“We have an emergency. There are hundreds of people in the sea,” said Commander Cosimo Nicastro of the Italian coastguard as he strode into the briefing room in Rome.
“It looks as if there were 500 people on one boat. Either a wave struck them or the migrants all rushed to one side of the boat and it capsized,” he added. “A lot of them are little children.”
The tragedy was unfolding 600 miles south in the deep blue water of the Mediterranean, about 23 miles off the coast of Libya.
The briefing ended abruptly and we went down to an air-conditioned operations room, where two officers were sitting at a console next to a bank of red telephones. Desperate migrants at sea were calling: the traffickers know the phone numbers and hand them to their victims as they set off in flimsy boats.
This morning, May 24, the phones had rung and rung. Here, in the basement of a suburban ministerial building, the Italian officers were choreographing 15 air and sea rescue operations simultaneously.
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On a big screen, a cluster of dots signified ships around the stricken vessel. The system tracked aircraft and ships operating in the stretch of sea between Italy and the north African coast.
“They are working out what extra ships and helicopters we need to direct to the emergency,” said Captain Filippo Marini, the coastguard spokesman, indicating a group of officers huddled over charts. “Every time, it’s a hard decision.”
He added: “Italy has assumed control and responsibility of the zone to the north of Libya and it has a legal obligation to co-ordinate search and rescue operations, so we must guarantee to help.”
I was asked not to disclose the details of what I could see, but it is safe to say that the average person would be astonished at the accuracy with which the western military can watch the crimes unfolding before its eyes.
Doing something to stop it is another matter. The Italian officers kept their cool, but their actions meant life or death for the migrants.
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Out at sea, Chris Catrambone, on board the Maltese rescue ship Phoenix, was photographing dozens of people floundering and shouting in the waters, some wearing fluorescent orange lifejackets. Others floated without moving.
“[It’s] not a scene from a horror movie . . . real-life tragedy unfolding on Europe’s doorstep today,” said Catrambone, posting a stream of images on Twitter.
He watched as bodies were pulled from the sea with the help of an Italian navy helicopter. The bodies, dressed in cheap, gaudy clothes, were draped over the sides of a motor dinghy and brought to his ship. Then they were wrapped in white plastic bags and stacked on the port bow in the sun.
A Royal Navy warship joined Spanish and Italian naval and coastguard vessels.
It was an extraordinary deployment of wealth and technology to save a group of people who had been dumped into a leaky blue wooden boat on the Libyan coast. But it was not enough.
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“Approximately 30 bodies are still floating in the rescue zone . . . many are small toddlers,” Catrambone said.
In the end, his team from the Migrant Offshore Aid Station pulled 593 people from the sea and recovered 33 bodies. Three people who needed medical treatment were ferried to an Italian navy ship.
The Phoenix set sail north, passing the Sicilian town of Taormina where leaders had gathered for the G7 summit. The migrant crisis got scant attention from them, however, and rescue ships were ordered not to dock at their usual ports in Sicily.
More than 1,500 people were saved on May 24 under the direction of the men and women in the coastguard centre in Rome.
The crisis is getting worse and more bad days are to come. And despite the seamanship and skill of all who pluck the migrants from the Mediterranean, the operations are controversial.
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“The traffickers know our units are just outside the 12-mile limit of Libyan territorial waters so all they have to do is reach there,” said an EU official in Brussels. “It’s totally cynical.”
So far this year, more than 50,000 people have come ashore in Italy, a rise of 46% on the same period last year. According to the interior ministry in Rome, that means Italy can expect to cope with 200,000 arrivals in 2017.
The top four countries from which migrants came via Libya this year were Nigeria, Bangladesh, Guinea and Ivory Coast. Fewer came from war zones such as Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen or South Sudan.
Many politicians and officials conclude that most of those risking their lives in the Mediterranean are economic migrants trafficked by organised crime gangs, not political refugees.
“We will be overwhelmed unless something is done,” warned the mayor of Naples, Luigi Di Magistris, whose city has crammed migrants into schools, convents, gyms and disused offices.
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The centre-left Italian government of Paolo Gentiloni had hoped to rally the West behind a strategy to stabilise Libya, to strengthen its coastguard, close trafficking routes across the Sahara and use aid to improve the economies of Africa and keep their people at home.
None of that has come to pass. Foreign aid to the Libyan coastguard has merely helped a thieving bunch of militiamen to board boats and rob helpless victims.
Soumaila Diawara, a 29-year-old opposition lawyer from Mali, made it to Italy with a mobile phone full of photographs and videos documenting his nightmare. He has been granted official refugee status.
Sitting in the cool atrium of the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, he scrolled through pictures of men crammed onto the sandy floor of a house in Tripoli, where traffickers kept their victims. “It is like another world,” he said.
Unlike most of the migrants, Diawara is well-educated. That did not save him from being robbed by the Libyan police, who stole his passport and cash, then threw him in jail until a ransom was paid by a friend in Sweden.
A few days later he stood on a beach near Tripoli with a crowd of 120 frightened people waiting to get into a rubber boat. “There were men with guns on the dunes who said, ‘If you try to come back, we’ll kill you,’ and waved us into the boat.
“We only got 30 minutes from the shore when it began to sink. Fortunately I know how to swim and made it back to the beach. Most of the others drowned,” he said.
The gunmen did not shoot. At dawn next day, the men were loaded onto another rubber boat. They sailed all day until a Maltese freighter loomed above them, its lights burning like a beacon.
“It was then that I felt saved, as if a weight was taken off me,” Diawara said. The survivors were transferred to an Italian navy ship. Diawara eked out a bored existence in transit camps in Sicily, then used his initiative to sign up for a legal course in Rome.
For the first few nights he slept on the street. Then he found shelter with a Jesuit foundation, the Centro Astalli, where he is training to work as an intermediary with young Africans.
“We have to get across the message that they must not expect Europe to be an eldorado,” he said. “They know nothing, they have no idea what to do and they realise the truth only when they arrive.”
As more young migrants arrive, they are prey for mafia exploitation as cheap labourers or prostitutes.
Daniela Pompeii, who handles immigration services for the Community of Sant’Egidio, a Catholic charity, said Italy would have to adjust from being a “transit country” to a place where migrants stayed.
“Certainly the tradition of tolerance in Italy could change,” she said. “But this challenge is not just an Italian problem: it’s a European problem.”
The problem for Italy is whether anybody else in Europe is listening.