the harbour in Otranto there are two short rows of prefabricated huts and containers for illegals who have been caught, most of them on the beach, a handful inland. They arrive at the huts drenched and chilled to the marrow. They are shivering, terrified, nearly ecstatic – a state induced by the journey and the fact of having survived it. Their eyes are bright, feverish, inquiring, their faces transfigured by a combination of exhaustion, curiosity and surprise. It’s as though they’d tumbled slowly and painfully to earth through rain-logged skies and couldn’t quite grasp that they’d survived the impact of landing. Jeans, shirts, sweaters are set out to dry between the huts and, after an hour or so, the men begin milling about, while the women sit with their heads bowed and the children sleep.
It is 5 a.m. There are dozens of detainees in the huts. Two Albanians who are sure to be sent back take out their sodden documents: they have wives in Italy and children attending Italian schools; they have work contracts and Italian tax returns, the evidence of their right to reside here. One is a building labourer, the other a mechanic. When the labourer heard that his mother had taken sick in Tirana, his friend accompanied him back. The time came to return to Italy, but they couldn’t get the authorisation from the Italian consulate and anyhow, they explained, it is hard to take the legal route to Italy on the ferry that plies the Channel daily. The scafisti soften the ticketing companies and harbour authorities with a mixture of threats and incentives, to ensure that very few passengers avail themselves of the ferry and demand for the gommoni remains high. But these two men, who are legally entitled to stay in Italy, attempted illegal entry and that is sufficient reason to send them back. (Imagine a diligent servant lodging in the house of the family he works for. He has to leave for a day, on business, but loses his key. He arrives late at night and enters by a window at the back. The family dismisses him.) The strain on their faces is no longer the strain of fatigue. It has cost them over the odds to get to Otranto and now all their outlay is squandered.
By 7 a.m. medics, finger-printers and interpreters are arriving at Otranto harbour. People are examined for injuries. Migrants often sustain fractures wading ashore in the dark. Children can be concussed by the repetitive jolting of the boats at high speed on rough seas. In one of the huts, plywood table tops have been stood on oil-drums and forensic staff are preparing to take fingerprints. The migrants shuffle down the line with their hands extended. The abrupt introduction of the illegal alien to the grudging host state begins. In this parody of greeting, gloved hands reach out to bare hands, seize them, flatten them down on an ink block, lift them across the table-top and flatten them again onto a square of paper. Four sets of prints are taken from each person, then a photograph. A group of Kurdish men, some in stone-washed denims, others in crumpled checks with turn-ups from their overnight bags, dig their knuckles into a tub of industrial cleansing jelly and climb out of the hut, wringing their blackened hands. A truck arrives with sacks of sandwiches and cases of mineral water. Briefly the sight of food rouses the detainees; dejection and reticence give way to energy and assertion. Men come forward to skirmish on behalf of wives, sisters, children. As disorder threatens, a detachment of carabinieri cajoles them into silence.
There are sixty detainees in all. About a third are Albanians, who will be sent back on the ferry. The rest – Kurds and Kosovans – will be bussed up the coast to the Centro Regina Pacis, to be quartered and processed, and eventually released into Italy with a short-stay permit or temporary leave to remain. The figures for last night’s game in the Otranto Channel are now through: twelve landings and 201 detentions along the coast of Puglia. But many will have got away. Rain drives down on the prefab huts. Grey seas fret at the harbour walls. As the first contingent of shivering arrivals prepares to board a waiting bus, a dull church bell starts tolling for Mass.
Whether they’ll live or die must, at some point on the journey, become a more pressing question for illegal entrants into EU countries than whether they will find a foothold in the rich world. These journeys are dangerous. But to be driven by attrition is to prefer the devil you don’t know, or to give him the benefit of the doubt, and for those who buy passage on the gommoni, the devil is vaguely familiar in any case. Rumour and precedent keep the scafisti in business. This form of passage is relatively low risk. The bigger boats which fill up with passengers along the shores of the eastern Mediterranean and hang in the offing with hundreds of people on board waiting for the moment to abandon them on the Italian coast are another matter. Death from thirst, sickness, hunger or a full-scale disaster is a pressing possibility.
About three hours after the buses loaded with Kurds and Kosovans left for Regina Pacis on that bitter Sunday morning, a 200-tonne vessel under an Albanian flag dropped anchor south of Otranto, off Santa Maria de Leuca. The captain and most of the crew got away in an inflatable raft, consigning their passengers to Italian jurisdiction, and the Guardia di Finanza began shuttling them off the boat in lighters and reconnaissance craft. The captain had been cruising the coasts of Greece and Albania for two weeks, but some of the passengers had probably been at sea for longer, languishing in an even larger boat anchored off the coast of Turkey, before being decanted into this elderly cargo ship.
Hundreds of bystanders waited on the quays in the lashing rain, watching the migrants disembark. There were many exhausted women and children coming off the boat. One Guardia shuttle consisted entirely of Africans. On the gangways, a ravaged young man lifted his face and bared his parched mouth to the downpour. To a barrage of questions he replied that he was from Sierra Leone and that he’d been travelling for three months. He flicked one hand gracefully, dismissively, at about the level of his forehead: ‘Up, up.’
He and his friends had come overland from West Africa. I asked where they’d boarded ship, but the police shut the conversation down. That night I drove along the coast through a violent storm to Regina Pacis, to find out more, but the gates were barred by carabinieri. After half an hour an official appeared and read out a provisional tally of arrivals: 169 from Turkey, probably Kurds, four from Iraq, three Afghans, seventeen from Sierra Leone, twenty-nine from Guinea-Bissau, one from the Democratic Republic of Congo and another from Senegal.
In the course of twenty-four hours in deep winter, with Italian security already beginning to deploy in Albania and the Italian Government more resolute than it had been throughout the hectic summer of 1998, 400 illegal migrants had entered the country. The figure does not include those who made their way off the beaches of Puglia without being detected. Statistics for the following year showed no let-up: by October 1999, over 20,000 illegal migrants had been apprehended and for every one of those, the Guardia di Finanza estimated, two or three would have slipped through the net.
This is not the first time that Europe has become a place of passage and confusion. In 1937, with one massive displacement of people following another in the heart of the continent and points east, the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London commissioned a comprehensive survey of refugee movements. To superintend the project, it appointed John Hope Simpson, a persuasive and highly energetic man who had worked in India and Palestine, directed the National Flood Relief programme in China (1931–32) and served as vice-president of the Refugee Settlement Commission in Athens. In the summer of 1938, Simpson published a preliminary report of his team’s findings. By the time a full text was ready for the presses in October, he was forced to note in his preface that the annexation of Austria had now ‘strained the capacity of absorption of neighbouring countries to breaking point’, while the annexation of Sudeten areas of Czechoslovakia had created ‘yet another most serious problem, the full effects of which are not yet measurable’. A report commissioned at a moment which the Institute might justifiably have thought to be the high-point of the ‘refugee problem’ was superseded on the eve of publication by a further flurry of stateless people and evacuees clamouring for sanctuary. Yet the findings of Simpson and his colleagues on refugee movements in the preceding years and on reception and settlement in host countries, were so carefully researched and presented that the finished document, which runs to 600 pages, remains a model of what have come to be known as ‘refugee studies’. It also has a bearing on the refugee movements we are witnessing now.
Simpson’s mainstay in France was H. W. H. Sams, a gifted investigator decorously referred
