Chronicle of a tragedy foretold

Reactions to this week's shocking tragedy off Lampedusa - in which over 300 asylum seekers from Africa are believed to have lost their lives in the umpteenth such accident in recent years - have raised more questions than they set about to answer.

As tends to be the case when tragedy strikes, most of the formal reactions by governments adopted a suitably shocked and outraged tone to respond to what can only be described as the most serious human tragedy to befall the region in years.

Without doubting the sincerity of all such statements, the fact however remains that we have all heard this rhetoric before. Such tragedies are not after all unique: Fortress Europe, a website aimed at cataloguing what it now describes as a 'massacre' (strage) in the Mediterranean, estimates that thousands of asylum seekers have perished in the ongoing attempts to reach Europe from Africa.

Death has in fact become a very recognisable part of the public face of irregular immigration; and yet the reaction of European countries - Malta included - to the latest of several such tragedies has included 'surprise' that such things could happen on their own doorstep.

One can only wonder where all these countries were looking, when 13 migrants drowned off the coast of Sicily just the preceding week; or when 31 people drowned off Libya coast last July; or another 20 near Lesbos (Greece) last December; or when 89 asylum seekers died attempting to cross from Morocco to Gibraltar between October and November 2012... among many, many other cases of loss of life as a direct result of the Mediterranean's now evident human trafficking phenomenon. 

Faced with the sheer predictability of a tragedy which has had so many precursors, one can only seriously question the commitment of European nations - individually, and also as a collective - to meet their own legal responsibilities to save lives at sea.

Elsewhere, it must also be said that not all the official reactions were quite so tactful or restrained. Stripped of all its frills, the official response by the Maltese government can very easily be interpreted as a thinly disguised attempt to wrest more logistical support from a European Commission that has to date ducked its own responsibility for Europe's southernmost border.

"Today's incident should not remain just a headline but it should lead to EU solidarity," Prime Minister Joseph Muscat said, adding that "countries cannot be left to face this problem on their own".

Viewed in the context of his repeated calls for more solidarity from Europe, the message comes across as uncomfortably reminiscent of a ploy (with which Muscat has been accused in the past) to use the plight of asylum seekers as leverage in negotiations with Brussels.

Given the timing of this reaction, Muscat's choice of words was decidedly unfortunate. The people owed solidarity at this stage are surely the 150 survivors of this tragedy, as well as the families of the ones who were not so lucky. Muscat would be well advised to give more thought to statements issued on such sensitive matters, especially considering the fact that his government has already been accused of deliberately exploiting the migration issue to secure an international mandatory burden sharing agreement.

Nonetheless, one must also concede that the EU has indeed proved reluctant to take any serious action to address this issue once and for all. And even if Malta's demands for help and solidarity were ill-timed and smacked of insensitivity, the European Commission clearly owes its Mediterranean partners an explanation for its near-total avoidance of the issue in so many years.

As things stand, Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom's response was to announce a new mechanism, EUROSUR, aimed at providing logistical support to life-saving operations at sea.

This is a welcome development, no doubt, but at the same time one is forcibly reminded of similar initiatives in the past, which were likewise announced with much fanfare by the Commission only to have a negligible impact on the situation.

FRONTEX (of which EUROSUR is ultimately but an offshoot) had promised to achieve identical goals in 2011; but was ultimately hamstrung by lack of co-ordination and agreement among individual member states.

Malmstrom has so far stopped short of explaining why she is so confident that EUROSUR will succeed where FRONTEX failed. It is also significant that the thrust of her statement in response to the tragedy was to urge member states to meet their own obligations in this regard: subliminally underscoring a possible suspicion that individual members may refuse to co-operate with EUROSUR, as they had in the case of FRONTEX.

If so, her fears are not entirely unfounded: just as EU member states have proved reluctant to accept the principle of mandatory burden sharing, Malta (and Italy) has likewise on occasion refused to play ball with the Commission... for instance, when Malta unilaterally pulled out of FRONTEX in protest against its revised rules of engagement in 2011.

Sadly, this latest tragedy has only reinforced an already existing widespread perception that there is simply no such thing as a common European policy or even approach to this complex phenomenon.

This clearly has to change, if tragedies like these are to be avoided in future.