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MISSING IN THE MEDITERRANEAN Every month, hundreds in north Africa and the Middle East leave by boat to seek new lives in Europe. But many vanish without trace. Caroline Moorehead meets the mothers of the disappeared From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, May/June 2014 On good days, Wertane thinks that her husband, Nabil, is still alive, that her mobile will ring and he will tell her he has found work in Italy, or France, that he will soon be home with money to buy them a house. But now that three years have passed since Nabil paid a trafficker to take him on a boat from Sfax in Tunisia to Italy, she is less sure. Three years since the evening of March 29th 2011, she says, is too long. She didn’t know he was going, though they had talked, endlessly, about his inability to find work as a qualified mason, and about the relentless poverty in which they lived. They had heard stories of men who had made the journey and come back with cars and money to build houses for their children, and Nabil dreamt of doing the same. On March 30th, Wertane returned from visiting her parents with her two young children, and a neighbour told her Nabil had departed the previous evening. What Nabil didn’t know—and neither did she—was that she was pregnant. Their little girl will be three this summer. The older children are nine and five, and Wertane feeds them by giving occasional lessons. She is a qualified teacher of Arabic, but there is no job for her in any local school. She lives in two small rooms and would not survive, she explains, without help from her parents and Nabil’s brother. All the money she earns goes on food.
The lost men of El Kabariya are not typical of the flows of boat people—175,000 are officially recorded as having arrived in Italy alone in the past six years, and the true figure is thought to be much higher—because the possibility of leaving for Europe across the sea lies on their doorsteps. Far more—Eritreans, Sudanese, Ethiopians—have already survived terrifying flights from persecution in their sub-Saharan countries, then crossed the deserts and mountains of north Africa, before their boat journey even begins. But all boat people, wherever their journeys start, share the same despair and yearning. As the popular north African rapper Samir Balti recently put it in a song, “They’ve gone where the wave decided they would go/Where death is present/They went where the news is lost/...They went where they feed fish/They went where mothers weep.” It is Samir Errawafi who introduces me to the women of El Kabariya. He has six children, the youngest disabled. His 19-year-old son Mohamed vanished one night from his bed and rang the next day from Sfax to say that he had found a trafficker and was going to Italy. Mohamed had been shot in the thigh by the police during the demonstrations that marked the start of the Arab spring in January 2011. He was a sporty boy, a fine footballer, and he had often spoken of the need to get away. Samir introduces me to Aziza, mother of 34-year-old Monia Arfawi, the only woman among the missing 25. Monia took her 16-year-old son, Shebab, with her, fearing that he might otherwise fall into bad company. She sold her furniture, borrowed money from relations to pay for their passage and left her younger son, Amir, with her estranged husband. She was, her mother says, an elegant, laughing, liberated young woman who wanted to have fun. But there was no work for her in Tunis and she needed money to pay for an operation for Amir, who was going blind in one eye. Monia and Shebab were on the same boat as Nabil. And then there are Janette Rhimi and her husband Hamed, the parents of 20-year-old Wissem, who also left without saying anything. For months, increasingly frantic, Janette did the rounds of the various ministries in Tunis, clamouring for news, writing letters, trying to get answers from Italy. One day, overcome with anguish, she set fire to her clothes. She would have burned to death had her husband not put the fire out, burning himself badly in the process. Surgery has not erased the scars, and Janette and Hamed have lined, defeated faces. Like some of the other women who talk to me, Janette shows me boxes of sleeping pills and anti-depressants, saying that without them she cannot keep the nightmares at bay. What makes this group of Tunisian families different from others whose sons have disappeared at sea is that, despairing of official help, they have formed an association to campaign for recognition and for a commission to look into the whereabouts of the missing. They want to know exactly what happened to their loved ones. If they are dead, they want to know where their bodies lie. In modern parlance, they want closure. Like the mothers of those who disappeared in Argentina during the years of military dictatorship they stage sit-ins, demonstrate and file petitions. In February 2013, 151 families signed a petition to the European Union. “We do not know the exact number of missing people,” they wrote, “but we know there are a lot—hundreds from Tunisia alone.” With no real pressure for accountability or information-sharing coming from elsewhere, what is happening in this community may become a model. In 2012 Samir’s wife, Mecherzia, was part of a delegation of six mothers who, helped by the Tunisian government, went to Italy to trace their missing sons. Tunisia collects fingerprints from its citizens, and Italy collects them for national identity cards: the mothers wanted to press the Italian government for an exchange. Five have since returned, having discovered little, but Mecherzia has stayed on. She won’t go back to Tunisia, she insists, until she receives news about Mohamed. Her persistence has attracted plenty of attention in the Italian media. Most of these families still genuinely believe that their sons or husbands are alive. In the office of the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights in Tunis, they show me Euronews footage of a boat arriving in Lampedusa. In a grainy still from the footage, Wertane points out Nabil, recognisable, she says, by his baseball hat. Janette points to Wissem, in his tracksuit, sitting a little further back in the boat, while Monia is clearly visible to her mother from her large white puffer jacket. Even Samir believes he has had a sighting of his son, for though he was not on the same boat, Euronews caught him leaving the detention centre in Lampedusa, his head jutting out of a bus window, and the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights has given him a copy of the tape. It shows Mohamed gesturing with his hand, drawing a line across his throat, shouting that he will die rather than return to Tunisia. When I ask the parents who gather round me with photographs of their sons how old the boys are, they pause, then give me two answers: how old they would be now, and how old they were in March 2011. Since then, there has been no news, no phone calls, nothing. All of them have repeatedly tried ringing their sons’ mobiles; there is silence at the other end. Mohamed and the others have, apparently, vanished. Top Aziza: Mother of Monia Arfawi, the only woman among the El Kabariya missing, who took her 16-year-old son, Shebab, with her when she left Above Wertane: Her husband, Nabil, left El Kabariya in March 2011, leaving her pregnant with their third child. She has not heard from him since
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Wertane (right, with her three children)
lives in El Kabariya, a poor suburb of Tunis, where electricity cables
sag across the dusty streets and many of the buildings are half-built
or derelict. In this small community, there are 25 missing people, all
driven by the uncertainties of the Arab spring and the ailing Tunisian
economy to take to boats in the hope of finding work in Europe. All but
one were young men whose only income came from recycling empty bottles.
All had talked, with longing and anger, of the need to leave Tunisia,
to go somewhere they could find work and earn money to send home.
Pointing at the ramshackle houses, the shabby clothes, the thin, small,
solemn children, one old man explains that his son left in order to
“faire l’avenir”