Badruddin Al-Wahaibi-Tunisia
Habib remembers how he returned to life from the journey of hell on a secret boat that settled deep in the Mediterranean Sea off the Italian coast. More than seventy young men and women settled in the Blue Tomb.
The goods are being stored in his home in the town of Bourguiba, his hometown of Bizerte, north of Tunis, while trying to arrange memory and photographs dating back more than 10 years. The faces, names and sounds of distress are still being kept that night unanswered.
The phenomenon of secret immigration on death boats is nothing new to Maghreb and African youth in general, bringing more than the dreams of people who saw salvation in infiltrating Europe by climbing the walls of the sea, which has turned them into daily banquets for Mediterranean fish.
Habib says his ambition, driven by poverty and a lack of vision, refuses to obey reality or even try to change it with the possibilities available at the time, fueling this feeling of shame, the season of summer migrants returning, and stories of a paradise separated only by waves.
| Habib in his home in the city of Bourguiba recalls the difficult moments he experienced (Al Jazeera Net) |
The beginning of the journey
He remembers how in his existential crisis the young man who had been captivated by an opportunity to emigrate on a secret voyage guaranteed the results, transformed him into a dream and an opportunity he had unthinkingly tried to achieve by all means.
A hectic month of work and hardship, Habib bought a backpack to collect some of his clothes and a picture of his mother, and crammed into his memories a difficult reality to be - as he said - an incentive to work and hard in Italy to change it as soon as possible, it is impossible in that country, as he was told.
The first stations were in a secret camp in the city of Qurnbaliya in Nabeul province, the closest point on the coast of Italy. It is a backyard of the house of one of the emperors of human trafficking in those days known as the "pilgrim".
Habib describes the conditions of the camping in anticipation of the start of the death journey as inhumane conditions. Africans, including young Maghreb men and women, live in the open under the trees. The pilgrim and his gang take care of the message and impose a life order by force so as not to be clarified.
He recounts the names and faces he has put together for a month in the death camp, stories that tell unbearable pain, "young men above the earth", as he put it, unemployment, poverty and childhood torn by difficult social and family conditions.
During the month of waiting, Habib saw dozens of people settling in the camp and leaving after giving them a sum of money, leaving the camp behind dreams and fantasies. Sometimes, under pressure of anticipation, the orchard turns into a battleground that is extinguished by the Haj's followers in their own way.
| Habib al-Tunisi described the conditions of the camp from which the flights to the sea start as inhumane (Al-Jazeera Net) |
The boat sank
They were forced to walk for six hours in the forests bordering the coast, the march of death in the true sense of the word, being dragged like an aphrodisiac behind a handbook for the price of their delivery to the ship's anchorage, to the beginning of the end.
Habib describes the scene after being thrown inside the boat as a terrible sight, fearing for the first time on the chests that held her breath. The silence was not only because the voyage was not revealed, it was the moment of truth where there was no room for retreat.
The bodies and dreams of the compound are crowded, not heard in the darkness, which only brought the whispers of young people from time to time, and they are fed by cigarette burners that light up and their faces are dripping with hope and hope to reach safety. The hours and miles pass in a quick descending count to meet the "hell".
A lover is silent, barely able to understand, as though he were living again with the water of his feet, as if he could hear the voices of his companions beginning to rise to ask the master why the water had leaked to the boat. With Scott the engine began to fret and expressions of puzzlement quickly turned into chaos.
He says he was stunned, especially when the captain asked them to try to get the water out of the boat, compounded by his failure to restart the engine. The parts of the captain's face looked scarce, though his eyes were predicting the disaster was inevitable.
| Refugees rescued by Tunisian Coast Guard after being on their way from Libya to Italy (AFP / Getty Images) |
Crying and wailing
He wakes up from his astonishment at the sound of the skipping of the captain and his escape as the only cover for survival. Despite the appeals of resignation, he does not turn his attention. He asks us with disapproval: "Did you see a dead man sing his luck?" That was the case of everyone, crying and wailing and slapping faces. About his load of shock shock.
With the start of the ship sinking, Habib decided to jump in the water, trying as far as possible to keep away from the boat so as not to pull it to the depths, a decision that many did not succeed in making, which made dozens go to the bottom of the sea and love them with dreams and dreams to nothing in a terrible sight.
"He saw young people he knew trying to hold on to each other in desperate attempts to survive. But the sea had another opinion," Habib says. "He took them deep into their depths.
The struggle of the pregnant woman, a brother trying to rescue his sister crying with unbearable burning, drowns together, a lover struggled all night and a desperate desperation, remembers the young man who accompanied him throughout the struggle for survival, how they were encouraging each other to hold on to a rescue boat that might not come, Comrade to call the blue grave, then cried a lonely lover waiting for his role.
He describes his body as cold and salt. "My body turned to pure white, as if the sea wanted to bury me before it killed me. Every now and then I felt the fish as if they were tasting my flesh, waiting for my limbs to rest and the silence that surrounds me."
When the sun went down, he did not have enough strength to make a distress call that caught the attention of the helicopter flying over him. He said he was martyred before he let his hands sink into the depths when a rescue boat came toward him amid the bodies that surfaced to indicate his place.
| Habib: I Could not Understand Being Still Alive (Al Jazeera Net) |
New birth
After the incident began to form a new person, says Habib that he retired from the people and society for months, his mind could not initially grasp that he is still alive, but he finally understood that the beautiful things waiting for him were behind the seafloor.
A lover who is born after the incident mixes the night with the day, works in the city market, no longer selects the works or resumes from each other, each dinar brings him closer than achieving his new self, distances reduced in his mind to make him a man living and struggling for a clear goal, .
He returned to the starting point with a more determined spirit of success, with a more realistic view away from the delusions of distant European paradise. He founded a trade and a small family. He even built a lifeboat installed by many of his city's youth, perhaps without knowing it.