Hope and desperation

Writing in the Australian Age, Paola Totaro describes the 'sea of hope and desperation' in the Mediterranean:

The smell will remain imprinted forever, an acrid cocktail of sweat, urine and sheer exhaustion, the odour of hope and the stench of despair. In surreal, dignified silence, men, women and tiny children hobble down the gangplank, a sea of haunted faces clutching little more than each other or a plastic water bottle, long since sucked dry.

An infernal scene, it is played out daily on the vast concrete wharf that dominates the tiny Italian port of Lampedusa. There is no moaning, no wailing, just the deep drone of boat engines churning water, the shout of coast guards mooring, a seagull's cry. On land, safe and at last shaded from the vicious 40-plus-degree heat, the relief is palpable, if fleeting.

Between January and August, nearly 20,000 people made the perilous overland journey to the coasts of Libya or Tunisia, to cross the Mediterranean and land on Italy's southernmost territory, the islet of Lampedusa. Many have already spent weeks, months and even years on the road and once on the coast, must entrust what little money they have left to the local criminal syndicates that traffic in human beings, and smaller and ever more dangerous boats.

So far in 2008 an estimated 600 souls have perished at sea trying to get to Italy, while more than 18,000 are estimated to have disappeared or died en route from Africa to Europe since the mid-1990s. Today, the fishermen and commercial trawlers that work the waters between North Africa, Sicily and Malta haul in human remains with horrible regularity but admit that they no longer bother to report their finds to the authorities...