Speedboats, a path to death
After the tragedy, an operation against rubber boats today
We want to know WHY
Carlo BOLLINO
She smiles from her marble bed beside her mother. She smiles with a faded, icy, motionless expression. I hesitated for a long time before deciding to publish this shocking photograph, but in the end we judged that the emotion it arouses might make people reflect, and that the scandal it brings to light is less important than the lives of other little children like Rezarta.
We look at this photograph and our first reaction is to look away, because it is one thing to tell the now-repeated story of migrants who die dreaming of reaching Italy, and quite another to look this child and her mother in the face. These faces resemble those of everyone who will board speedboats tonight to head for Puglia; they are the faces of those who queue to pay the speedboat operators for a journey that may be fatal, but, if all goes well, can change their lives. Here are the faces of those migrants who struggle through the waves in the Strait of Otranto, who throw themselves into the sea before reaching the Italian coast and, when stopped by the police, are sent back as people without an address.
We look at this child and cry out with all our strength: WHY! We want to know who is to blame; we want to know what must be done to prevent another scene, identical to this one and resembling that one, from becoming [text unclear]. The workers who went to the employment offices, or the director himself, set all the procedures in motion; they did not arrange for those concerned to be checked beyond simply registering a name.
Continued on page 4
This is how the dream ended
Anila Plaku and her six-month-old daughter Rezarta in the morgue in Vlora
On pages 12–13