Dying to Live

Night and day, Haj Ashmawi and his neighbours in the impoverished village of Telbana in the governorate of Daqahliya look sadly at the lapping brown edge of the river in the hope their sons will return. At least 20 young men from the village had risked their lives taking dilapidated ferryboat to Italy via Libya in a desperate escape from a dire life on the Delta, hopefully to the European pastures of potential wealth. But they had neither made it to Italy nor returned. They just disappeared, leaving behind loads of stories of grieving parents and broken homes wallowing in debt and family disputes.

"They [the young immigrants] have not drowned," insists Ashmawi, hoping against hope "they are in captivity."

Ashmawi's son Sami was among seven young labour migrants who disappeared three years ago on the deadly route to the land of fortune, Sicily. Another 13 from the same village disappeared the same way seven years ago.

An impending sense of sadness and anticipation has taken over the village now mired in financial and family problems. "Those young men have left their wives and kids without any assets, money or a breadwinner," Ashmawi said. "We die everyday. It's only hope that keeps us alive."

His hope, however, grows dimmer every day just like the fading rays of the orange sunset reflecting on Ashmawi's tired face and poor house. A tenant farmer with a heart disease and yet many mouths to feed, Ashmawi is now encumbered with debt. He had to pay LE20,000 for the expenses of his son's trip on the understanding that he would pay them back when he reached Italy. "We had to borrow the money because we are poor," he recounted. "But we pay them back in instalments."

Haj Ashmawi does not know where to vent his anger -- on "poverty; a government that does not care for its people; or an infectious ambition affecting the entire village.

"Loads of young men from our village made it to Italy and came back with a fortune, building houses and getting married," he said. "Those young men have ambition. They can't get jobs here and if they do they get very low wages. They have no choice but to throw themselves and their money into the sea; people die here every day because of poverty and unemployment and the government does not do anything to help."

So when Ashmawi's 20-year-old son Sami told him he wanted to go to Italy, the allure was hard to resist. Sami had worked as a barber in Libya, but his wage was too little to make ends meet. "I told myself 'let him travel like all young men in the neighbourhood so he can help himself and his siblings,'" Ashmawi continued. "Young men compare themselves to each other and get jealous when they see that others have made it to a better life. And no one can say this is an illegal way of making a living since there is nothing legal in this country. The government has not left people with any other choice."

Everybody in the village tells more or less the same story. They similarly insist that the young men who disappeared are alive and have been detained by the Italian authorities in holding camps in Italy's Lampedusa and Sicily. The families of those who disappeared say they have received repeated anonymous calls telling them that their sons are alive and were being held in holding camps.

"They would say your sons are sending you their regards and hang up," Ashmawi told Al - Ahram Weekly. "They would not reveal their names or identities. We tried to contact the numbers appearing on our phones, but it turned out that they called from pre-paid cards."

People would bet on whether the anonymous calls were being made by sympathetic prison guards, released prisoners, or are just a trick by traffickers who seek to inject hope in potential travellers.

Um Wael attests to the first scenario. She said she had received several calls from her 30-year-old son Wael El-Sayed telling her that he had been imprisoned, together with 36 other illegal Egyptian emigrants in Lampedusa, and asked her to call the Egyptian authorities to help them out. "He said he was calling from the mobile of a sympathetic Arab guard there and that conditions are very hard in the camp," the shattered mother told the Weekly. She looked sadly at a photo of her son while in captivity which a stranger had delivered two months ago and in which she said her son looked "literary 10 years older." She doesn't really care who delivered the photo -- what matters is that "someone must do something" to save her son.

"A stranger came and said he was from the Egyptian Foreign Ministry and gave me the photo. I asked at the ministry and they said they don't know anything about it," Um Wael went on. "Please do something to get my son back," she pleaded.

The families of those who have disappeared said they had done everything they could to save their sons -- talked to the press and contacted the authorities, the Italian Embassy and Interpol, to no avail. "We sent a letter to President Mubarak and he replied, saying contact Interpol. We did but nothing happened," Um Wael complained.

Officials at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs similarly can do little to rescue immigrants who, more often than not, deny their Egyptian identities. Illegal immigrants usually claim a false Palestinian or Iraqi identity in the hopes that they would be released and let into Europe as political refugees. Many have made it to Europe this way but many have also died in the process.

"The last thing they [illegal immigrants] want is to be deported to Egypt," noted Adel William, director of the Land Centre for Human Rights (LCHR). Traffickers of illegal emigrants, according to William, ask for huge sums of money, around LE40,000 and almost all these travellers sell everything they have -- their homes, land, sometimes even their wives' gold, borrow money from friends or get loans from banks to pay for the expenses of the trip in the hope that they would pay it all back when they work in Europe. "They would then rather die in prison than come back with such a failure to an even more miserable life now mired in debt and unemployment," William said.

According to LCHR estimates, about 8,800 Egyptian illegal emigrants died in European holding camps from 1993 to 2006 while the future of 16,000 other detainees seized over the past five years remains uncertain. There are 176 holding centres in Europe for illegal immigrants: 16 are in Italy, 19 in Greece and four in Malta where most immigrants head. Those without the necessary documents are usually held in these camps and, if they reveal their true identities, they are ultimately issued deportation papers.

But those seem to be the lucky ones. Thousands had encountered disasters en route and had their ferries capsized off the coasts of Italy, Malta, Greece, Cyprus and Spain, known as the most accessible destinations for African immigrants. Traffickers usually use dilapidated ferries suitable only for regional waters, and cram them up with emigrants who are left with very few food supplies and little space on board. Many of these fishing boats encounter disaster en route. They may lose direction, run out of fuel and food supplies or capsize while trying to negotiate the relentless waves of the sea. Those who are fortunate enough to survive tell horror stories of how the passengers aboard the doomed fishing boats become hysterical and jump into the sea, faint out of hunger and thirst or succumb to the endless periods of time on the high seas.

The number of those who have drowned in the Mediterranean remains unknown but people insist it is in the thousands. The issue recently came into the media and official limelight when two boatloads of would-be Egyptian migrants sank off the coast of Sicily in late October claiming the lives of 22 people. Twelve people drowned off the Sicilian town of Siracusa and nine drowned off the province of Calabria. The Italian coast guard said it had no information to support one claim that up to 140 had died, and Italian media reported that many aboard the boats were believed to have swum to safety; Reuters said.

"There is no way we will know the exact number of those who drown unless someone comes back to tell us the story," William told the Weekly.

A brief study by the LCHR, however, gives an alarming sign of how illegal immigration has become phenomenal. It says 153 illegal migrants drowned and 158 remained missing in the period between January and October 2007. About 1,000 others were deported in the same period. In the sole month of June 2007, 74 Egyptian migrants went missing en route to Greece from the governorates of Daqahliya, Beheira and Menoufiya. Another six were arrested by Tunisian border guards as they attempted to sail to Europe in the same month. Perhaps because it is the nearest and most accessible and already has many Egyptian immigrants living there who can provide help, Italy proved to be the destination of at least 61 per cent of all immigrants.

The number of those who make it to European shores remains equally murky. Success stories usually go as follows: when illegal migrants are arrested by coast guards, they never say they are Egyptian and usually get entry papers to stay for four days after which they are arrested again if they do not leave the country. "They never leave though; they hide and get the help of relatives and friends with legal stay in the country to get a job," William said. "They get minor jobs -- many in pig ranches -- that Europeans do not take, but the jobs pay because of the difference in currency."

The phenomenon, according to William, started 10 or 15 years ago but has increased drastically due to arduous economic conditions.

According to recent USAID estimates, approximately 40 per cent of the Egyptian population still live below the poverty line. The same study reveals that Egypt suffers from a high chronic unemployment rate of 15-25 per cent and a lack of public participation in political life. According to the World Bank's World Development Indicators for 2006, 43.9 per cent of all Egyptians live on less than $2 a day while prices continue to rise at unprecedented speed.

Conditions are even worse in the countryside where "job opportunities are almost non-existent and the fruits of development are hardly seen", according to William. "Conditions started to deteriorate with the application of Law 96/1992 which was put into action in 1997 and resulted in the expulsion of almost one million tenant farmers from lands. That accordingly meant that at least seven million people -- the families of the expelled tenant farmers -- have been suffering the double onslaught of unemployment and poverty in villages nationwide."

The phenomenon is widespread in about 40 to 50 villages on the Nile Delta. Daqahliya, particularly the villages of Mit Nagi and Telbana, witnessed the highest rate of illegal immigration -- it is the fourth most populated city in Egypt after Cairo, Alexandria and Giza. "There are four million people there living on only 2,000 feddans of arable land, with 61 per cent owning less than a single feddan," William maintained.

A pessimistic William expects a much bigger wave of illegal immigration to Europe if a new law imposes higher taxes on resident houses. "A farmer will be asked to pay up to LE3,000 a year for perhaps a multi-storey brick house where he lives with his extended family."

William regrets the way the government tackles the problem as a security rather than humane issue. "The government insists on simply imposing penalties on traffickers, but that will not work. If one trafficker is seized, a thousand others will emerge. People are left with no other choice but to die on the high seas because they believe they will perish anyway."

On the same day the village of Mit Nagi received the coffins of a number of immigrants who drowned, William was surprised to find a man from the same village preparing his luggage for a similar deadly trip to Europe. "The man scoffed at the idea of death. He was 42 and unemployed. Even those who experienced disasters on their way to Europe are ready to take the risk twice and thrice if they have the means to."

The Weekly contacted two survivors of two capsized ships loaded with illegal emigrants -- Wael El-Gohari and Mohamed Ghali -- who witnessed several drownings. Surprisingly enough, it turned out that the two had left to Europe in the same deadly way.

"I spent a year fighting with him, trying to stop him from going, but there was no stopping him," a saddened Ghali's mother told the Weekly. "He said he would die anyway if he remained here without a job and unable to get married." Neither was the horror Ghali experienced on his first trip to Italy enough reason for him to stay home. According to his mother's account, the ship Ghali was aboard stopped on the high seas, ran out of fuel and with no food left. Ghali's fellow travellers panicked and drowned. "My son clung to a floating oil barrel and swum to safety, but it left him with skin burns [from the first trip]. He did not have his skin treated before he decided to leave the country again," she cried.

Even success stories may end up in misery sometimes. Having managed to stay legally for more than 10 years in Italy as an Iraqi refugee, an Egyptian illegal immigrant was successful enough to open a chain of restaurants in Italy but ironically not to secure a better future for his family back home. "He died suddenly," William said. "He had all his money frozen in assets -- restaurants -- and now his wife cannot claim a penny of the billions of Egyptian pounds her husband left because she cannot prove his identity."

Not that William blames immigrants. Instead, he suggests practical solutions that focus on developing the countryside. He is not fond of the bilateral agreement the Egyptian Foreign Ministry recently made with Italy -- that Italy provides 7,000 jobs yearly -- since "lower-ranking officials at the Egyptian Ministry of Manpower take bribes from those who want to travel, which are more in value than the money a trafficker would take."

For William, development is a core solution. "The EU has earmarked $6 billion to secure borders against the infiltration of illegal immigrants, but the Egyptian government should suggest that part of those funds go to developing villages and generating jobs.

"Immigrants will find a million ways to reach their destination because they are desperate," William insisted. "It might be illegal, but definitely not illegitimate because it is a basic human right that people work for a living."