LAMPEDUSA—We finally spotted the Coast Guard ship entering the bay just after 1 a.m. on Thursday morning. Several police and civilian cars were lining the street outside the gates marked Zona Militare by the time it docked at the closed-off pier on the southwestern end of the harbor. What’s usually a desolate place at night was now teeming with police officers, Red Cross workers, and a handful of volunteers to help distribute water, blankets, and first aid—if anyone needed that.
Ever since the ‘flotilla’ of over a hundred migrant boats sailed into the Lampedusa harbor in full view of locals and tourists over the course of a single day in September, authorities seem to be spending considerable effort to hide their activities as much as they can.
Unlike in the past month, arrivals are kept under a low profile now. Before the migrants would have a chance to reach the island after undertaking the few hundred kilometer journey from North Africa, the authorities dispatch a ship to meet them well out of sight, and then they either tug them in or—most of the time—just take aboard the passengers and leave their boat drifting at sea. Also, most migrant vessels arrive late in the night, which further reduces the chance of unwelcome tourists gawking at the spectacle.
The 48 migrants from Libya, nearly all of them young men, were the only group arriving that night, the authorities told us. Over 350 people arrived the night before, so this was a relatively calm evening. They came aboard the Coast Guard vessel, their own boat left behind. After docking inside the well-guarded military zone, the group was escorted onto two Red Cross buses in an orderly fashion and were quickly driven towards the reception center about two kilometers further inland. In and out in less than thirty minutes.
Everything went well, none of them were injured or needed special care, Micha told us afterward. The German-Italian young woman was part of the six registered volunteers who came out in the middle of the night to help with the reception. About half of the group were locals, the rest, like Micha, regularly spent time on the island just to carry out this mission.
We told Micha how we saw one of last night’s migrant boats being tugged across the harbor during the day to be lifted by an enormous crane and put on a truck to be hauled away—probably to the island’s infamous “boat graveyard.” But that was the only one we saw all day despite a lot more arriving the night before. “Sometimes they go out in the morning to collect the boats left there during the night,” Micha said. “But most of them are just left there.”
She wouldn’t elaborate further, but it’s not too hard to guess what happens to the boats that don’t end up in the ‘graveyard.’ After all, it’s a long-standing fact that human smugglers tend to come out later with faster ships to recover their property to be used by the next group of migrants.
Of course, the practice of smugglers recovering their vessels happens a lot more often after NGO rescues that usually happen closer to the North African shores.
A report from the European External Action Service (EEAS) confirmed back in 2016 that more and more search and rescue NGOs had been carrying out their missions just outside of Libyan and Tunisian waters—making it considerably easier for the traffickers to collect and reuse their boats.
In 2021, Italian prosecutors even charged two of these NGOs—Save the Children and Doctors Without Borders (MSF)—claiming the organizations “collaborate” with traffickers by arranging direct handovers of the migrants and leaving the smugglers to safely return to shore with their boats to begin preparing the next trip.
It’s hard to imagine the Italian Coast Guard would let something similar happen indirectly, even if it’s a lot harder to recover used vessels as far out in the sea, near Lampedusa. At the same time, it could make sense for the authorities to leave some of these boats behind, especially those that make the journey fully intact, as this could reduce the chance the next group’s voyage would end in tragedy in a much less seaworthy craft.
But it’s also possible it’s just easier to forget about the vessels than spend time and energy disposing of them. The next morning, we stopped a group of Coast Guard personnel as they were leaving the military compound to ask them what usually happens with the boats. They confirmed what Micha said during the night, explaining in broken English that collecting all the vessels wasn’t worth the effort. “After the rescue, we simply just leave them out there.”
