The Italian island, Lampedusa, is a magnet for tourists - and for thousands of Africans who risk death to reach it, reports Paddy Agnew
This week, tourists on the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa waiting for the ferry to take them back to Sicily found themselves in unfamiliar company. Waiting alongside them on the other side of a steel fence were hundreds of African "boat people", watched over by local police.
For the tourists, it was the end of a holiday and time to travel home to the Italian mainland via Sicily. For the boat people, it was just another stage in a gruelling odyssey that will have seen some of them leave their homes in north African and sub-Saharan African countries, travelling thousands of miles overland to the coast of Libya, and from there to not-so-faraway Italy.
Given that a choppy sea delayed the ferry's arrival in port, the tourists and the migrants had plenty of time to observe one another, with the former idling away their time in their cars and the latter seated in neat rows on the harbour-front pavement. Two nights earlier, many tourists had come down to the same harbour to take photographs of the luxury yacht of fashion mogul Giorgio Armani. Now, some of them took out their cameras again and photographed the motley crew of migrants.
The reality about Lampedusa, an island that was once owned by the Lampedusa family best known for the writer Giuseppe, author of The Leopard, is that it is closer to Africa than to Italy.
For many years tourists have been attracted to the little island by the stunning quality of its spectacular
turquoise sea, full of starfish, scorpion fish, octopuses, sea cucumbers, sea sponges, and many other maritime delights.
These days, its proximity to Africa has attracted another type of regular visitor - the economic migrant. Since January, more than 11,000 boat people - Algerians, Egyptians, Eritreans, Ethiopians, Libyans, Moroccans, Senegalese, Somalis, Sudanese, Tunisians and others - have landed on the little island. That figure represents just over double the island's 5,300 population.
For every boat person who struggles onto the island, perhaps another 10 or more fail to make it, eaten up by either the desert or the sea. Last weekend, for example, an estimated 70 people drowned on successive days as their boats sank close to Lampedusa.
Ironically, one of those sinkings may have been caused when the migrants all rushed to the side of their already badly listing boat in order to climb onto an Italian navy rescue vessel. As their vessel listed even more, it appears to have collided with the Italian boat.
For the tourists, perhaps the biggest problem on the road ahead concerned dealing with that all-too-familiar post-holiday, back-to-work trauma that negatively impacts on many of us at this time of year. For the migrants, it was time to travel to the splendidly named Centre of Temporary Permanence, or holding camp.
In principle, the idea of the holding camp is that it gives the state authorities time and space to identify
the boat people, establish their provenance and sort out the economic migrants from the political refugees. If a boat person cannot prove that he or she is entitled to political asylum or has a permesso di soggiorno (permit to stay), then he is adjudged to be "clandestine" and is served with an expulsion order, prior to compulsory repatriation.
In practice, many of the migrants have little or no documentation (in some cases, deliberately so), which
makes identification difficult. On top of that, the process is further slowed by linguistic problems, given the shortage of interpreters and the variety of different migrant languages. Needless to say, almost no one has a permesso di soggiorno.
GIULIANO AMATO, ITALY'S minister for the interior, acknowledged to parliament in June that this whole identification process can take 15-40 days. In the meantime, some of the migrants will have slipped out of the holding camps. Many more "move on" even after the expulsion order is served, since the current legislation - the so-called Bossi-Fini law - gives them three days in which to leave.
In short, the migrant often very quickly moves from the holding camp of "temporary permanence" to a
Western Europe of "permanent temporariness".
Reacting to last weekend's latest wave of boat people, Amato lamented the fact that more of the "slave
traders" who organised this "criminal" activity were not apprehended. At a midweek news conference, he announced the setting-up of two special units intended to co-ordinate the fight against illegal immigration, with one based in Sicily and the other in Rome, both modelled on existing anti-Mafia and anti-terrorist units. Furthermore, the Bossi-Fini law seems destined for immediate and radical revision.
Given the dimensions of illegal immigration from the developing world, such measures, unless co-ordinated at European Union level, are unlikely to resolve much. In the meantime, what will become of
Lampedusa? Already the revenue generated by the 20,000 tourists who annually visit the island is being challenged by the revenue generated by the permanent presence of the 400-strong security force required to deal with the migrants. Unlike the tourists, who mostly come in July and August, the security forces stay all year round. Then, too, there are those local traders making the most of the situation, such as baker Gianfranco, who regularly turns out 7,000-8,000 loaves of bread for the hundreds of overnight migrant "guests".
The migrants might bring business for some, but they represent a problem for the tourist trade, according to Salvatore, who runs a car hire company, Mikael. He says his business is down 50 per cent on last year. Antonio, chef at the Ucalaciune restaurant, shares those worries, telling the daily newspaper La Stampa this week that he was worried about the long-term impact on the island's fishing trade: "Who will want to buy our famous blue fish when the message finally gets out that these waters are full of dead bodies?"
Not everyone sees it quite that way. Rock singer Claudio Baglioni, who has a summer house on the island, stages an annual September concert in Lampedusa to draw attention to the problem of illegal immigration. "This is just the visible part of a global problem that we've had for years," said Baglioni this week. "The migrants have started to come to die right beside us, in our homes. It used to be that we
only saw that sort of tragedy on TV."