Once again, we journalists are sitting in Room III in the Palais des Nations, and once again we are being handed a piece of paper, whose statistics bear an almost bland testimony to a horror no government seems interested in addressing. “Some 65 people have drowned after their boat sank approximately 45 nautical miles off the coast of Tunisia early this morning,” reads the statement from the UN Refugee Agency. It is, the UN says, “one of the worst incidents on the Mediterranean in months.” It is likely no one will ever know the identities of those people who died in the first week in May. Their families, in Nigeria, Gambia, Syria, or Iraq, may never get confirmation of their fate, but will wait, as years go by, hoping for news of the son, daughter, mother or husband they sent off to Europe with so many hopes and fears. We are not seeing the huge masses of people crossing the Mediterranean that we saw in 2015, the year of Europe’s so-called ‘migrant crisis’. One reason for that ...
