Thursday, December 6, 2007

An educated Iraqi, an English-speaking veterinary surgeon who asked to be called Omar, arrived on the coast of Italy this summer after 30 hours drifting at sea.

In a small backpack, which was all he carried on the overcrowded rubber dinghy, was a computer memory stick containing copies of his passport, diplomas and letters.

Those documents, upon which his future depended, portray an often unnoticed group of migrants trying to get into Europe: The professional people who move by any desperate means from one unwelcome way station to another.

"They are honest people, they are professionals, they respect the rules, they felt so embarrassed, so sorry they had done something illegal," Laura Boldrini, one of the officials from the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees who interviewed the new arrival.

Boldrini was speaking of the veterinary surgeon and a 26-year-old Iraqi engineer with whom he made the crossing, who asked to be called Said.

Omar - a nom de guerre, taken to protect himself from his smugglers and his enemies in Baghdad - gave an unemotional account of his travels after fleeing Baghdad two years ago when a letter wrapped around a bullet was delivered to his home. At the time Baghdad was in dire turmoil.

"The letter started with the name of God and a little from one of the holy Koran paragraphs," he said. "After that they gave our names and the home number and area number and ordered us to leave the house within 24 hours."

The remarks come from a film that the UN refugee agency made of many refugees including Omar, who came to attention because of his professional life and ability to speak English.

By his account, Omar, his parents and a sister were told to leave their possessions behind. Their first stop was Syria, after which Omar went onto Jordan, then Libya, which he left by boat for Europe - a destination he had never considered, by a route that was perilous.

"It's not braveness, it's not Hercules," he said. "We had to either cross the sea or we would die. There was no other choice."

Omar, 33, spent a few days in the detention center on the Italian island of Lampedusa in September before being sent to mainland where, in early November, Italy granted him an initial two years of asylum, on the ground that his life would be endangered if he were sent home.

Now he is a free man, at large, with the fresh challenge of cobbling together a life in a new land.

Before that, when he was vulnerable, his unusual story was captured on the UN film.

The footage, a copy of which was obtained by this newspaper, was shot by the UNHCR as the basis for a film that would raise awareness about the variety of migrants who land on Lampedusa's shores.

He agreed to speak on camera on the condition that his face and his identity were concealed.

The film of him, taken from behind, shows a stocky man with thinning hair. Wearing a pale T-shirt and blue tracksuit pants, he spoke in a flat voice that carried no trace of triumph at having survived a voyage that has claimed a documented toll of 551 lives so far this year, according to Fortress Europe, which monitors press reports of deaths and disappearances on Europe's frontiers. About 12,000 others have landed this year, to an uncertain fate.

For him, the Italian tourist island north of Libya was a last resort. His migration began in Baghdad when it was at its most violent; after two death threats, he realized his family would never survive the winter if they stayed.

"If you don't follow the Qaeda, they will kill you. So we had to leave from Baghdad to another country," he said.

Boldrini said that the family paid $200 for a taxi across the border to Syria, which now hosts 1.4 million Iraqi refugees. Leaving his parents and sister there, Omar moved to Jordan. But Jordan, too, was filling with displaced Iraqis, and he could not get a job. Finally, a friend invited him to Libya.

He spent a year in Jordan, waiting for his contract to be ready; when it was completed, his salary was $220 a month and his rent was $180, Boldrini said; it was only after starting work that he learned that he was being paid a third of the Libyan wage. Eventually, he lost his job, and with that, his visa, and had to move on.

He approached the embassy of a European country in Tripoli but security guards would not let him near the door. He wrote to the Canadian Embassy in Tunis, but it denied his visa request; the letter that Omar scanned onto his flash memory stick said that Canada was not satisfied he would leave when his visa expired.

With doors closing around them, he and Said examined their options.

"We tried to have a Schengen visa or another visa to Canada, but they refused it," Omar said. "There was no other way, only the sea."

Refugees in danger have the right under international law to seek protection in safe countries. But 90 percent of asylum-seekers who make it to the European Union do so without authorization because there are few channels for entering any other way, according to a 2005 Oxfam report. At the same time, the EU is spending heavily to staunch those unauthorized channels.

In response, refugees are turning to smugglers, and taking more dangerous routes.

Omar and Said paid a smuggler for a place on an inflatable dinghy, known as a Zodiac, and set off from the Libyan coast. "They decided to play Russian roulette," Boldrini said of Omar and Said, referring to the dangers of drowning at sea.

Those dangers are exacerbated by challenges to a tenet of international maritime law that obliges seamen to rescue those they come upon in distress. Seven Tunisian fishermen, who rescued a boatload of migrants three weeks before Omar arrived, are now on trial in Sicily for facilitating clandestine migration.

The average rate being asked by smugglers on the Libyan coast for a place on an inflatable Zodiac is €1,100, or $1,600, according Bruce Leimsidor, a professor of migration law at the University of Venice. According to Boldrini, Omar and Said each paid €1,500.

"The Zodiac was overloaded," Omar said. "They said there was a good captain and a good assistant for the captain who could use the GPS: This was a lie."

So were assurances that the journey would take 3 hours -- it took 10 times as long in rough seas.

According to the accounts of survivors, passengers in such boats typically sit under the open sky, knees to their chest, as the smugglers fill the boats beyond capacity. The only cargo is water and fuel for the engine. In the all too likely event of mechanical or weather problems, passengers die of dehydration or drowning.

No one died on Omar's boat, but the seas were rough. After they had gone about 100 kilometers, or 60 miles, from the Libyan shore, "the sea was very difficult," he said. Some of the passengers wanted to turn back.

"We had a fight," Omar said. "We couldn't go back to Libya or to Tunisia because we didn't have a passport, and if the Libyan authorities caught us they would harm us."

For refugees like Omar, going home is not an option.

"We preferred to die in the sea rather than return to Iraq," he said.