Italy Is Burying the Dead and Dodging the Blame After Maritime Disaster

Vincenzo Voce was in the middle of a press meeting on March 28 when his phone suddenly rang, signaling urgent official business. Excusing himself, he flew out of his office into a black SUV parked by the town hall of Crotone, the small southern Italian city of which he was mayor. Squeezed against his entourage on the back seat, he blazed west down the highway along the beachfront, alighting at the entrance to what looked like a small, lush park facing the sea.

Half-blocking the gated entrance to the park was an awkwardly shaped, dull-gray Mercedes with its long trunk flung open. Inside was a white wooden coffin, around the size of a large suitcase, nestled next to a handful of colorful stuffed animals: a purple raccoon, a prostrate panda, a pint-sized Tweety bird. Affixed to the front was a small plate reading: “KR16M0.” That was KR, for Crotone, and 16, for the 16th body found on the shores of Steccato di Cutro, a small beach town a half-hour drive away. The tag was in lieu of a name.

“It looks like a license plate,” Voce said to a group of journalists gathered by the scene. “Not a good look.” The body had, in fact, been identified after the plate was added; it belonged to a boy of less than 6 months old, of origins unknown, simply referred to as “Ali.” His surname, among other details, had yet to be disclosed by the local magistrates’ office, which had been tasked with his identification.

Voce joined the pallbearers as they walked the tiny white coffin into a graveyard exploding with flowers in full bloom, and then lowered it into a small ditch. There was a hush as the priest delivered the last rites. Two undertakers shoveled dirt atop the grave, then gently placed the stuffed toys and a bouquet of flowers on the mound. An aide to the mayor concealed tears under sunglasses.

The coffin of a young victim, Ali, rests in the back of a hearse at the graveyard near the beach in Crotone on March 28. Ben Munster for Foreign Policy

The boy was the second child to be buried in Crotone, and one of dozens of passengers who, in the early hours of Feb. 26, drowned when a crowded wooden boat carrying around 180 refugees— from a range of countries that included Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Tunisia—found itself in rough waters off the southern Italian coast. Nobody came to the rescue until it was too late, and at least 90 people, many of them children, died at sea.

It’s not clear why the response was so slow—but the answers may come from the top. Since the ascension last year of a far-right coalition headed by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, the Italian cabinet has been a font of anti-migrant rhetoric, and, citing the need to “defend Italy’s borders,” has pushed through a number of practical measures curtailing the effectiveness of search and rescue operations. Initially, it tried to block vital nongovernmental organization rescue ships from docking in Italian ports. Failing that, it simply banned them from performing more than one rescue on a given trip, requiring them to disembark at ports in central Italy, far from the main area of operations in the south. A new anti-refugee bill shunted through the Italian legislature earlier this month, meanwhile, will only make things worse.

In Crotone, the tragedy has been felt sharply and personally. In Rome, it’s all about avoiding blame. In the aftermath of February’s disaster, the Meloni government was indeed quick to shrug off responsibility, largely blaming Turkish smugglers and framing the incident as a one-off bureaucratic slip-up on the part of Frontex, the European Union coast guard agency.

“The issue is simple in its tragic nature: No emergency communication from Frontex reached our authorities. We were not warned that this boat was in danger of sinking,” Meloni said. “I wonder if there is anyone in this nation who honestly believes that the government deliberately let over 60 people die, including some children.”

Equally quick to shift responsibility were the various agencies responsible for search and rescue, which include the official coast guard and NGO rescue ships as well as the Guardia di Finanza, an Italian military police. They cited bad weather, poor communications, the careless parents of the mostly very young victims, Meloni, and the irresponsibility of other coast guard agencies.

Investigations into the incident have only recently begun in earnest, but early reports provide a broad outline. On Feb. 22, the migrants, led by the smugglers, set off to Italy from the western coast of Turkey, near the port city of Izmir. On Feb. 25, as the boat approached Italian shores, Frontex detected its movement and alerted the Italian Ministry of the Interior that a “boat with good buoyancy” was approaching the Calabrian coast, near the city of Crotone.

As is standard procedure in Italy, the ministry in turn alerted the Guardia di Finanza, which sent out a crew for a routine checkup of the vessel. Only with approval from Rome could that expedition have taken on the urgency of an official search and rescue, but that approval wasn’t given, despite thermal data suggesting that there may have been dangerous overcrowding below deck.

There was little sense of alarm or haste. The police, citing rough seas, turned back before making contact. Typically, this would have triggered an intervention from the official coast guard, whose boats are better able to withstand rough seas, but the agency only sprang into action on the morning of Feb. 26.

Among those mobilized was Orlando Amodeo, a semi-retired medical colonel in the Crotone state police and a veteran of hundreds of search and rescue missions over a 25-year career. When Amodeo arrived at the beach, he said, it was already too late. The boat had blown apart in rough tides and tossed its passengers overboard. Scores of bodies lay on the shore, awaiting black bags and coaches that would transfer them for identification and eventual burial. Around 80 survivors were set up in a nearby field, he recalled.

“All I could offer was a caress, a hug,” he said. “I couldn’t do anything else—they were already dead.”

Much of the ongoing investigation focuses on the aborted police interception and the inaction of the coast guard. Amodeo, however, believes responsibility may also lie at least in part with the new administration.

The principal cause of the botched reaction, he said, was that need for approval from Rome. When the government is occupied by someone like Meloni, that becomes a problem. Since the premier came to power, Amodeo observed, institutionalized anti-migrant rhetoric has poisoned the “mentality” among rescuers, fomenting an atmosphere of fearful obedience that punishes the kind of spontaneity needed to push out to sea on a hunch.

“Previously we were able to go out and save lives first, then discuss these things after the fact,” he said. “But now there is a climate of fear.”

Investigators are looking into why the Ministry of the Interior overlooked evidence from Frontex that the boat may have been packed below deck. It instead classified the sighting as a matter for law enforcement, and the Guardia di Finanza—rather than the coast guard—set out to intercept the boat.

Whether that confusion was the result of poor reading comprehension or a deliberate botching of the signal remains the subject of investigation. But even these bare facts, Amodeo contends, present a challenge to the Meloni government’s line that it received no critical communication from Frontex whatsoever, and that the smugglers were mostly to blame.

As Francesco Verri, a lawyer for a number of the victim’s families, says, there does not actually have to be conclusive evidence that lives are at risk to justify a search and rescue mission. “You only need the thought of the probability of danger, much less than danger itself,” he said. That’s the “law of the sea—an absolute obligation.”

When Amodeo raised these points in a live interview on Italian broadcast network La7, he received a notification—mid-interview—that the minister of the interior was threatening to sue. Nothing came of the threat, but it speaks to the Meloni strategy of shifting blame elsewhere, onto both Frontex and the smugglers who charge thousands of euros—in this case, around $8,000 per person—to ferry people to their deaths.

According to Richard Braude, an activist at Arci Porco Rosso, an Italian civil society organization that has supported newly arriving migrants since 2016, Meloni’s approach is really just the “endpoint” of a sinister and calculated strategy begun almost a decade ago by previous Italian governments that collapses the complex causes of mass migration into a simple narrative about unscrupulous smugglers and crass economic opportunism. That, Braude said in an interview, allows politicians to deflect blame onto migrants by criminalizing them.

There was a brief time where the Italian government took responsibility for the lives of refugees. Following a shipwreck off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa that killed 360 people in 2013, the then-governing center-left coalition launched Mare Nostrum, a far-reaching search and rescue operation that covered vast tracts of the Mediterranean and saved thousands of lives. Since Mare Nostrum folded a year later, however, governments turned increasingly inward, reinvesting energy and resources into “upping the criminalization of migration and migrant rescue,” said Braude.

In 2016, for instance, Italy’s then-governing Democratic Party began to levy spurious charges of “human trafficking” at NGO rescue ships, which in the absence of political support had begun to take an increasingly prominent role in search and rescue operations. At the same time, Minister of the Interior Marco Minniti arranged with Libyan militias to detain migrants seeking to cross the Mediterranean, putting the Italian stamp of approval on a violent and frequently murderous clandestine prison network.

This drive to intimate migrant complicity often results in an unlikely distribution of blame. In 2021, for instance, Ahmad Jawid Mosa Zada, an Afghan anti-Taliban magistrate who disembarked not far from the same stretch of the Crotone coastline that swallowed February’s victims, was sentenced to seven years in prison on dubious charges of being a “smuggler.” Braude estimates around 1,000 others have been similarly imprisoned.

“They always have to find someone to arrest as the boat driver,” he said. “Even when it’s totally bogus.”

Just earlier this week, the premier pushed a bill through the Italian parliament further criminalizing migration and making the pursuit of asylum that much more onerous. There will soon, for instance, be fewer visas for migrants as well as long and arduous detention periods with little chance of integration, all while top ministers decry migration as “ethnic substitution” and portray these draconian policies as “border defense.” But if the Meloni government was truly serious about “border defense,” argued Amodeo, the retired medical colonel, it would have done all it could to intercept mysterious, potentially dangerous vessels sighted off the Italian coast.

As the Mare Nostrum initiative showed, Italy is capable of doing much better. As if to further prove this point, in the weeks following the shipwreck, more than 6,000 migrants were rescued in the region of Crotone alone, according to Amodeo and other sources in the town. “It is the only good thing to come from this massacre,” Amodeo said. “They’re letting the ships go to save face—they have to clear their consciences.”

Without constraints from on high, he argued, rescue operations are actually pretty straightforward, and the failure in late February points less to a lack of institutional ability than it does to a lack of political will. But even a government that has made vitriol against migrants a central plank of its political strategy recognizes the poor optics of dozens of dead children, and, if only briefly, it scrambled to put on a good show—before returning to its favored strategy of criminalization and strategic neglect.

“That’s why I insist on calling this event a “massacre” rather than a “tragedy,” said Amodeo. “A tragedy is unavoidable—this wasn’t.”