The Haves and the Have-Nots by Branko Milanovic

Author:Branko Milanovic
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2010-11-05T04:00:00+00:00

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Who Are the Harraga?

They are called the “burners of papers,” although they could also be called “the burners of borders.” They burn their own papers so that when they make it to Europe and the governments there try to send them back to their countries, the police are confused: They do not know if a harga (singular of harraga) is from Algeria or Morocco or Tunisia. Keep the enemy confused!

The harraga are almost entirely young men, between twenty and thirty-five years old, from the Maghreb. But to understand the problems faced between the Maghreb and the soft Mediterranean underbelly of Europe, one has to speak of three actors in this unfortunate drama. Starting from the south, the first actors are poor sub-Saharan Africans who desperately try to reach the heaven of Europe. They do it either directly, by boats from the western coasts of Africa to the Canary Islands (the nearest European-controlled land in Africa), or more frequently by going to North Africa, that is, to Libya, Morocco, Algeria, or Tunisia, and trying to get to Europe from there. In that perilous journey, many die. Frantz Fanon’s les damnés de la terre have been transformed into les damnés de la mer.

The second actors in the drama are the Maghreb’s own emigrants, the harraga. They are physically closer to Europe and can cross the Mediterranean directly. Yet there are differences in the distance to, and accessibility of, Europe from different points of the southern shore of what in an oblique reference to the cold war they call “the Mediterranean wall.” Many of the harraga thus congregate in the areas of northern Libya or Tunisia. The most well-known ports of departure, out of which, mostly at night, they board the small boats overloaded with human cargo, with no lights and with only very primitive navigation equipment, are Zuwarah and Tripoli. Both are in Libya. Libya has become a key transit nation, not only for Africans, who are estimated to number more than 1 million (accounting thus for one-sixth of the Libyan population), but also for fellow Arabs. They stay illegally in Libya, working as construction workers, fishermen, or repair-men; are treated brutally;1 and bide their time—either trying to save some 1,000-1,500 euros that a human trafficker charges per person (half of that amount for children) or waiting for the opportune moment, a propitious dark night, a good wind, to embark on one of those fragile boats.

The third actor in the drama is Europe, the target of these expeditions. As the inflow of immigrants has increased, Europe has been shutting its doors more and more tightly. Fast boats, almost military in their looks, equipped with infrared-vision cameras, airplanes, and electronic fences are used to spot and send back the emigrants before they can reach a European shore. The EU operation of interdiction called Frontex costs 40 million euros annually. Ironically, this is about the same amount as the “transport fees” paid by some 40,000 African emigrants who arrived by sea in Italy in 2008 alone, an increase of 75 percent compared to the year before.

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