From Mare Nostrum to Mare Mortuum: The Preventable Disaster of Migrant Deaths at Sea

03/02/23 • -1 min

Breaking the Sound Barrier by Amy Goodman

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan The bodies of drowned migrants are still washing up on the beaches of Crotone, Italy on the Mediterranean Sea. Their wooden boat crashed on the rocks just offshore from this Calabrian resort town, turning the beach, said one local, “into a graveyard.” The death toll reached 67 on Wednesday, with 80 survivors. It is assumed that many more died, as at least 200 people were aboard the boat when it departed Izmir, Turkey, a few days earlier. “I have been treating migrants for 30 years and have never seen anything like this,” Orlando Amodeo, a local doctor, told The Guardian. “These people traveled 1,078 kilometers by sea only to die three meters from the shore.” The Mediterranean Sea itself has become a massive graveyard in recent years. The UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM) estimates that at least 26,000 migrants have perished while crossing to Europe, mostly from Turkey and Libya, fleeing Afghanistan, Syria, and drought-stricken and war-torn African nations. Many more migrants have died uncounted, as clandestine voyages on makeshift boats, overcrowded by human traffickers out to maximize profit, too often disappear at sea without a trace. “There is a lot more media attention in this case because the tragedy happened so close to Italy,” Caroline Willemen, deputy head of search and rescue with Médecins Sans Frontières, or Doctors Without Borders, said of the Crotone shipwreck on the Democracy Now! news hour. “But this is something that happens on a quite, unfortunately, regular basis, also very often closer, for example, to the Libyan coast, to people leaving Libyan shores. Very often that news will not even reach Western media.” Over seven million Ukrainians fleeing the Russian invasion have rightly been welcomed in Europe. Teymoori Mohammad lost a relative in the Crotone disaster. Speaking to the press there, he lamented the lack of equal treatment for non-white refugees: “Because they have their black hair or they don’t have green or blue eyes, they didn’t rescue these people...their human right. Because they have the black eye or the black hair, they weren’t human.” MSF has been operating search and rescue vessels in the Mediterranean since 2015, plying dangerous waters to rescue thousands of migrants who might otherwise have died, while also dodging an increasing array of regulations and restrictions imposed by European countries intent on blocking migration. MSF’s latest ship, the Geo Barents, was refitted and launched in June, 2021. It is currently impounded in a Sicilian port, victim of Italy’s new crackdown on humanitarian search and rescue operations, launched by the far-right government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. “This new legislation that has come out targets only NGOs doing search-and-rescue work,” Willemen explained. “Keep in mind that the vast majority of people who arrive in Italy, either they manage to arrive autonomously or they are rescued by the Italian Coast Guard, but the legislation targets only NGOs, which says quite a lot.” Médecins Sans Frontières is not the only humanitarian organization involved in migrant rescue that is being hounded by various European governments. Sea-Watch, RESQSHIP and other German-based groups are condemning Germany’s new ship safety ordinance that seems designed specifically to hamper civilian migrant rescue operations. In 2015, a youth-driven project led to the acquisition and conversion of a small fishing vessel christened Iuventa. The ship operated in the central Mediterranean, considered the most dangerous route to Europe, helping save 14,000 migrants from 2015 until it was seized by Italian authorities in 2017. Now, more than five years later, several crew members are being tried in Italy, along with activists from MSF and Save the Children, accused of “aiding and abetting unauthorized immigration.” Sascha Girke, one of the Iuventa crew members made a statement in court on Wednesday: “I would like to begin this statement today, in this courtroom by commemorating those who lost their lives off the coast of Crotone...while we were sitting in this courtroom on Saturday, they started to fight for their lives. In a terrible and unambiguous way, the deaths of these people remind us of what is actually being on trial here: the Crotone shipwreck is inseparable from this trial...It wasn’t the bad sea weather – it was the denial of help where it was possible. The answer to the Crotone disaster is the expansion of rescue capacities at sea and not their confiscation. The answer is safe and legal entry routes and not Fortress Europe.” Six years ago, Dr. Orlando Amodeo posted a video showing body bags of drowned migrants being lowered to a dock, off of one of MSF’s rescue ships. He called the video “From Mare Nostrum to Mare Mortuum,” invoking the ancient Roman name for the Mediterranean, Mare Nostrum, “Our Sea,” and naming what it has become, Mare Mortuum, the Sea of Death.

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Malcolm X: His Struggle Continues

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Malcolm X was assassinated 58 years ago, on February 21st, 1965, standing at the podium before a crowd in Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom. His wife Betty Shabazz, pregnant with twins, and his four daughters, aged 6, 4, 2 and five months, were in the ballroom, looking on. As Malcolm began speaking, a man shouted, accusing another of picking his pocket, creating a disturbance. A smoke bomb was thrown. Amidst the confusion, three gunmen at the front of the hall opened fire. Malcolm was hit 17 times in the ensuing hail of bullets. He died on the stage as chaos erupted. Talmadge Hayer (a.k.a. Mujahid Abdul Halim) was shot in the leg by one of Malcolm X’s bodyguards as he fled the ballroom. He was caught on the scene with ammunition that matched one of the murder weapons. In the days that followed, two other men, Khalil Islam and Muhammad Aziz, were arrested and accused of being the two additional shooters, even though they were nowhere near the ballroom that day and could prove it. Hayer testified under oath that his two codefendants were innocent but was ignored. Aziz would go on to spend 20 years in prison, and Islam, 22 years. Then, in 2021, more than 56 years after Malcolm X’s assassination, these two wrongfully convicted men were exonerated. Muhammad Aziz was 83 years old. Khalil Islam died in 2009. Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr. opened a reinvestigation of the assassination and prosecution, complementing years of dogged research by journalists, historians and independent researchers that pointed not only to the innocence of Aziz and Islam, but to the guilt of others. The reinvestigation spanned almost two years, and uncovered previously undisclosed FBI and New York Police Department (NYPD) documents. It was revealed, more than half a century later, that the FBI had up to ten informants inside the Audubon Ballroom. The NYPD had at least three undercover officers there as well, one of whom was actually on Malcolm X’s security team. Evidence gathered by both the FBI and the NYPD that was exculpatory was “deliberately withheld” from Aziz and Islam. This information and more, the Manhattan DA argued, “would have resulted in verdicts more favorable to the defendants.” The court agreed, and vacated the convictions in late 2021. Muhammad Aziz and the estate of Khalil Islam sued both the City and State of New York for wrongful conviction and imprisonment, and, in late 2022, they reached a combined settlement of $36 million. Which brings us to 2023. Today, the Audubon Ballroom has been restored, and is the Malcolm X & Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial & Education Center. On February 21st, the 58th anniversary of Malcolm’s assassination, the family, along with their lawyers, held a press conference there to announce a forthcoming $100 million wrongful death lawsuit. The suit will name the City of New York, the District Attorney, the NYPD, the FBI, the U.S. Justice Department, and, interestingly, the Central Intelligence Agency. “We intend to have vigorous litigation of this matter,” civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump said. “To have discovery, to be able to take depositions of the individuals who are still alive 58 years later, to make sure that some measure of justice can be given to Malcolm X’s daughters, who in this very room were present with their mother when he was shot at 21 times, 17 bullets hitting him. If anybody deserves justice after these decades, it is these women.” Malcolm X’s third daughter of six, Dr. Ilyasah Shabazz, an educator and author, spoke next, her voice shaking: “On February 21st, 1965, my mother came here excited to see her husband, because a week prior her home had been firebombed. She walked in here happy, and she left shattered.” Ilyasah was also there that day, just two years old. She continued, “For years our family has fought for the truth to come to light concerning his murder, and we’d like our father to receive the justice that he deserves. The truth about the circumstances leading to the death of our father is important not only to his family but to many followers, many admirers, many who looked to him for guidance, for love. And it is our hope that litigation of this case will finally provide some unanswered questions. We want justice served for our father.” Malcolm X was just 39 years old when he was assassinated, as was Martin Luther King, Jr. three years later when felled by a sniper’s bullet in Memphis. Both men were leading revolutionary movements for Black liberation, and both were heavily surveilled and targeted by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. The time for knowing the full truth behind Malcolm X’s assassination is long past due. May this lawsuit provide the answers, and the overdue justice, that his daughters, and this country, deserve.

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Women, Life, Freedom: The Power and Promise of International Women's Day

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan March 8th, International Women’s Day, arrived not a day too soon, as women, half the world’s human population, still endure varying degrees of oppression, violence, inequality and discrimination. This day’s living history is steeped in struggle and celebration; a day when women protest with courage and tenacity. From the Taliban to Texas, men wield words and weapons to subjugate women. Solidarity and action, to protect and liberate women, are needed now more than ever. Systemic oppression of women may be worst in Afghanistan. Richard Bennett, the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan, calls the Taliban’s treatment of women “tantamount to gender apartheid.” In an update to the UN Human Rights Council on March 6th, Bennett said, “The Taliban’s intentional and calculated policy is to repudiate the human rights of women and girls and to erase them from public life...authorities can be held accountable.” That same day, in a remarkably brave protest, Afghan women held a “read-in”: sitting on the ground outside Kabul University, they opened books and began reading, defying the Taliban’s ban on education for women and girls. “Those women who protested yesterday in Kabul know what they’re facing...they might be killed,” Zahra Nader said on the Democracy Now! news hour. She is an Afghan-Canadian journalist and editor-in-chief of Zan Times, a media outlet that covers human rights in Afghanistan. “They are still willing to take that risk, because that is what’s going to bring them hope. This is a fight for them, to resist...even if that comes at the cost of their own lives.” Next to Afghanistan, in Iran, nationwide protests continue, sparked by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in police custody last September 16th. Amini was arrested by Iran’s so-called morality police, accused of not wearing her hijab properly. The Iranian government has responded to the protests with a harsh crackdown, arresting thousands. Four men have been publicly executed so far, simply for protesting. Fourteen more face execution, according to Amnesty International. Now, a wave of apparent poisonings has struck Iranian girls’ schools. At least 290 schools have been targeted, affecting no less than 7,000 students. “These horrific chemical attacks on girls’ schools...have to be understood as a punishment against women and girls who have been leading this nationwide revolt for several months now,” Manijeh Moradian, professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Barnard College said on Democracy Now! “In response, people have been protesting. The national teachers’ union called for nationwide strikes, sit-ins and demonstrations. This is a nation in revolt.” March 8th is significant in modern Iranian history. The Iranian Revolution ousted the brutal U.S.-backed dictator, the Shah of Iran, in January, 1979. Millions of Iranians hoped for a democratic, secular future. Instead, the return from exile of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ushered in harsh, theocratic rule. On March 8th, 1979, Iranian women rose up in protest against the Ayatollah’s new regime. “Those women who poured into the streets on International Women’s Day 43 years ago rightly understood that the enforcement of mandatory Islamic dress code, mandatory hijab, was part and parcel of the erosion of all of the democratic promises of the revolution,” Professor Moradian explained. She went on to link this history to today: “In Iranian Kurdistan, in Saqqez, the hometown of Mahsa Jina Amini, the teachers are on strike right now, defending the right of women and girls to education but also condemning the broader state repression and the economic crisis that’s impoverishing ordinary people in Iran. Saqqez is where this uprising began in September, with the slogan ‘Women, Life, Freedom,’ – all about life and joy, [and] deeply connected to feminist movements and to International Women’s Day.” Republican politicians in the U.S. decry the Taliban, including its treatment of women. But their apparent feminism only goes so far, as these legislators pass law after law attempting to control womens’ bodies, restrict reproductive healthcare and criminalize abortion. In Texas, five women have sued the state after they were unable to obtain an abortion to terminate life-threatening pregnancies. Four months into her pregnancy, plaintiff Amanda Zurawski’s water broke. She needed an abortion, but couldn’t find a Texas doctor willing to do it. She then developed sepsis, which could have killed her. She may never be able to give birth as a result. The imprisonment of women for miscarrying, as happens already in El Salvador and other countries, may be coming soon to red states in the U.S. March 8th, International Women’s Day, began as a socialist protest among striking mill workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, demanding not only Bread, but Roses. Now, over a century later, in addition to Bread and Roses, women, gender non-conforming and trans and LGBT...