Lampedusa CommemorAction - 11 October 2013/2023
CommemorAction 2013/2023 - Lampedusa.
In the evening of 11.10. 2023, more than 130 people - locals, tourists, transnational activists - followed our invitation and participated in the CommemorAction for the victims of the horrible shipwreck that took place off Lampedusa exactly ten years ago.
Alarm Phone presented a video documentation that remembered the unfolding of this violence and non-assistance, enforced and executed by the Italian and Maltese autohorities. Despite continuous and desperate calls by the people of the sinking boat via satellite phone to Rome and Malta, the respective coastguards did not react and waited, until it was too late. The boat capsized and 268 people were killed, including more than 60 children.
A lawyer then reported on the trial and the court decision of December 2022, in which italian authorities were found guilty of manslaughter and negligence resulting in failure to rescue. Two activists from Malta emphasized the co-responsibility of Maltese coastguards, who were never hold accountable for their left to die practices.
Afterwards a transnational composition of activists from Alarm Phone Sahara, Alarm Phone Morocco and Boza FII pointed to the death in the desert and on the route to the Canary Islands. Friends from the Alliance with Refugees in Libya, from Mediterranea Saving Humans and the network We'llcome United were involved in the presentation.
A comrade from the 18/18 struggle in Zarzis, then read the names of all known victims of the 11 October 2013 massacre, repeating several times in a chorus: "we will never forget, we will never forgive".
Photos of the victims were hanging in the background, and an endless list - more than 50 meters long - with the names of known victims killed by the EU border regime since 1993 was enrolled on the pedestrian zone.
Following a minute of silence, Alarm Phone and Maldusa activists - accompanied by quiet drums of senegalese Baye Fall crew from Palermo - read in Arabic and Italian the poems by Abdel Wahab Yousif Latino, a Sudanese author, who himself drowned off Libya in 2020 during the attempt to cross the Mediterranean sea.
The mourners then moved to sea front to held another minute of silence, closed by the drums and prayers of the Baye Fall crew - a final moment of an impressive and intense CommemorAction, where we shared tears and anger as well as hope for a world where death at the border belongs to the past.