So apparently some rather scary dudes from Austria (see picture below, but generally all males from Austria who are older than 50 give me the creeps) have come up with a really sick idea: Set up a charter airline that specializes in deportation flights from Europe to the warmer parts of this globe. If you believe the press reporting about their yet-to-be-realized plan then they are all about saving european taxpayers a couple of euros and making those forced deportations a little bit more enjoyable for everyone involved:

“With a professional service the deportations will be faster, chains will not be needed and the deportees can enjoy a meal.” The planned flights will have guards, medical staff and a representative of a human rights group on board, though there is no immediate news of plans for in-flight entertainment or a frequent-flyer scheme. [taken from an article from dermobilitaetsmanager.de, a website which advertises itself as the prime magazine about business travel]

Don’t really know where to start here. maybe with the ‘brilliant idea’ of having some clueless NGO provide in-flight legitimation. Mo doubt that there will be enough ‘human rights groups’ who are just waiting for that opportunity (they probably teach this kind of stuff during 1st year introduction classes for political science and communication studies students now). Or with the fact that they won’t have a frequent-flyer scheme? How lame is that? I mean even Lufthansa’s deportation classhad one way back in 2002!

But i guess none of this really matters. To figure out where this idea comes from, you just need to take a good look at the three people behind this ‘plan’ (deportation lawyer Hermann Heller, aviation consultant Heinz Berger and entepreneur Carl Julius Wagner): The picture pretty much tells it all: combine a sick obsession for military aircraft, with the urge to be some kind of modern day slave master and your wet dreams will inevitably make you fantasize about ‘asylum airlines’…

As usual the google ad-words engine is one spot on with its commentary sponsored links. the story on the mobilitäts manager site pulls up two google adds: one that suggests a probably even cheaper means of transport (but then these low cost airlines do not really fly outside of Europe so they are pretty much worthless when it comes to deportations) and the second one suggests a the next step for the deportees after they have finished ‘enjoying their meal’: Apply for a visa for the US:

Came across this installation in front of a small internet cafe/phone shop in Psiri in the center of Athens yesterday:

When i took pictures of it a guy the indian shopkeeper of a mini market across the street came out of his shop and asked me why i was taking pictures of this ‘ugly piece of crap’. Before i could even answer him the owner of the internet cafe came out and responded to him that this was ‘creativity’ not crap, to which i agreed. During the resulting conversation with Rana (the owner) which for some reason centered on the fact that he liked Amsterdam a lot (no not because of the legal dope or any of the usual reasons people have for liking Amsterdam, but because he had perceived Amsterdam as a place without the racism he encounters in Athens, which given the xenophobic tendencies in Holland in the last couple of years i found quite remarkable) he mentioned that he was a Bengali from Kolkatta. This sparked another round of insults from the mini market shop keeper, who insisted that Rana was in fact not a Bengali but from Bangladesh adding extra flavor to the earlier complaint about racism in Greece.

Since December 2002 i have been collecting press reports about migrants who have died trying to reach Europe for the noborder website. At the time of writing this the list has grown to 179 incidents with a total of 2009 reported fatalities and an even higher number of people missing who most likely have died as well. It is also safe to assume that the majority of such cases never gets reported in the press at all (according to spanish immigration officials about 6000 African migrants have died or gone missing on the sea journey to the Canary Islands in 2006 alone).

Over the last couple of days i have taken the data i have collected and mapped it onto google earth to get visual representation of the geographic distribution of these incidents. If you have google earth installed (it is a free download from google) you can download the .kml file here (right click to download) and have a look at the data yourself.

The visual representation of the data clearly shows that most migrants perish at sea. there are 4 big clusters of incidents:

One along the west coast of Turkey (mainly boats attempting to reach the Greek islands of Lesvos, Chios and Samos from the region around Izmir). The second cluster is along the route from Libya and Tunisia to Sicily, Lampedusa & Malta (the data for 2005 actually looks like a straight line from Libya to Sicily). The third cluster is around the strait of Gibraltar and the last cluster of drownings can be found along the West African coastline (boats from southern Morocco, Mauritania & Senegal attempting to reach the Spanish Canary Islands.

This last route has become especially popular (and deadly) in 2006: in 2003 5 incidents were reported around the Canary Islands, in 2004 there were 7, in 2005 9 and in 2006 the number soared to 23 reported incidents. This increase is commonly attributed to the fact that straight of Gibraltar and the Moroccan coast have become more heavily policed by European and Moroccan police and military forces so that sub-saharan migrants are forced to find alternative routes to Europe. One of these routes is the up to 1500 kilometer long voyage across the open Atlantic ocean from Mauritania and Senegal to the Canary islands which are part of the EU. The increase of deadly ship wrecks is clearly illustrated by these two screenshots showing the incidents from 2005 and 2006 respectively:

At the same time the number of incidents in the strait of Gibraltar seems to be pretty stable at a low level, which probably does not mean that this route is still as widely used as it once was, but that it used to be a relatively safe route (no wonder give that the distance to travel is 100 times shorter) and that people are forced to take more risks here as well.

There is an excellent background article on ‘Trans-Saharan Migration to North Africa and the EU’ on the migration information source (published by the migratiion policy institute in the US) which confirms the above observations but also points out that for many sub-saharan migrants crossing the Mediteranian or the Atlantic is hardly the most dangerous part of their voyages:

The risks of crossing the Sahara are believed to be higher than crossing the Mediterranean or the Atlantic. In response to increased restrictions in North Africa, border and police officials tend to charge higher bribes, and migrants increasingly use secondary, often more dangerous routes through the desert.

Away from the seas migrants attempting to reach the EU also die in the minefields along the Greek Turkish border, get shot attempting to overcome the fences separating the Spanish exclaves of Melilla end Ceuta from the Moroccan mainland, freeze to death at the Ukrainian Slovakian border, get crushed by trucks on both sides of the English Channel and every now and then a dead migrant or two are found in the undercarriage of an airplane at one of the mayor european airports (sometimes also as far away as Los Angeles)

Patrice has unearthed another nice little article for me (the fact that he has send it by email this time makes me think that he actually reads what i write here). It gives a nice little insight into the ethnic and religious underpinnings of Senegalese migrants that work as street hawkers in Italian cities. apparently most of them belong to a small but dynamic Sufi Muslim brotherhood called the Mourides. The artcle is a bit short, but well worth the read:

… tourists and locals alike probably assume these traders are just a disorganised, random sample of Europe’s vast army of human flotsam and jetsam, desperate migrants from poor places who arrive in leaky boats. In reality, the traders on the streets leading to the Vatican are anything but disorganised. They are members of a highly disciplined international community, at once religious and economic, with headquarters in another holy city - Touba, in the heart of Senegal, three hours’ drive from Dakar, the capital.

Read the rest here. Reminded me of this picture which i took back in 2002 in Torino, italy (in the article one of the Mouride salesmen expresses admiration for people selling umbrellas based on the weather forecast)

… straight from the US Immigration and Customs enforcement website (o.k with a detour via the the excellent subtopia field guide to military urbanism), the chair guy:

This is the most amazing combination of sheer will, imagination and engineering i have come across in ages (subtopia calls it ‘imagination of desperation’). Makes me hope that this has remained undetected for a while before these pictures were taken…

Excellent headline from last Saturday’s NRC handelsblad!! (it roughly translates to ‘integration primarily a problem of the natives’ (bablefish suggests ‘autochthons‘ as a translation for autochtonen, but i think natives fits it better).

The article goes on to point out that according to a recent survey immigrants (allochtonen) do not consider integration as an important issue, while the native population (autochtonen) does perceive it as the 4th most important issue (the top three are the health-care system, criminality and cost of living).

The Guardian is running quite an impressive piece titled ‘One Friday‘ on its website today [i know that it is wednesday today but then those brits drive on the wrong side of the road and are generally confused when it comes to just about every measurement, so this not all too shocking]:

Criticised for their beliefs, clothing and attitudes; accused of not being British enough; reviled as the enemy within – not a day passes without Muslims being attacked in the media. So how does it feel to be Muslim in Britain today? Guardian writers asked people around the country – from a rear admiral to an organic farmer, a rapper to a gay rights campaigner, an accountant to a niqab-wearing teacher – to tell us how they spent last Friday. A G2 special.

Go read it here (warning, it is really long!). My favorite sentence is ‘the other day the internet cafe opposite me was raided, allegedly as part of a transatlantic terror plot. It was ridiculous.’

Which reminds me that we still know next to nothing about that transatlantic terror plot in question. still no news on how exactly they planned to blow up those planes without passports, explosives or tickets. Also not much more information on why liquids on a plane are dangerous. We do however know that denying people to take liquids on a plane is not only stupid but actually dangerous.

It is not very often that those who are supposed to be the weakest members of a social group manage to slip through policies designed to exclude them from resources. Apparently though, this seems to be what is happening in the case of the stupid language tests that the Dutch government has imposed on would-be immigrants a while back. To recap, would-be immigrants have to do a basic dutch language test in their countries of origin before they get permission to come to the Netherlands even if they do qualify for a residence permit. Now these language tests are pretty basic and fully computerized and they are clearly designed to weed-out immigrants with lower education so that only ‘desirable highly-educated’ immigrants are let into the Netherlands.

Now apparently this policy is a complete failure. i recently talked to a couple of civil servants from the city of Amsterdam and they told me that the whole system does not work at all: According to them it is the low-skilled, lower educated immigrants who pass this language test and the high-skilled, highly-educated would-be immigrants who miserably fail to do so. Of course this was not really satisfactory from the view of the sick bureaucrats who came up with this stupid idea in the first place and consequently they ordered some research into this issue:

So it appears that people with relatively low education have ‘auditive memory‘ and are good in ‘instructive learning‘ while people with higher education levels seem to have predominatly ‘visual memory‘ and engage in ‘experimental learning‘.

What this comes down to, is that people with lower education are better at remembering phrases thrown at them and repeat them to a computer than people with higher education who do seem to get lost in this simple procedure partly because they get offended by the setup. The result is, that non-western people (of course in good old apartheid-style white western people do not have to take this test) with higher education currently seem to have an extremely hard time getting into this little arrogant country. Now this is not to the liking of those who came up with this system and those civil servants i talked to (who did not come up with this system) were pretty sure that within the next 6 months this policy will get canned. Let’s enjoy it while it lasts.

When i was in Argentinean Patagonia in January our host at the Estancia Monte Leon (by the way one of the most gorgeous places i have ever stayed in my life, totally worth the hefty price tag) told us that the penguins who hang out at the beach there in order to raise their kids would go all the way up to Rio in the (southern hemisphere) winter as they find patagonia to cold during that time of the year.

While i can see that Patagonia might be a little bit too cold in July i could not really picture penguins in Rio. Also i did not run into any Spheniscus Magellanicus down there (but then that is probably due to the fact that we did nose around in all the wrong places). A couple of days ago i ran into more anecdotal evidence that there are indeed penguins in Rio. This time in the form of someone blogging about migrants being washed up at the beaches of the canaries and penguins in Rio (which as the alert reader will notice are both subjects that have kept me busy in the past):

Penguins in Rio, abnormal concentrations of jellyfish in the Mediterranean coast, giant crabs invading Norway’s waters, Sub-Saharan immigrants stranding at the beaches of Canary islands in unhuman conditions surprising tourists… Nature claims… something is wrong with our world today… (from: extremo occidente

Seems like the author wishes to imply that the world is a bit out of control which does not seem totally wrong of an observation if you ask me.

update to the update: Looks like i should do my google reserach first. seems like while we did indeed see no penguins in Rio they have been there this summer. CBS reports that at least 135 showed up on the local beaches and are now being airlifted back to the southern Atlantic ocean in a heroic joint operation by the brazilian armed forces:

A Hercules C-130 transport airplane will take the flightless birds to Pelotas in southern Brazil on Sept. 23 for the first leg of their journey home, the Air Force’s press office said. There, they will be examined by veterinarians at the Marine Animal Rehabilitation Center of the Eliezer de Carvalho Rios Oceanographic Museum. From Pelotas, the penguins will be driven to the coast and placed on Navy ships. They will be taken 40 miles offshore before being released into the southern Atlantic. “Ocean currents will hopefully carry them back to their natural habitat,” Candiotto said. “If everything goes smoothly, the penguins should be back in Antarctica within 10 days after leaving Rio.”

According to the Guardian, Rio became a popular destination for penguins in 2001 or so. in that year they published a first article on penguins in rio and linked it to global warming (isn’t it refreshing to see that in the summer of 2001 the press could still explain strange things in other ways than blaming terrorists for them?). The article does contain absolute gems on how ordinary brazilians behave when suddenly confronted with penguins on their doorstep:

… some are being kept as pets by Brazilian fishermen, who feed them sardines and even walk them on a leash. [.. but also one would not expect] how many people put these penguins in freezers when they rescue them …

Regardless of this update the conclusion remains more or less the same. the world seems to be a bit out of control.

… seems to mean ‘Barcelona or the afterlife’ and according to the Guardian Unlimited this is the phrase west African migrants say before they board those small fishing boats on the Senegalese coast that attempt to reach the Spanish Canary Islands some 800 nautical miles away.

The guardian article deals with how these often deadly emigration attempts of young people from Senegal are represented in local rap songs. it focusses on DJ Awadi the person behind the recent hit Sunugaal (‘Our boat’) which seems to combine outrage about the Senegalese governments failure to provide jobs for the majority of young people in the country with warnings about the perils of emigrating to Spain and the rest of the EU.

On the website the song is accompanied by a flash slideshow (click here if the link above does not work). the slideshow contains 51 pictures of exhausted, dead or otherwise sufferening black migrants on small boats, in the desert of in camps. pretty discouraging stuff in any case, and probably one of the more effective means to discourage someone from attempting to leave for Europe in a boat or through the desert.

This and the fact that the quality of the pictures available to the makers of the animation (these are not your average google image search results) makes me wonder if the song/slidshow has not been produced with the help of a European government or secret service or of the EU’s external border security agency Frontex (ok, the last option is extremely unlikely, given that those Frontex people have not even managed to get up their own website in more than a year). Guess this would be a far more effective way of spending money to deter migrants than building fences or flying people back in deportation class. Of course it would be even more effective to just let them in and not force them to take more and more deadly routes…

Ironically when you google ‘Barca mba Barzaak’ you get a paid search result for the MBA programme of the Barcelona Management Institute …

… and upon clicking on the link, the website greets you with the image of a happy young african MBA student. Barca mba Barzaak indeed!