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The 66 coffins recovered so far are lined up in the large sports hall in the Calabrian provincial capital of Crotone. Each has a wreath of flowers on it. There are also several white children’s boxes between; someone placed a small toy truck on one of them.

The images are broadcast on TV in all news programs in the living rooms of Italians and on the front pages of newspapers – a memorial, but also an unspoken accusation: why did no one save these people, these children?

This is precisely the question pursued by Crotone’s prosecutor, who has launched a criminal investigation. There was also a hearing in Parliament in Rome. It is already clear that there was no rescue attempt.

A surveillance aircraft from the European border control agency Frontex spotted the refugee boat the evening before the accident and a thermal imaging camera recording suggested that there were numerous, perhaps hundreds, of people on board the ship.

Since the boat was not yet in distress, the Frontex crew did not alert the coastguard, but the Italian financial police, who sent two vessels. However, the purpose of the action was not to rescue the refugees, but to enforce illegal immigration laws.

Bad weather prevented the rescue

Due to the bad weather conditions – wind force 8, waves of four meters high – the two ships failed to reach the refugee boat – and returned to their ports without achieving anything. Apparently no one thought that a swell that engulfed even the modern speedboats of the financial police could also cause problems for an overloaded wooden fishing trawler – and no distress call came from the refugee boat itself.

The Coast Guard, which has boats specially equipped for shipwreck rescue, did nothing. That only came when the refugee boat had already crashed a hundred meters from the beach in the town of Cutro. All the Coast Guard crew had to do was help carry the dozens of bodies that washed ashore.

The opposition and representatives of the Church, such as the Bishop of Palermo, immediately blamed the restrictive migration policies of Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing government and the EU’s lack of action for the tragedy in Calabria. At the center of the criticism are impartial Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi, who has massively restricted the work of private rescuers at sea with a decree, and Lega boss Salvini, who, as minister of infrastructure, is responsible for ports and so also for the coast guard.

The two hardliners set the pace of the government’s migration policy – and previously formed a team: when Salvini was interior minister from 2018 to 2019 and introduced the “closed ports policy”, Piantedosi was his chief of cabinet.

Demands for the resignation of the interior minister

Piantedosi rejected any criticism of his decree – blaming the misfortune instead on the refugees. He accused the dead of irresponsibility: “They should not have left in this weather. Desperation does not justify endangering your own children,” the interior minister said.

More ignorance about the causes of flight and less empathy towards the 66 coffins in Crotone are hard to imagine. After the call for his resignation descended, Piantedosi tried to save what could no longer be saved: he was also shocked as a human being by the tragedy, but his office does not allow him to show his feelings, the interior minister explained.

In the end, Giorgia Meloni’s government has already failed in its policy of criminalizing migrants and private rescuers: the number of boat people arriving in Italy did not fall in the first two months of the year, as promised during the election campaign, but compared to the almost tripled to more than 14,000 last year. And the Italian secret services are already warning of the next “time bomb” given the unstable political situation in Tunisia.