Boat people: a European responsibility for all

The day I assumed my functions in Valletta, on July 23, 2008, the Maltese press reported that a boat laden with 28 men and two women had been intercepted at six nautical miles from the shore of Marsaxlokk and the illegal immigrants had been handed over to the police authorities.

This quasi-daily chronicle of suffering and exile now forms part of the daily life of each and every one of us, whether we live in Malta, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Germany or France. It is by reflecting on the past (shattered illusions) and of the future (improbable hopes) of the African boat people that a month after my arrival I contacted the crew of Falcon 50 that, leaving from Malta, patrolled above the sea within the framework of the Frontex operation.

Frontex has, since 2004, been coordinating civil and military officials responsible for gathering information on the immigration networks and for organising the nautical and aerial means which monitor the external European frontiers.

I therefore spent a day in a plane flying above the Mediterranean. What did I see? Tunisian and Maltese fishing boats, turtles, a whale, plastic bags, but also two empty capsized dinghies. Their passengers, illegal immigrants, had perished. In the event of shipwreck, one never knows exactly the number of people who are missing.

This type of dinghy, generally of bad quality, is the boat most frequently used by the smugglers, who also make use of fibreglass boats, often rendered fragile because of hasty construction. Dinghies and boats leave the shore overloaded with passengers, jerry cans with petrol, water and food supplies.

The passengers, whose identity papers have in most cases been stolen (the smugglers remain ashore), are merely instructed to steer due north. They are sometimes equipped with a compass, GPS or satellite telephones. The material used remains always the same, a sign of the existence of structured, stable networks.

Dinghies and boats made of fibreglass, always just about being able to float, are fragile vessels, at the mercy of any gust of wind, and even of a treacherous wave. Seen from the sky, the black dinghy was a dark spot on the sea. It is estimated that around 1,000 immigrants die in this manner every year; it is one of the tragedies of our time.

The majority of these immigrants hail from Somalia, Eritrea, to a lesser extent from Mali, the Ivory Coast, Niger or Nigeria. All are ready to risk death in order to live in Europe. Each epoch has had its infernal voyages.

The 20th century invented neither hatred nor indifference, but it rushed dozens of millions of men and women towards death or deportation. Everyone knows how the criminal policies that ravage Africa, fatally sick with Aids, now hurl entire populations onto lawless routes.

Hope is a very long path, which may entail months, even years. Constrained to work in order to pay their journey, always robbed, often abused, sometimes abandoned to certain death in the midst of the Sahara, and subjected at every stage to aberrant travel costs, to extortion by all and sundry, transformed into slaves or prostitutes, swindled, it is morally drained people who reach the African coast from where they may perhaps be finally able, after having paid $1,000, to embark (they all have often already spent between $1,000 and $1,500 on their land journey).

Numerous European experts confirm that the route of the illegal immigrants remains always paved with the same horrors. But the truth is still to be construed, as Camus used to say, just like love, like intelligence.

At the beginning of December 2008, French Minister Brice Hortefeux announced that the following year France would be receiving 80 African immigrants coming from Malta. I then met Foreign Affairs Minister Tonio Borg and asked him what he thought of the French decision. "Excellent!" he said, "when I had spoken about this eventuality to a French minister a few years ago, a woman, had told me: Ask for whatever you want, except that! We are moving forward."

Since that day, the French and Maltese authorities have worked hand in hand. Before the end of June, 80 immigrants should be boarding the plane to France. A few weeks ago, Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi evoked at great length before Bernard Kouchner this human drama and the problems of the Maltese faced with these chaotic arrivals. Everyone understands that Malta, a European and Mediterranean country, should not remain alone.

The peoples around the Mediterranean have always sought the eternal promises of life. This quest has often given people good reasons to abandon their villages, their cities and to go far away. Greeks, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, had of yore left their shores to follow in the footsteps of Ulysses. Closer to us, right in the middle of the 19th century, many French people, craftsmen from the suburbs, worker revolutionaries of 1848, embarked down in the hold of barges, then on paddle frigates, have crossed the Mediterranean to go and found colonies in swampy regions or thorny lands.

And how many Maltese have left their island to go and settle in Alexandria, in Tunisia or in Algeria? And in the 20th century, how many crossings were there in the opposite direction? Peasants from the Rif, Chouf or Kabyl came to work in French mines and factories. Pieds Noirs (some of Maltese origin) came back to France with just a suitcase. All that was not bereft of pain.

History is always both enthralling and frightening. Today Ulysses is black, and dies at sea in the silence of the waves, after months of distress. This tragedy does not concern only the Maltese and the immigrants, but also all the European and African countries bordering both shores. The Mediterranean, our common good, where we indefatigably seek the face of wisdom and of beauty, cannot become a cemetery.

Mr Rondeau is the French Ambassador.