for the self-created instability we feel in our societies.

This may sound like a bleak read of Europe’s moral integrity, and incongruent to the democratic, liberal, and human rights-based values it globally promotes. But we have to see that in order to understand the impact MotM and organizations like it have had on the lives of the people these policies affect.

It’s a matter of integration. Something we’ve learned has been denied people in the migrant community. For some African migrants, they’ve never sat at the same table with an Italian before.

Like our colleague, Italy Correspondent Chiara Iacuzio wrote last week, she was the first Italian to sit down for coffee with Promise (story forthcoming) and Andrew, two friends of MotM who we’ve known for years. When Chiara met with them in September 2022, they had already been in Italy for six years.

Six years.

It goes to show that policies devised at an institutional level have had a domino effect on its citizens, who in turn treat the same people as extraneous. Illegals. A problem.

At MotM, we are committed to getting in front of this wave of exclusion. We do that by sharing the stories of the people in the migrant community who inspire us, people with whom we find a shared home. Our goal is to prevent a legacy of hate and dehumanization to ever take root, and to break this cycle of vilification so that we may all prosper together.