It was not so long ago though that he "just wanted to
see land." After three days at sea aboard a small, crowded boat in
difficulty, he and 74 other African refugees were rescued by a coast guard ship
in the Mediterranean and brought to this
island nation.
"I was very sick at that time," said Mr Hussen,
25, who cannot swim, speaking of the ordeal of the 345km crossing from Tripoli in Libya
to Europe, arriving safely in Malta
Aug. 31, 2012.
Some 2,000 such refugees landed in Malta in 2012 (and again in 2013), coming from Somalia, Eritrea,
Syria, Ethiopia, Mali,
Palestine and Afghanistan, according to media
reports.
Hussen, who was born in northern Sudan of Eritrean parents,
was stateless there, he says, because he had no birth certificate. He has been
competing in athletics since 2006 but could not compete internationally without
a passport.
Traveling with his cousin from Khartoum
in civil war-racked Sudan,
they made the six-day crossing of the Sahara desert to Tripoli,
where they later paid traffickers 1,800 US dollars each for a place on the
small boat to Europe.
Numerous reports have claimed that the trafficking is
carried out by the same unruly militia groups responsible for rampant
lawlessness in the North African country since their NATO-backed overthrow and
lynching of the Libyan leader Muamar Khadafi in 2011.
"It was like Mogadishu"
there, Mr Hussen said, "with shootings everyday," in the capital Tripoli.
Earlier this month, the Libyan Prime Minister, Ali Zeidan,
even found himself a refugee, very briefly, in Malta
when his jet was diverted here following unrest at an army headquarters in Tripoli.
The instability in the oil-rich country - once Africa's most
developed - is the reason why so-called push-back of the irregular migrants to
their point of departure is not an option for arrival countries like Malta and Italy,
besieged in the warmer months with migrants landing on Europe's
southernmost border. Most originate from the war-torn countries around the horn
of Africa's Red Sea oil export channel.
The Maltese Prime Minister, Joseph Muscat, has called for
the presence of a UN force in Libya to increase stability there as well as for
burden sharing on the part of other EU countries to accept the transfer of some
of the asylum seekers, who represent a disproportionate burden, the government
has said, on the resources of the tiny country (400,000 population).
EU rules, such as the Dublin II regulation, say that
migrants remain the responsibility of the country that received them, making
reallocation more difficult.
While recent minor rule changes now allow other EU members
to voluntarily accept a relocated refugee, for a payment of 6,000 euros,
southern members' hopes for reforms have largely not panned out. Some observers
have cited a lack of EU political will on the issue.
The EU will again take up the question of irregular
migration from Africa in June 2014 when it
adopts a new five-year program, to include new asylum and immigration policies.
Some 15,000 migrants arrived in Italy
and Malta
in 2012, according to the UNHCR, after making the perilous crossing, where
hundreds drown annually. The worst such disaster occurred on Oct. 3, 2013, when
366 people were lost a
.
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