More than 30 migrants, mostly toddlers, drowned on Wednesday when about 200 people without life jackets fell from a boat into the sea off the Libyan coast before they could be hauled into waiting rescue boats.

Rescue group MOAS, which operates in the Mediterranean, said its staff was pulling bodies out of the water. “Most are toddlers,” co-founder Chris Catrambone said on Twitter.

A total of 34 dead bodies were found in the water, and around 1,800 people rescued from four rubber dinghies and six wooden boats, the coast guard said later in a statement.

British and Spanish navy ships, aid group Doctors Without Borders (MSF), three merchant ships and a tug boat joined MOAS and the Italian Coast Guard and Navy to carry out the rescues.

The ill-fated boat probably tipped because of a combination of weather conditions and the fact the migrants suddenly crowded to one side, sending just under half of the 500 on board into the water, the coast guard said.

More than 1,300 people have died this year on the world’s most dangerous crossing for migrants, after boarding flimsy boats to flee poverty and war across Africa and the Middle East.

Last Friday, more than 150 disappeared at sea, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said Tuesday, citing testimony collected after survivors disembarked in Italy.

In the past week, more than 7,000 migrants have been plucked from boats in international waters off the western coast of Libya, where people smugglers operate with impunity.

Despite efforts by Italy and the European Union to train and equip the U.N.-backed government in Tripoli and its coast guard to fight traffickers, migrants are arriving in record numbers.

Disputes are also brewing between the Libyan Coast Guard and aid groups. MSF and SOS Mediteranee said officials from the Tripoli-based force had boarded a migrant boat during a rescue Tuesday, robbing the migrants and firing shots into the air.

More than 60 people fell into the water in the ensuing panic, but no one was injured as life jackets had already been given out, MSF and SOS Mediteranee said, broadly corroborating an earlier report by humanitarian group Jugend Rettet.

“Italian and European authorities should not be providing support to the Libyan Coast Guard,” MSF representative Annemarie Loof said. “This support is further endangering people’s lives.”

Group of Seven summit

Italy is hosting a meeting of the world’s seven major industrialized nations in Sicily on Friday and Saturday, and is pushing the group, which includes the United States, to put migration, Libya’s stabilization and African development at the top of the agenda.

“The tragedy of children dying in the Mediterranean is a wake-up call to leaders meeting in Sicily,” the United Nations Children’s Fund Deputy Executive Director Justin Forsyth, who is traveling to the summit, said in a statement.

Authorities have diverted rescue vessels to the mainland from their usual ports in Sicily during the summit, keeping the migration crisis out of sight but not out of mind.

More than 50,000 migrants have been rescued at sea and brought to Italy so far this year, a 46 percent increase on the same period of last year, the Interior Ministry said this week.

Most rescues take place just outside the 12-mile mark that separates Libyan territory from international waters.

It is a busy stretch of sea where humanitarian vessels and the Libyan Coast Guard are joined by scavengers hoping to recover abandoned migrant boats and their engines.

After Tuesday’s skirmish, Jugend Rettet said the Libyans towed two migrant boats back to shore while humanitarian groups brought more than 1,000 on board.
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South Africa grabbed international attention earlier this year with images of angry demonstrators attacking foreign residents and their businesses. This type of xenophobic violence, analysts say, is largely driven by high unemployment, inequality and frustration with the government’s failure to provide everyone with basic services.

But like those enduring challenges, xenophobic attacks are also proving hard to wipe out. The nation has seen eruptions of major anti-foreigner violence in 2008, 2014, 2015, 2016, and earlier this year. Members of immigrant communities and watchdog groups say xenophobic violence is a daily occurrence.

Sharon Ekambaram leads the refugee and migrant rights program for Lawyers for Human Rights. She said her rights group hears daily accounts of crimes against immigrants, and South African authorities are often reluctant to intervene when foreign nationals are targeted.

“It’s not only my opinion, but it is well documented,” she said. “… And these acts of violence are a combination of very, very reckless statements that have been made by politicians, unsubstantiated statements using foreign nationals as scapegoats for their failure to implement policies and deliver services that they are constitutionally obliged to do.”

In central Johannesburg, Abdirizak Ali Osman, secretary-general of the Somali Community Board, agrees.

“Xenophobia in South Africa has never ended, and I think for me it is never going to end,” he said, rattling off a number of recent reports his office in central Johannesburg has received of lootings, robberies, and threats.

“It happens on a daily basis, on a very small scale, in different parts of the country.”

Scared and silent

Foreign shopkeepers say they are regularly targeted because of their nationality. One, Fatuma Hassan, said she has taken to wearing a face-covering niqab so that she can speak freely about the threats she faces.

“Xenophobia not one time, two times, three times – several times” she said. “Up to now, they came to me, took $300 from my shop. Now my brother came through to here, he told me that they looted, even today in my shop.”

Another Somali businessman, Soweto shopowner Mustafa Omar Caddow, said he recently stood by helplessly as a rampaging mob took at least $30,000 worth of appliances from his shop and then trashed the place.

“This month, in the evening around eight, the people who was destructing, they came, and they looted the shop,” he said. “They break, and they took everything. There is nothing left.”

Safety in numbers

Here in the predominantly Somali suburb of Mayfair, residents say they feel safety in numbers. They need it, they say, because they do not feel the government has listened to their suggestions on how to improve safety.

“I was expecting that at least they will say, we are going to take care of you from now on, so this will not happen,” said Caddow. “They do not say.They say, “Actually, we can do nothing.”

South African police did not answer repeated calls from VOA seeking comment.

Caddow, whose wife and children still live in war-torn, unstable Somalia, said he longs to be reunited with his loved ones after nearly eight years apart.

But, he said, it just isn’t safe.
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The attorney general of the Democratic Republic of the Congo opened an investigation Tuesday into a former government minister’s alleged sponsorship of militia violence in the Kasai region. The move follows a newspaper report that two slain U.N. experts were probing the former minister’s involvement.

Congolese Attorney General Flory Numbi said Tuesday that he was investigating Parliament member Clement Kanku, who was development minister until he lost his job in a government reorganization last week.

Possible charges against Kanku include participation in an insurrectional movement, assassination, arson, malicious destruction and associating with criminals.

If Kanku is charged, Numbi said he would request that Congo’s National Assembly lift Kanku’s parliamentary immunity.

The investigation follows a New York Times report that Zaida Catalan, one of two U.N. experts killed in March in Congo’s Kasai region, had obtained a recording of a telephone conversation between Kanku and an alleged member of a militia known as Kamwina Nsapu.

The call reportedly took place last August, as the militia began an insurrection against the government. In the recording, the Times reports, Kanku can be heard speaking positively about the militia burning down a town and asking if rebels have killed the bodyguards of a colonel in the Congolese military.

According to the Times article, Catalan had informed Kanku that she was in possession of the recording before she and her American colleague, Michael Sharp, were killed. On April 24, the Congolese government showed reporters a grainy video of Sharp and Catalan being killed by men it claimed were members of the Kamwina Nsapu militia.

The government did not disclose how it obtained the footage.

Kanku attempted to hold a news conference at a Kinshasa restaurant Tuesday afternoon, but about 20 policemen prevented him from addressing reporters. Later, at his private residence, Kanku and his lawyer spoke to the press.

Kanku denied involvement in the criminal activities, saying he was dismayed by the allegations.

Kanku’s lawyer, Aime Kilolo, said it would be premature to confirm whether or not the recording is authentic, but noted his client’s name was not explicitly cited in the audio.

The conflict between the Kamwina Nsapu militia and the government is now in its 10th month. The armed group has been condemned for recruiting children, while the military has been criticized for its disproportionate use of force.

At least 400 civilians have been killed and more than 1.2 million people have been displaced by the fighting.
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State authorities in South Sudan closed part of their border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo last week in an effort to prevent the spread of the deadly Ebola outbreak, declared by the World Health Organization in a remote, northern part of the DRC two weeks ago.

The WHO has confirmed that four people have died from the disease in the DRC. Lino Utu, deputy governor of Tambura state, said the movement of people and goods between the two countries at the border town of Ezo had been restricted until further notice.

“We closed the border temporarily because of Ebola,” Utu said. “We have been told it has been found in DR-Congo. If we leave the border open, it can trickle down to Tambura state.”

He said the area along the border with the DRC had been teeming with activity, “because it is where the people from the Democratic Republic of the Congo bring in their goods, and also the people from Tambura state bring in their goods. It’s a big market.”

Uto said doctors have confirmed that Ebola can be found in bushmeat, so state officials have temporarily banned the sale of all bushmeat in the markets.

“We cannot allow bushmeat to be sold any longer because people can easily contract Ebola from meat,” Utu said.

The minister of health was informed about Tambura’s move to close the border at Ezo on Tuesday.

Utu said international health workers, including those with the WHO, are partnering with local officials to educate the public about how Ebola is spread. “This is awareness that has been going on and on and on,” he added.

Utu is appealing to the WHO to send experts to Tambura to screen people for the deadly virus “and advise us in other areas as far as how Ebola is contracted and how we can prevent the spread of Ebola,” he said, adding, “I really need them to come to us on the ground in Tambura state.”

Authorities in Gbudue state, which also runs along the DRC, have banned the sale of bushmeat in Yambio markets, but have kept border crossing points open. The Gbudue state minister for information, Gibson Bullen Wande, said wildlife officials are creating awareness about the dangers of eating bushmeat. He said state officials and nongovernmental organization health partners have trained and deployed health workers along the border to monitor movement of traders. “We have also left some medical workers along those areas to let them monitor,” he said.

Bullen said as far as he is concerned, it is the responsibility of the national government to decide whether to close the border between the two countries.

On Tuesday, the state director of wildlife went on the air to warn people against eating bushmeat.

“We are going to ban the sale of all bushmeat or any trading of the bushmeat [because] those are the things that people get Ebola from,” Bullen said.
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