CAIRO (Middle East Eye) –
Romany, a former wood supplier in Egypt, found himself boarding an unseaworthy boat measuring eight meters in length along with 48 others when he crossed the most dangerous sea border in the world: the Central Mediterranean.
After his business went bust, and with a family of five children to feed, he sold everything he owned before crossing the border to Libya and then headed out to sea.
Middle East Eye spoke to Romany and two other men who had recently made the dangerous crossing from Egypt to Libya, and then to Italy.
They spoke from a small migrant shelter in Milan via Shukri, an interpreter and Egyptian migrant himself.
“There was a moment when the waves were too high and then people really lost hope… they were saying their prayers,” Romany told MEE.
“And now I’m in a shelter and looking for work… I have to work to get money to send to my children.
The two other men, Mohamed and Ahmed, had met in a detention centre in Musaid, Libya, in August 2022. They had both come from the city of Abnub on the east bank of the river Nile in southern Egypt. Mohamed said he was fleeing a tribal vendetta, with blood feuds common in the poor, rural south.
Mohamed had managed to get a visa for Libya, while Ahmed resorted to a smuggling route and crossed the border by foot.
There was no respite on the Libyan side of the border, as the streets were lawless, gunshots filled the air and the threat of kidnapping loomed over them constantly. Mohamed threw his lot in with a smuggling network to get across the channel.
Prior to his departure, Mohamed was held for three months at a centre in the Libyan border town of Musaid, run by smugglers, and that is where he met Ahmed. The wait was excruciating, as it was haunted by the pervasive fear of police raids.
After months of waiting, they boarded a boat from Musaid in the dead of night. The rising sun revealed a decrepit shell measuring 25 meters in length, its rotten frame barely containing the 620 people aboard.
When they were far out at sea, the boat’s motor failed and panic set in. Some of the passengers demanded they return, others that they push on. Fights broke out. Finally, the decision was made to turn back and drop 100 people back on the shores of Libya.
“There was mayhem,” Mohamed recalled, “lots of us had been waiting for months in detention. People were shouting, I don’t care if I die, I’m not getting out.”
These men’s stories are not isolated incidents but part of a surge in Egyptians fleeing their country via smuggling routes, into the war-torn streets of Libya and across the Central Mediterranean in flimsy dinghies.
In February 2022, Egyptian arrivals in Italy peaked, accounting for around every 1 in 3 disembarkations in Italy.
According to the most recent data from the European Union’s border agency Frontex, Egyptians were the most common nationality detected crossing the Central Mediterranean, accounting for 20 percent of the nationalities along the route over the first five months of 2022.
The three men sitting around an iPhone in a shelter in Milan were among the lucky ones who made it over a heavily militarized border and then across the deadly waters of the Central Mediterranean.
According to an IOM survey conducted between December 2021 and January 2022, most Egyptian migrants in Libya came from the country’s northeast, mainly originating from the Governorates of Minya, Assiut, Fayoum, and Beheira.
Dire poverty ran through the stories like a thread. A cost of living crisis has eroded an already threadbare safety net in Egypt, plunging an estimated 60 million people below the poverty line and forcing many of them over the border into Libya.