WE'RE NOT ALONE: AFRICAN MIGRATION TO EUROPE MIRRORS CURRENT CENTRAL AMERICA EXODUS

By CAROL J. WILLIAMS
Los Angeles Times
Pope Francis lamented the mass drowning of African boat people off the Italian island of Lampedusa on Thursday as "shameful" evidence of human indifference to those in despair.
President Giorgio Napolitano of Italy, where tens of thousands of desperate migrants cast up on remote shores each year, deemed the deadliest migration accident in the Mediterranean Sea this year a "massacre of innocents."
But U.N. officials tasked with protecting those fleeing their homelands put into unemotional perspective the tragic end to a boatload of migrants' dangerous gamble for a better life: an everyday occurrence.
Poverty, injustice and armed conflict have long been the instigators of African migration to Europe. And in today's ever more unstable world, where Islamic militants terrorize much of Africa and political instability grips the Arab world, the numbers willing to risk perilous sea voyages for a chance to start over in affluent Europe have exploded.

"Lives are lost every day in the most cruel of circumstances because people flee out of despair and try to cross the sea in rickety boats," said Volker Tuerk, director for international protection with the Office of U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.
"Because of human misery, because of despair, for reasons of persecution in their home countries, these people have nothing else but to take an unseaworthy boat to a European haven," Tuerk said. He called on the European Union to halt overcrowded boats leaving Northern Africa and come to the aid of those who encounter peril when they do manage to set off.
The search for better jobs and higher incomes still drives much of the human tide across the Mediterranean. But the economic migrants are now joined by swelling crowds of Syrians fleeing their civil war-racked country, by Somalis escaping lawlessness and sectarian strife, and by political refugees from the "Arab Spring," the pro-democracy movements in the Middle East that have traded authoritarian rule for near-anarchy in countries such as Libya, Egypt and Yemen.
Italian rescue crews plucked about 150 survivors from the waters off Lampedusa, where the 66-foot fishing boat that sank Thursday had caught fire and capsized just half a mile offshore. Few among the estimated 500 Eritreans, Somalis and Ghanaians on board could swim, and recovery workers expected the death toll to reach or even exceed 300 when the emergency operation was over.
Tragedies at sea have been a fixture for decades in the global movement of the miserable. And the intervention of professional smugglers who charge the desperate upward of $1,000 per head for a space on the boats has accelerated the traffic.
UNHCR figures show that nearly 22,000 migrants have arrived in southern Italy so far this year, a shocking rise over last year's total of 7,981. Eritreans and Somalis make up the biggest groups, but Syrian arrivals have increased more than tenfold from 2012 and now rank third behind the Horn of Africa migrants.
In a 40-day stretch between August and September, "3,300 Syrians, of whom more than 230 were unaccompanied children, have come ashore, mainly in Sicily," said Adrian Edwards, a UNHCR spokesman in Geneva.
The Syrian influx swelled noticeably as fighting ground down this past summer between rebels and government troops loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad, culminating in the now-confirmed use of chemical weapons on Aug. 21 in suburbs of Damascus.
Most of those in the surge of Syrians reaching Italy fled Damascus, which has been the scene of intense fighting for months. Many of them are Palestinian refugees born in Syria, forced to flee from one shaky refuge to another, Edwards said.
In a July report, the U.N. refugee agency took note of increasing arrivals in Southern Europe from Egypt, Pakistan, Gambia, Mali and Afghanistan, all scenes of political, ethnic or religious conflict.
Afghans, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and others from the impoverished Asian underbelly north of the Indian Ocean have mostly set sail for Australia and its outlying islands in attempts to escape turmoil and repression at home. But there, too, shipwrecks occur with numbing regularity, like the June capsizing near Christmas Island of a smuggler's overloaded boat in which at least a dozen perished. In December 2011, more than 200 asylum seekers drowned or went missing when their overcrowded ship sank off Indonesia's main island of Java.
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