Migrants, more than a thousand have died up to March, since 2014 more than 55 thousand have disappeared in the migratory routes of the world, half in the Mediterranean

ROME – From 2014 to today, 55,000 migrants have died or disappeared worldwide. The Mediterranean sea route is by far the most dangerous in the world, while in the rest of the planet almost 7,000 people died or went missing en route to landings considered safe and promising, in 2022. Effective policies would be needed – reads a report by Openpolis, an independent foundation that promotes projects for access to public information, transparency and democratic participation – which protect the rights of migrants and lead to the reduction of death and suffering. In just over 9 years, more than 55,000 people have died or been missing as they migrated in search of a better life. More than 6 thousand every year, a thousand in the first months of 2023 alone. These are impressive figures behind which there are human beings and the stories of tens of thousands of people who have died at sea or on land, along the numerous migratory routes of the world.

Half of the dead in the Mediterraneor. Of the more than 55,000 people who have died since 2014, more than 26,000 have lost their lives or been missing on the three main routes of the Mediterranean Sea route (Western, Central and Eastern). It is 47.3% of the total: exactly 26,257 people dead or missing from January 1, 2014 to March 31, 2023. According to the project “Missing migrants” ofInternational Organization of Migration (IOM), a UN agency, the Mediterranean route is by far the most dangerous in the world. In fact, the technicians of the UN agency constantly monitor the 15 main migratory routes that are articulated throughout the world. Reference is made both to intra-continental ones on the mainland, as happens from South to North Africa, and those which bring, for example, thousands of migrants from the countries of Central Asia to Europe via the Balkan route, or the crossing of continents by sea, via the Caribbean Sea or precisely the Mediterranean.

But they are low estimates. It should be noted that the data provided by Missing migrants they represent downward estimates, because the migratory routes are irregular – therefore adequate tracing is not always possible – and therefore in many cases deaths and missing persons are not recorded. Of the 1,000 migrants who died or went missing in the first three months of this year, half (499) were registered in the Mediterranean Sea. Among these, also the 99 people shipwrecked a few meters from the beach of Cutro, in Calabria, on February 26th. The almost 500 deaths in the first three months of 2023 represent a similar number to that of the first quarter of last year, almost halved compared to the figures recorded by the IOM in the first months of 2016 and 2017 (when 749 and 803 died or were missing respectively migrants) but higher than those of the same period of the two-year period 2019-2021. The winter with the least number of people who lost their lives at sea was in fact 2020, probably also due to the lower mobility due to the pandemic.

Almost 7,000 people died in 2022. If we consider the year that has just ended, we note that also in this case it is the Mediterranean that sees the most people dead or missing, of all the routes monitored by the IOM. In 2022, in fact, 35% of the dead or missing were recorded in the sea that divides Africa from Europe: 2,406 out of 6,868. In 2022, almost 7,000 migrants died or were missing in the world. Of the 6,878 migrants found dead or missing last year, 4,292 people have been certified dead. The remaining 2,586, on the other hand, are missing but, writes the IOM, they are presumed to be dead.

The number of missing exceeds that of the dead. The Mediterranean is the only route where the number of missing exceeds that of the dead. In all the areas considered there are more people for whom death has been confirmed, except for the Mediterranean Sea. In fact, 838 people died on this route in 2022, but 1,568 were missing. Confirming how difficult it is to even understand how many people have lost their lives trying to reach the coasts of European countries, and how complicated it is to recover bodies in the water. The other most dangerous routes in 2022 are Western Asia (887 dead or missing), North Africa (719) and South Asia (702).

The Balkan route. On the other hand, the Balkan route is less deadly, but no less painful for the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, which together with the other access routes to Europe (such as the Polish-Belarusian border) saw 140 deaths in 2022 and 18 missing. It is necessary to reiterate that we have been denouncing the lack of transparency and monitoring on the Balkan road for some time, including by the Italian institutions.

Walls and violence on the Balkan route. The migratory phenomenon has existed since humanity existed. For this reason, the attempts by most Western governments to stop the exodus, moreover through repressive and in some cases violent policies, appear as acts of wishful thinking (when not pure propaganda). The walls erected on the border between the United States and Mexico are not needed, nor are the hundreds of kilometers of barriers recently built between Poland and Belarus on the Lithuanian-Belarusian border or the more than 500 km of wall on the Serbian-Hungarian one.

Europe closes borders to the southeast. Furthermore, in recent years the protection of migrants’ rights has worsened, thanks to agreements that also see our country as a protagonist (such as the Italy-Libya memorandum) or EU institutions, such as the EU-Turkey pact. Europe turns a blind eye to the violence perpetrated on its borders. These are agreements that explicitly aim to detain hundreds of thousands of people on the borders of Europe, delegating the disenfranchisement and the exercise of violence to authoritarian or semi-authoritarian governments, such as those in Libya and Turkey. In short, when they don’t die, many migrants are forced into arbitrary imprisonment, violence and abuse. Conditions which, moreover, push people to flee and subsequently to find, sometimes, a tragic death.