The EU can no longer stand by while child migrants are drowning

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/21/eu-child-migrants-drowning-libya-trafficking

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Following Sunday’s catastrophe, in which a suspected 800 people drowned off Libya’s coast, only 28 people were saved and brought here to Catania. Despite almost drowning, they are considered the lucky ones. Over the sea in Malta, some of the bodies of those who died have begun to be brought ashore.

The scale of this tragedy can be put down to the EU’s short-sighted decision to end funds for Italy’s search-and-rescue operation at the end of last year. This was replaced with a smaller and cheaper border control mission. It’s clear that this was the wrong decision and it’s time to restart the rescue.

But we must also look at the root causes of this tragedy. Many of those attempting to reach Europe are children. And of these children, many are completely alone – without the support of parents, family or friends. In 2014, half of the children who arrived in Italy were unaccompanied, but this year the proportion has increased to over two-thirds (68%).

These children are fleeing conflict, extreme poverty and persecution in some of the world’s most bloody conflicts, failed states and repressive regimes including Syria, Somalia and Eritrea. They are not criminals, but victims of some of the modern world’s most major crises.

One migrant reported traffickers spraying migrants with petrol and setting them on fire for 'stepping out of line'

Many of those children I’ve spoken to were tricked by traffickers and promised jobs as hairdressers, shop assistants and babysitters. Their families were persuaded to pay thousands of pounds to allow them to head to Europe. But once in the hands of traffickers and far from home, they had no rights and no protection.

Libya has for many years been the point of departure for thousands of people fleeing Africa and the Middle East, but the deteriorating situation in the country has allowed human trafficking to flourish. The lack of police, governance or state control in anarchic Libya means traffickers operate with impunity. Combined with recent good weather, the number of people launching off the country’s northern coast has rocketed in recent months.

On the journey across Libya, children face dehydration and malnutrition, kidnapping, detention and extortion, torture, child slavery, trafficking and sexual abuse. Here in Sicily, the Save the Children team met 17-year-old Brahane from Eritrea. He described being forced to board a pick-up truck of 30 people to cross the Sahara desert into Libya. He reported seeing ruthless traffickers spraying migrants with petrol and setting them on fire for “stepping out of line”.

“In Libya we only ate once a day,” he said. “We stopped near Benghazi for a month. We were continuously beaten up, in some cases with iron bars.” He said 63 of the migrants he was trafficked with were killed in Libya; of these, 25 had their heads cut off. Brahane said the people traffickers would call the migrants’ families and torture them down the phone line, to pretend they were killing them and extort even more money. Even if children survive this terrible ordeal, they must pay thousands of pounds for a place on a crammed and unsafe boat.

As various tragedies in the past six months have shown, these journeys can include ramshackle and vastly overcrowded boats, migrants being locked in the hold of ships, and boats being left to drift unmanned across the Mediterranean.

Related: I was a Lampedusa refugee. Here’s my story of fleeing Libya – and surviving | Hakim Bello

These people are desperate – they have fled often with no possessions, put themselves into the hands of savage traffickers, trekked across the Sahara desert and then spent time in lawless Libya. They are not risk-averse, so they will continue to attempt this final leg of their journeys across the sea.

Alongside the urgent need to set up a European search-and-rescue mission then, EU leaders must also look to help build stable states and support governments in crisis, so that fewer children are forced to seek refuge abroad in the first place. Save the Children works in many of the countries these children come from on issues of violence, poverty, desperation and human rights abuses.

But this is a global problem which is going to increase in coming decades and requires more resources and greater commitment from governments. Some of these factors will take a long time to fix, but the bottom line is we can’t stand by while children are drowning. We’re not pretending this is easy, but right now there is an undeniable humanitarian imperative to save lives and EU leaders must step up.