SUPERFLUOUS PEOPLE

As I started to write this chapter on 23 April 2021, newspapers were reporting that at least 120 asylum seekers were feared drowned after their rubber boat capsized in the Mediterranean off the coast of Libya. According to the Guardian newspaper report on 22 April, a humanitarian group named SOS Méditerranée was alerted by Alarm Phone, a volunteer-run rescue hotline, that three boats were in distress, with waves reaching 6 metres in height. SOS Méditerranée’s rescue boat Ocean Viking went to the area but found ten bodies and no survivors. Alarm Phone told the newspaper that it was in contact with one boat in distress for over 10 hours, and alerted European and Libyan authorities, reporting the boat’s GPS position, but they refused to intervene. It was thought around 130 people were on that boat, and on 22 April the Ocean Viking searched for another boat in distress, reported to have 40 people on board, but without any success. SOS Méditerranée told the Guardian newspaper that more than 350 people had died on that stretch of the Mediterranean up to that date in 2021. The week before, UNHCR and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) reported that a boat had capsized off Tunisia, with at least 41 people on board. When I rewrote this chapter on 5 July 2021, there were reports of 43 people dead and 9 missing after a boat capsized off Tunisia –the boat was carrying people from Egypt, Sudan, Eritrea and Bangladesh, and capsized after its engine broke down; and the Missing Migrants Project, established by the IOM, recorded 2,021 migrant deaths in the Mediterranean during 2021, adding to a total of 23,360 missing migrants in that sea since 2014.

The Guardian headline for the 22 April story reads ‘More than 100 asylum seekers feared dead after shipwreck off Libya’. Those discounted in the rounding down to a headline number are not only nameless but also numberless, the ‘more than’ representing an excess that has been lost in every possible way: they were superfluous deaths. But these people did not come out of the blue – they had names and stories, stories interlinked in complex ways to the European powers that refused to help them, and interlinked by a history of European colonialism.