Ocean Viking and Geo Barents have arrived in Ancona with 110 migrants after gruelling days at sea. Ochek's story as an example of the many lives fleeing hardship.
This morning, with 73 people on board, the Geo Barents, the Médecins Sans Frontières vessel, docked at the end of its second mission in just a few days. This time, however, the humanitarian ship encountered two additional difficulties compared to a few days ago: bad weather and the government's decision to assign Ancona, on the Adriatic coast, as the port of disembarkation — several hundred nautical miles further north than the port of Taranto, where the Geo Barents had docked on 4 January, and further north than Lampedusa or Sicily.
Why did Ancona, so far north, become the scene of two NGO vessel landings within 24 hours — first the Ocean Viking and then the Geo Barents — for a total of 110 people on board? Because Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi explained that the Viminale is seeking to distribute the burden of the continuing landings equitably among Italy's various ports. In reality, however, Ancona's mayor, Valeria Mancinelli, felt compelled to publish a video to explain to her own citizens — so unaccustomed are they to a migrant landing at their latitude — that "the place of disembarkation and the reception facilities where the migrants will be taken are not connected": for instance, the mayor pointed out that Ancona has already taken in 400 migrants who arrived on the coasts of Sicily and Puglia.
Il Governo ha stabilito che due navi con a bordo 110 migranti sbarchino al porto di Ancona. Voglio darvi le informazioni essenziali e corrette sulla vicenda e su quello che avverrà nella nostra città, per evitare, per quanto possibile, preoccupazioni ingiustificate ed il chiacchiericcio strumentale.
Posted by Valeria Mancinelli on Tuesday, January 10, 2023
The Geo Barents had been due to dock on Tuesday, but bad weather — with waves of up to two and a half metres (the same conditions faced by the Ocean Viking) — severely hampered navigation: the crew requested a closer port and received a negative response from the authorities. "This is our fourth day sailing towards Ancona," Fulvia Conte, head of rescue operations on board the Geo Barents, explained yesterday, describing the situation on board during the final day at sea. "Because of the weather we are moving at very low speed, not even 5 kilometres per hour. Last night we had to move people from a lower deck, which was flooded, to a higher deck where the rolling is much worse, and last night many people were extremely unwell. Unnecessary suffering, on top of everything the migrants have already endured during their journeys."
Suffering such as that experienced, for example, by Ochek (a fictitious name), who is 21 years old and one of the 73 people who have just disembarked from the Geo Barents. During the past few hours — the last, gruelling hours of the voyage — he had opened up and told his own story, which can serve as an example for everyone else's.
"On board the Médecins Sans Frontières ship I feel safe," he had said two days ago. "But at the same time I am not yet completely relieved, because I am still at sea and I am afraid of being sent back. I can't wait to reach Italy and set foot on land so I can start to forget everything I experienced in Libya and in Africa."
Ochek comes from Eritrea, "where children of 8 or 9 are conscripted into the army": he fled to Sudan at the age of 4 with his mother, specifically to spare him from permanent military service (the main reason Eritreans flee), because "one day the government took my father away and my mother was afraid the same would happen to me." He lived in Sudan for 13 years, "but from the age of 14 I wanted to leave — I didn't think it would be so dangerous. I thought it would be straightforward to get to Libya and then to Europe. In Sudan I did various jobs, I worked in a restaurant and in a gold mine in the mountains. Then I decided to go to Libya and that's when things changed."
The ordeal begins from the very moment of departure: "To go to Libya I paid a middleman. He had told me he would pay the smuggler, but the smuggler told me he hadn't received anything, so I would have to pay again or work for him. He didn't always treat me well, so after 3 months I fled." In Libya, Ochek explains, Eritreans are forced to live in hiding. "We have to stay indoors, we rarely go out because if they see us they kidnap us to demand a ransom. They ask us to pay in dollars because they believe we have relatives in Europe. I was kidnapped twice but both times I managed to escape."
In captivity, "in the morning they gave us a piece of bread and there was a jerrycan of desalinated, bitter water. Inside the room there was a bathroom and we slept on our sides, pressed up against one another on the floor. There were 70 to 100 of us but there was no limit on the number of people." Then came the escape, the work to save up enough money to pay a smuggler again. "While they were transferring us towards Tripoli, though, we were arrested and imprisoned again in an overcrowded room. Mistreatment, abuse and humiliation were the order of the day. It was a militia. We stayed there for 15 to 20 days."
Ochek swears that "until the day I left Libya I suffered torture and mistreatment, and with my own eyes I saw people beaten and abused. I was tortured. They tied my hands and burned me with a red-hot iron bar. My chest is covered in scars. They would hit us with a rifle or burn our chests with hot metal. They forced us to call our families to ask for help, to send ransom money. After 15 days of torture, one of these smugglers — an elderly man of about 80 — saw the state I was in and told the others I would die if they continued to torture me. Other people who had already paid their own ransom collected more money and paid for me too. They put me in a car and left me in Tripoli, where I found a group of Sudanese people and stayed with them."
But torture takes many forms in Libya. "You see women raped in front of you and there is nothing you can do, even if they come from Sudan just like you. If you try to help them they threaten you with a gun or beat you with a stick. I was ready to die at sea rather than be caught by the Libyan coastguard and be taken back to endure humiliation and torture all over again."
The final stretch — the sea crossing — is, if anything, even more harrowing. "At sea the rubber dinghy was pitching up and down. A man spotted a fishing boat in the distance and started screaming that it was the Libyan coastguard. Everyone panicked; people were vomiting — they would have preferred to die at sea."
Before taking to the sea, "they locked all 70 of us in a small room far from the shore. You can't speak, open your mouth or move. We were sitting next to one another, very tightly packed, then one by one they took us by car, where we were piled on top of each other. They took us to another place closer to the shore, just a few steps from the beach. At night they brought us out in groups of 10. They made us carry the dinghy and put it in the water. We jumped on and we prayed. We put our trust in God and set off. The waves took us up and down but, despite that, we weren't afraid until the moment that man shouted that the Libyan coastguard was there." After all, it's better to go and risk your life than to return to the hell of Libya. "People in Libya are not safe — they beat us with all their strength and fury, without mercy, as if we had committed murder against them." Now the first part of Ochek's journey is over: a second one begins, less dangerous but, if possible, equally complicated. The road of reception — where it leads, no one yet knows.
