Europe must honour its migrant dead

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/30/europe-migrants-dead

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Eight deaths a day, on average, for the last 14 years: this week the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) published research that confirms the scale of migrant casualties in the Mediterranean.

Yet the story has remained one about Europe, driven by references to the “flood” of migrants, and by a policy discussion centred almost exclusively around securing the borders of the EU.

The 40,000 people believed to have died trying to enter what they perceived as the promised land of the EU in the last 14 years remain faceless and anonymous, statistics that justify ever more draconian rhetoric in the capitals of the EU’s member states.

What remains largely undiscussed amid the data, however, is the fact that most of these casualties are officially classified as missing: the IOM estimates that more than half of these presumed deaths have not been verified. The result is that families in the migrants’ countries of origin receive no information about what has happened to loved ones who have left. As with any unresolved loss, the ambiguity over the fate of the missing means mothers and wives, sons and daughters live between hope and despair, always waiting for news of their loved one, but never receiving it.

The most shocking source of missing migrants, however, is not the bodies swallowed by the Mediterranean and never found, but the failure to identify those whose bodies are washed up on the beaches of Europe’s shores. The cemeteries of Europe’s southern periphery are increasingly populated with anonymous bodies found on beaches after shipwrecks. My colleague, Iosif Kovras, and I have spent the last year trying to understand what happens to the bodies of migrants found on the coast of Lesbos, a Greek island that, after Lampedusa, receives the greatest flow of seaborne migrants to the EU.

What we found in Lesbos was a local population traumatised by all these deaths, and local officials paralysed by a lack of resources and policies from Athens that concerned only the management of living migrants. In contrast to the extensive regulation of migration by the Greek state, there are no regulatory provisions with regard to the identification and burial of the dead. As a result, local authorities – with capacities eviscerated by the economic crisis – improvise responses, with the possibility of identifying the dead compromised by a lack of political will, expertise and resources.

A visit to the local cemetery in Mytilene, Lesbos’s main city, reveals bodies lightly covered by earth, the only mark on the graves a broken stone, on which is written the (purported) nationality of the migrant, a number, and the date of death. No effort is made to collect postmortem data that could be linked to the human remains in the ground, and thus aid identification.

Local communities by and large reject the language of security in which the issue is wrapped by central governments: they see migrants continuously arriving – both living and dead – and understand that this is a humanitarian issue.

While the EU and its member states devote huge resources to the maintenance of their sea borders, they find none to address the humanitarian impact of unidentified migrant bodies. Data to count the number of dead have never been systematically collected by states – hence the attention paid to the IOM report – demonstrating that dead migrants are of far less interest than live ones.

EU states have the capacity to create a system in which migrant bodies are dignified, with an appropriate burial, and data is collected to maximise the possibility of identifying the dead and ensuring that their families are informed. Isn’t ensuring human dignity one of the ideals of the EU? Perhaps giving value to migrants in death is a route to valuing their lives, so that the Mediterranean’s death toll would be reduced.