Ten years on: from Lampedusa to Pylos

Francesca Soliman is a lecturer in Criminology at Edinburgh Napier University. Francesca’s research focuses on the social harms caused by borderisation on Mediterranean islands such as Lampedusa.

In the early hours of 14 June 2023, an overcrowded fishing vessel carrying an estimated 750 people capsized off the coast of Pylos, Greece. While rescue efforts recovered 104 survivors and the bodies of 82 victims, hundreds more passengers remain missing, unlikely to be recovered. Ten years before Pylos, on 3 October 2013, a fishing boat carrying over 500 people capsized just off the coast of Lampedusa, Italy, killing at least 360 passengers. Drawing parallels between the two tragedies comes easy: both boats broke down on their way to Italy from Libya, waiting through the night for help that would not come, and both triggered an outpouring of public grief and promises of institutional change. Like Lampedusa, Pylos was preceded by countless similar tragedies, and like Lampedusa it will likely be followed by countless more.

The 2013 Lampedusa shipwreck featured prominently in both national and international discourse, with politicians, activists, and other commentators united in crying “never again”. And yet, the search for the victims of 3 October was still ongoing when, on 11 October 2013, 268 Syrians would drown in what would become known in Italy as the “children’s shipwreck”. During the “black week” in April 2015, two shipwrecks claimed over 1,200 lives off the coast of Libya. In February 2023, almost 100 people, a third of whom were children, drowned off the coast of Cutro, Italy. According to IOM estimates, since 2014 at least 27,000 migrants have died attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea, and the list of known shipwrecks keeps growing. As Hyab Johannes reminds us, behind these statistics are hundreds of thousands of friends and families grieving the loss of a loved one, or waiting in limbo, unaware of their loved one’s fate.

The seemingly routinised nature of Mediterranean deaths is a threat to our humanity, but it also prevents us from focusing long enough on any one tragedy as migrant shipwrecks follow one another in quick succession, competing for the public’s attention and politicians’ consternation. The shipwreck in Pylos, however, should mark a turning point, as the role of Greek and EU authorities comes under increasing scrutiny. Initial claims by the Greek Coast Guard that the migrant vessel had been moving steadily in the hours before it capsized have been contradicted by a BBC analysis showing that the boat had been stationary “for at least seven hours” before sinking; meanwhile, Watch The Med Alarm Phone claims they had warned Greek authorities that the boat was in distress as early as 2pm on the previous day. This reconstruction of events suggests that the Greek Coast Guard watched the boat for several hours without intervening, carefully avoiding triggering Dublin obligations by taking the migrants on board. This is consistent with the common practice by European actors of exploiting the carefully maintained jurisdictional and legal vacuum at sea to absolve themselves of responsibility for migrant deaths. However, subsequent investigations into the Pylos shipwreck suggest that the Greek Coast Guard had instead attempted to tow the boat away from European waters, causing it to capsize. These claims are shocking, but not inconsistent with the recent evidence of migrant pushbacks: only two months before Pylos, footage emerged showing Greek authorities rounding up asylum seekers on Lesbos and abandoning them at sea on an inflatable raft. 

Ten years ago, the shipwreck near Lampedusa was largely attributed to two causes: a failure to rescue migrants at sea, and a failure by Italian and European institutions to provide safer migration routes. Omission and negligence remain key factors in the perpetration of border violence in the Mediterranean, but migrant deaths are not caused solely through neglect: as events such as Pylos and Lesbos show, the normalisation of tragedies at sea insidiously shields from view how state-sanctioned lethal violence is deployed ever more brazenly at the borders of Europe. As the death count from the shipwrecks known to have happened since Pylos steadily rises, I look ahead with despair at the horrors that the next ten years may bring.  

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