The Italian Government is raising a ship to honour the migrants who died there
The Italian government is going to great lengths to raise a sunken smuggling ship, identify the bodies trapped inside it and give each and every one of them a proper burial.
Many boats carrying many people have gone missing on their way to Italy and Greece over the last year. But none of them claimed as many lives as the one that sank off the coast of Libya on April 18, 2015.
"This ship is significant because it's the only one we know that had so many people on it," says Barbie Latza Nadeau, the Daily Beast's Rome Bureau Chief, in an interview with Brent Bambury on CBC Day 6. "By most estimates, there were 950 migrants, mostly sub-Saharan Africans. They were a couple of hours into their journey to freedom, and to a new life in Europe and the ship went down during, really, what ended up being a botched rescue operation."
The disaster is still the single worst documented loss of life since the migrant crisis began
Complicated Operation
Raising the ship off the ocean floor is a challenge in and of itself. But it's only the beginning.
"They're going to spray the entire ship with liquid nitrogen, essentially trying to keep it frozen or trying to keep it at the same temperature that it's been in the very deep waters of the sea. Because it's got to take about a three day journey to Sicily from where it is off the coast of Libya right now,"explains Latza Nadeau. Sheh says it's one of the first things that the team will have to do.
"This really is the first time anyone has tried to bring up a migrant ship," says Latza Nadeau. "The process is very, very complicated. These bodies have been underwater since April 18, 2015. That's more than a year. And they're all in the bottom of the ship. We have understood from various testimony from the 28 people who survived this terrible, tragic accident that the people who were in the bottom of the ship — these were people, probably, who paid less, they were women with children — they were locked in the bottom of the ship. So they had absolutely no way of escaping."
Because it was an illegal smuggling operation, there is no passenger manifest, so identifying the people who died will be difficult.
"They're doing a very complicated DNA procedure," Latza Nadeau explains. "Which includes, where they can, to extract anything that's left in terms of body fluids, to do 3-D cranial scans of the heads, to take dental records."
The hope is to create a database of the dead so that their families and friends might be able to find them and put them to rest.
Learning opportunity
Latza Nadeau says there's a huge opportunity for the scientists doing this work to learn from it.
"It is an extraordinary learning opportunity for forensic scientists. It is very rare to have that many people who died at the same exact moment, and whose bodies were kept in the same exact conditions. There are no variables in terms of that. So they can look at the effects of sea water on infants, on pregnant women, on young women, on young men, on elderly people. You know, textbooks will be written, basically, by what they learn from this exercise."
Political motivation
But ultimately, Latza Nadau says Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi sees the recovery effort as a way to force other countries to stay engaged with the scale of the on-going crisis.
"At the end of the day, Italy's doing its part, and the lion's share, of dealing with the immigration problem, the migrants and the refugees alike," Latza Nadeau says. "The Italian prime minister says, 'Okay, 4000 people may have died, but these 950 or however many deserve [in his words], a burial'. And he wants to give them that to really show —and to a large extent, really embarrass the rest of Europe—by showing that Italy really does care."