When rescue at sea becomes a crime: who the Tunisian fishermen arrested in Italy really are

On the night of Wednesday, August 29, 2018, six Tunisian fishermen were arrested in Italy. Earlier that day, they had set off from their hometown of Zarzis, the last important Tunisian port before Libya, to cast their nets in the open sea between North Africa and Sicily. The fishermen then sighted a small vessel whose engine had broken, and that had started taking in water. After giving the fourteen passengers water, milk and bread – which the fishermen carry in abundance, knowing they might encounter refugee boats in distress – they tried making contact with the Italian coastguard.

After hours of waiting for a response, though, the men decided to tow the smaller boat in the direction of Lampedusa – Italy’s southernmost island, to help Italian authorities in their rescue operations. At around 24 miles from Lampedusa, the Guardia di Finanza (customs police) took the fourteen people on board, and then proceeded to violently arrest the six fishermen. According to the precautionary custody order issued by the judge in Agrigento (Sicily), the men stand accused of smuggling, a crime that could get them up to fifteen years in jail if the case goes to trial. The fishermen have since been held in Agrigento prison, and their boat has been seized.

A map of where the fishermen of Zarzis work, in the open sea between Libya and Sicily. Valentina Zagaria. All rights reserved.This arrest comes after a summer of Italian politicians closing their ports to NGO rescue boats, and only a week after far-right Interior
Minister Matteo Salvini[1]
prevented for ten days the disembarkation of 177 Eritrean and Somali asylum
seekers from the Italian coastguard ship Diciotti. It is yet another step towards dissuading anyone – be it
Italian or Tunisian citizens, NGO or coastguard ships – from coming to the aid
of refugee boats in danger at sea. Criminalising rescue, a process that has
been pushed by different Italian governments since 2016, will continue to have
tragic consequences for people on the move in the Mediterranean Sea.

The fishermen of
Zarzis

Among those arrested is Chamseddine Bourassine, the
president of the Association “Le Pêcheur” pour le
Développement et l’Environnement, which was
nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize this year for the Zarzis fishermen’s continuous engagement
in saving lives in the Mediterranean.

Chamseddine, a fishing boat captain in his mid-40s, was one
of the first people I met in Zarzis when, in the summer of 2015, I moved to
this southern Tunisian town to start fieldwork for my PhD. On a sleepy late-August
afternoon, my interview with Foued Gammoudi, the then Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) Head of Mission for Tunisia and
Libya, was interrupted by an urgent phone call. “The fishermen have just
returned, they saved 550 people, let’s go to the port to thank them.” Just a
week earlier, Chamseddine Bourassine had been among the 116 fishermen from
Zarzis to have received rescue at sea training with MSF. Gammoudi was proud that the fishermen had already started
collaborating with the MSF Bourbon Argos
ship to save hundreds of people. We hurried to the port to greet Chamseddine
and his crew, as they returned from a three-day fishing expedition which
involved, as it so often had done lately, a lives-saving operation.

: Chamseddine Bourassine and Slaheddine Mcharek in the “Le Pecheur” Association headquarters in Zarzis. Valentina Zagaria. All rights reserved.The fishermen of Zarzis have been on the frontline of rescue
in the Central Mediterranean for over fifteen years. Their fishing grounds
lying between Libya – the place from which most people making their way undocumented
to Europe leave – and Sicily, they were often the first to come to the aid of
refugee boats in distress. “The fishermen have never really had a choice: they
work here, they encounter refugee boats regularly, so over the years they
learnt to do rescue at sea”, explained Gammoudi. For years, fishermen from both
sides of the Mediterranean were virtually alone in this endeavour.

Rescue before and
after the revolution

Before the Tunisian revolution of 2011, Ben Ali threatened
the fishermen with imprisonment for helping migrants in danger at sea – the
regime having been a close collaborator of both Italy and the European Union in
border control matters. During that time, Tunisian nationals attempting to do
the harga – the North African Arabic
dialect term for the crossing of the Sicilian Channel by boat – were also
heavily sanctioned by their own government.

Everything changed though with the
revolution. “It was chaos here in 2011. You cannot imagine what the word chaos
means if you didn’t live it”, recalled Anis Souei, the secretary general of the
“Le Pêcheur” association. In the
months following the revolution, hundreds of boats left from Zarzis taking
Tunisians from all over the country to Lampedusa. Several members of the fishermen’s
association remember having to sleep on their fishing boats at night to prevent
them from being stolen for the harga.
Other fishermen instead, especially those who were indebted, decided to sell
their boats, while some inhabitants of Zarzis took advantage of the power
vacuum left by the revolution and made considerable profit by organising harga crossings. “At that time there was
no police, no state, and even more misery. If you wanted Lampedusa, you could
have it”, rationalised another fisherman. But Chamseddine Bourassine and his
colleagues saw no future in moving to Europe, and made a moral pact not to sell
their boats for migration.

They instead remained in Zarzis, and in 2013 founded their
association to create a network of support to ameliorate the working conditions
of small and artisanal fisheries. The priority when they started organising was
to try and secure basic social security – something they are still struggling
to sustain today. With time, though, the association also got involved in alerting
the youth to the dangers of boat migration, as they regularly witnessed the
risks involved and felt compelled to do something for younger generations hit
hard by staggering unemployment rates. In this optic, they organised training for the local
youth in boat mechanics, nets mending, and diving, and collaborated in
different international projects, such as NEMO, organised by the CIHEAM-Bari
and funded by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Directorate
General for Cooperation Development. This project
also helped the fishermen build a museum to explain traditional fishing
methods, the first floor of which is dedicated to pictures and citations from
the fishermen’s long-term voluntary involvement in coming to the rescue of refugees
in danger at sea.

This role was proving increasingly vital as the Libyan
civil war dragged on, since refugees were being forced onto boats in Libya that
were not fit for travel, making the journey even more hazardous. With little
support from Tunisian coastguards, who were not allowed to operate beyond
Tunisian waters, the fishermen juggled their responsibility to bring money home
to their families and their commitment to rescuing people in distress at sea.
Anis remembers that once in 2013, three fishermen boats were out and received
an SOS from a vessel carrying roughly one hundred people. It was their first
day out, and going back to Zarzis would have meant losing petrol money and
precious days of work, which they simply couldn’t afford. After having ensured
that nobody was ill, the three boats took twenty people on board each, and
continued working for another two days, sharing food and water with their
guests.

Sometimes, though, the situation on board got tense with so
many people, food wasn’t enough for everybody, and fights broke out. Some
fishermen recall incidents during which they truly feared for their safety, when
occasionally they came across boats with armed men from Libyan militias. It was
hard for them to provide medical assistance as well. Once a woman gave birth on
Chamseddine’s boat – that same boat that has now been seized in Italy –
thankfully there had been no complications.

NGO ships and the
criminalisation of rescue

During the summer of 2015, therefore, Chamseddine felt
relieved that NGO search and rescue boats were starting to operate in the
Mediterranean. The fishermen’s boats were not equipped to take hundreds of
people on board, and the post-revolutionary Tunisian authorities didn’t have
the means to support them. MSF had provided the association with first aid
kits, life jackets, and rescue rafts to be able to better assist refugees at
sea, and had given them a list of channels and numbers linked to the Maritime
Rescue Coordination Centre (MRCC) in Rome for when they encountered boats in
distress.

They also offered training in dead body management, and
provided the association with body bags, disinfectant and gloves. “When we see
people at sea we rescue them. It’s not only because we follow the laws of the
sea or of religion: we do it because it’s human”, said Chamseddine. But
sometimes rescue came too late, and bringing the dead back to shore was all the
fishermen could do.[2]
During 2015 the fishermen at least felt that with more ships in the
Mediterranean doing rescue, the duty dear to all seafarers of helping people in
need at sea didn’t only fall on their shoulders, and they could go back to their
fishing.

The situation deteriorated again though in the summer of
2017, as Italian Interior Minister Minniti struck deals with Libyan militias and
coastguards to bring back and detain refugees in detention centres in Libya,
while simultaneously passing laws criminalising and restricting the activity of
NGO rescue boats in Italy.

Media smear campaigns directed against acts of solidarity
with migrants and refugees and against the work of rescue vessels in the
Mediterranean poured even more fuel on already inflamed anti-immigration
sentiments in Europe.

In the midst of this, on 6 August 2017, the fishermen of
Zarzis came face to face with a far-right vessel rented by Generazione Identitaria, the C-Star, cruising the Mediterranean allegedly on a “Defend Europe”
mission to hamper rescue operations and bring migrants back to Africa. The
C-Star was hovering in front of Zarzis port, and although it had not officially
asked port authorities whether it could dock to refuel – which the port
authorities assured locals it would refuse – the fishermen of Zarzis took the
opportunity to let these alt-right groups know how they felt about their
mission.

Protest in Zarzis against the docking of the alt-right ship C-Star, 6 August 2017. Valentina Zagaria. All rights reserved.Armed with red, black and blue felt tip pens, they wrote in
a mixture of Arabic, Italian, French and English slogans such as “No Racists!”,
“Dégage!” (Get our of here!), “C-Star: No gasoil? No acqua? No mangiato?” ?”
(C-Star: No fuel? No water? Not eaten?), which they proceeded to hang on their
boats, ready to take to sea were the C-Star to approach. Chamseddine
Bourassine, who had returned just a couple of hours prior to the impending
C-Star arrival from five days of work at sea, called other members of the
fishermen association to come to the port and join in the peaceful protest.[3]
He told the journalists present that the fishermen opposed wholeheartedly the
racism propagated by the C-Star members, and that having seen the death of
fellow Africans at sea, they couldn’t but condemn these politics. Their efforts
were cheered on by anti-racist networks in Sicily, who had in turn prevented
the C-Star from docking in Catania port just a couple of days earlier.

It is members from these same networks in Sicily together
with friends of the fishermen in Tunisia and internationally that are now
engaged in finding lawyers for Chamseddine and his five colleagues.

Their counterparts in Tunisia joined the fishermen’s
families and friends on Thursday morning to protest in front of the Italian
embassy in Tunis. Three busloads arrived from Zarzis after an 8-hour night-time
journey for the occasion, and many others had come from other Tunisian towns to
show their solidarity. Gathered there too were members of La Terre Pour Tous, an association of families of missing Tunisian
migrants, who joined in to demand the immediate release of the fishermen. A
sister protest was organised by the Zarzis diaspora in front of the Italian
embassy in Paris on Saturday afternoon. Fishermen networks from Morocco and
Mauritania also released statements of support, and the Tunisian State
Secretary for Immigration Adel
Jarboui urged Italian authorities to release the
fishermen, who are considered heroes in Tunisia.

The fishermen’s arrest is the latest in a chain of actions
taken by the Italian Lega and Five Star government to further criminalise
rescue in the Mediterranean Sea, and to dissuade people from all acts of solidarity
and basic compliance with international norms. This has alarmingly resulted in
the number of deaths in 2018 increasing exponentially despite a drop in
arrivals to Italy’s southern shores. While Chamseddine’s lawyer hasn’t yet been
able to visit him in prison, his brother and cousin managed to go see him on
Saturday. As for telling them about what happened on August 29, Chamseddine
simply says that he was assisting people in distress at sea: he’d do it again.

[1] Interior Minister Matteo Salvini has
been charged with kidnap and abuse of power as a result of his
actions during the Diciotti case.

[2] A couple of days before news of the six
fishermen being arrested became public, on 1 September 2018, French media
Konbini News created a crowd-funding campaign to sustain the work of another
member of the fishermen’s association “Le Pêcheur”. They launched an appeal to
help Chamseddine Marzoug in upkeeping and buying new land for the
cemetery of unknown persons, victims of the European Union’s Mediterranean
border, buried in Zarzis.

[3] Images from
the protest against the C-Star and of the fishermen’s association’s work can be
seen in Giulia Bertoluzzi’s documentary Strange Fish, coming out on 15 September
2018.

The fishermen of Zarzis

Rescue before and after the revolution

NGO ships and the criminalisation of rescue

The fishermen of
Zarzis

Rescue before and
after the revolution

NGO ships and the
criminalisation of rescue