Since the youtuber Luca Donadel had published a video that went viral in February, in which he monitored the movements of the ships engaged in rescues in the Mediterranean through the site Marinetraffic.com, the controversy over the role of NGOs has exploded in the newspapers. The video highlighted the routes of the boats, showing a tendency to get closer to the Libyan coast than in previous years. A question arose spontaneously right from the start: how is it possible that, despite the approaching rescue ships, the number of deaths in the Mediterranean between 2016 and 2017 has increased dramatically
An answer was given to Formiche.net by the correspondent of Tg3 Riccardo Chartrouxwhile he was in Tripoli last May. “A smuggler some time ago told me that the Sophia operation was a great thing for them,” Chartroux said on May 15, “knowing that ships are waiting for them at the border, the smugglers have stopped loading migrants on wooden boats. Now they put them on rubber dinghies that they manufacture with rubber from Egypt and Libyan resin, then they put them into the sea telling the migrants that after 6 nautical miles a ship awaits them, so they don’t know the difference between 6 or 12 miles ” .
In a January investigation, the online newspaper L’Inkiesta told all the details of the business of inflatable boats bought by smugglers, explaining how most of the inflatable boats came from Chinese companies. A thesis based on the semi-annual report of theOperation Sophia of December 2015, a classified document signed by Admiral Enrico Credendino and made public by Wikileaks three months later. Credendino reported that for the human trafficking business “inflatable boats are used in two thirds of cases and wooden ones in one third of cases”.
While wooden boats are usually “bought from Libyan fishermen or imported from Tunisia or Egypt”, the admiral explained that “reports of rubber boats imported from China and transhipped in Malta or Turkey are supported by a recent report of the Maltese customs of twenty rubber boats packed in a container for Misrata, in Libya ”.
That customs operation had ended with the return of the rubber boats, “because there is no legal basis for seizing those boats”. It is perhaps not an irrelevant detail, wrote Inkiesta last January, that the holdings of the port of Valletta , managed until 2008 exclusively by the French naval company based in Marseille CMA-CGM , are now shared between the Turkish giant Yldrim Group (50%) and the Chinese one of China Merchants Holdings International Company Limited (49%).
In an article yesterday, the Corriere brought attention to the purchase and sale of Chinese-made inflatable boats: poor boats, sold for 500-600 euros by portals such as the Chinese giantAlibaba , Amazon’s first competitor, or the Boatstogo.com site , with a capacity ranging from 10 to 60 people. In the ads, the boats are sold under the name of “refugee boat”: a cynical marketing gimmick, given that in most cases those boats will not be used to rescue refugees, but will be used by traffickers to load them and entrust them to fate.
Just take a look at the companies of origin to understand that almost all the inflatables are of Chinese production: Qingdao, Shenzen and Weihai the cities where most are assembled. Thus the company Zhejihang Anji Huayu Boat Development Co Ltd , of the Zhejihang region , to name one, which on Alibaba.com with the name of ” Refugee boat“Sells a 28-foot black dinghy with a not very reassuring appearance, on its website it displays the slogan” the best products are made of the best materials “and guarantees” strict quality controls “. The Chinese nautical market is constantly expanding, not only in the cruise sector, as reported by Bloomberg, but also in that of boats under 24 meters, produced mainly in the eastern regions of Guangdong and Shandong .
A market that is tempting to Europe where, between 2011 and 2012 alone, the import of inflatable boats rose from 161 to 233 million dollars. According to the latest ICE reporton the subject, that of 2011, 40.1% of Chinese exports of pleasure boats, a market that in 2010 was worth 204.2 million dollars, and made up of inflatable boats. A more recent 2016 report by the US International Trade Administration shows how those numbers have increased: “the current Chinese fleet (those registered) amounts to 53,836, of which 58% are rubber dinghies”.
On May 4, the EU Commissioner for Migration Dimitri Avramopoulos met the Chinese Minister for Public Security Guo Shengkun in Beijing. On that occasion Avramopoulos had pointed out that “the rubber boats used by the Mediterranean trafficking networks are manufactured somewhere in China”, and had asked Beijing for “the support and cooperation of the Chinese authorities to track down and dismantle this business”.
A concrete step was taken by the EU Foreign Affairs Council on Libya on 17 July, which adopted the CFSP decision 2017/1338 amending EU regulation 2016/44, requesting art. 1 “a prior authorization to sell, supply, transfer or export, directly or indirectly” rubber boats, or other products that may be useful to traffickers, “to any person, entity or body in Libya or for use in Libya”.
A decision, commented Bloomberg columnist Leonid Bershidsky, which could even be counterproductive, because according to him Europe does not have the strength to impose restrictions against a Chinese inflatable boat industry that has more than 180 producers. In addition to damaging local fishermen, the decision of the EU Council would only oblige the traffickers to pay more for the boats. In this way “they will load even more migrants or reuse the boats several times instead of abandoning them on the high seas”, with the risk of causing even more deaths.
