The first quarter of 2023 was the deadliest in the central Mediterranean since 2017. Experts say more should be done to identify the dead and offer closure to families.
in the central Mediterranean since 2017, according to the International Organization for Migration. Director General António Vitorino fears the deaths “have been normalized.”Of the known dead, only around 13 percent of bodies are ever recovered by European authorities, the International Committee of the Red Cross. The vast majority are never identified.
Within that void, people like Cattaneo are trying to put names and faces to the missing. “You do the tissue sample, you collect all the information that you need and put it in your data,” she said. “The difficult part is looking for the relative, but it’s not impossible.”Estefanos is one of the most recognizable faces of the far-flung diaspora, making her a lifeline for those in search of the missing.
More often, boats are swallowed without survivors, sinking so deep they will never be found. Or bodies scatter to different shorelines, without identification documents, and officials there do little to investigate who they were. For the most part, European governments only take concerted action to identify the dead after large shipwrecks that attract media scrutiny.When a blue trawler sank in Greek waters on June 14 with 750 people on board, the country took the rare step of activating its Disaster Victim Identification system, generally used during natural disasters. Authorities reached out to the migrants’ home countries to help identify the bodies and created a hotline for families.
“In the early years, people did not care too much about the dead,” she said. Tunisian migrants left on sturdier boats and safer routes, she said, and fewer drowned.That changed in July 2019, when 87 bodies washed up on the shore of Zarzis. M’charek was there on a research trip. Police were overwhelmed, she said. Street cleaners carried the cadavers on their trucks.
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