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Mohamed Munadi’s Tunisian village was barely affected by the uprising, but he was one of many who fled when Libya erupted Everybody on the boat smoked. There was nothing else to do, except when the storms came and waves battered the vessel, as water sloshed across the deck and passengers frantically bailed it out. For 22-year-old Mohamed Munadi, the storms were a respite. They gave him something else to focus on. “To be lost there where the water is black … it’s worse than the desert,” he said, drawing on a cigarette in the early evening sunshine of Oria, the town in southern Italy where many Tunisian migrants are based. “You get scared, and you start to imagine how you will die. Sometimes I imagined I would drink so much sea water that I would die, or that my heart would stop from fear. Eventually I would sleep. And at those moments I would ask myself: ‘Mohamed, you did all this for Europe? All this for a job?’” When the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, staged a summit in Rome on 26 April to press for the partial reinstatement of national border controls in Europe in the event of undefined “exceptional circumstances”, they had people like Munadi in mind. He and thousands of others have fuelled high-level political bickering inside Europe’s corridors of power, with some politicians demanding a fortification of the continent’s external frontiers and curbs on freedom of travel within the EU. This year has seen a sharp spike in migrants seeking to reach Europe from north Africa, where dramatic political upheavals have created social insecurity and relaxed border controls. On average 30,000 migrants a year land on Lampedusa, the Italian island just 60 miles off the coast of Tunisia. In the past four months that number has already been exceeded. “I haven’t seen a television for two months, but we hear about the politics, the meetings and the deals,” said Munadi. “It’s strange that control over your life is in the hands of people you don’t know, people you will never meet. Only they know what will happen. Our job is to wait, always be waiting.” Leaving Tunisia After he set out at night from the Tunisian village of Dahibah on 10 March, leaving his family behind and beginning a 2,000-mile journey north, Munadi’s life became a bundle of extremes, of the epic and the mundane. The decision to leave home was the biggest of his life; now, waiting in a camp for a permit that would determine his future, he was at the mercy of bureaucrats in far-off offices who made decisions about what he could eat, where he could sleep and how his life would unfold. His horizons had expanded to take in a new continent, yet he was focused solely on obtaining a 9cm-by-12cm scrap of paper to determine his eligibility to reside legally in Europe. He never imagined he would leave Dahibah, a Tunisia-Libya border town where he worked with his brothers as a petrol smuggler. Many Tunisians now in Lampedusa were caught up directly in January’s ousting of Ben Ali, and feared the political and economic chaos they believed would and inevitably engulf the nation in the coming months and years. “You can’t relax in a place where the forces of law and order are patrolling with tanks, and 31 political factions are fighting over who will take control,” said a 26-year-old student, one of 1,200 Tunisians also based in Oria. For Munadi in Dahibah, the tumultuous politics of the capital seemed a long way away, and his biggest preoccupation was the house he was building on his parents’ land. “During the day I would surf the internet, and in the evening I and my friends would go out into the desert hunting for rabbits. We would make a fire and camp out there, and take photos as a souvenir. It’s a special place, not really part of Tunisia. There’s not many police around. tThe government gives us a few logistical things but apart from that we have no relationship with them. The village belongs to its people.” The absence of the state in Munadi’s neighbourhood made revolution in January difficult to comprehend. The regular blows rained down by the corrupt and brutal security apparatus of Tunisia’s regime on much of the population were rarely felt in the semi-lawless frontier town of Dahibah. When Munadi’s family heard Ben Ali had been deposed they were pleased, but it was news detached from their own world, and – initially at least – life continued as normal. “Then the Libyan people tried to move,” said Munadi, “and Gaddafi moved too, and everything became dangerous. When he moved, we moved because the border broke and everything we were doing, the smuggling, the life we led, it had to stop. I knew that if I stayed I would have no job. And I knew that if I had the energy, I had to try to get out, find something new.” Munadi’s parents tried to dissuade him from joining the thousands of Tunisians who were taking advantage of the country’s post-revolutionary chaos to evade border patrols and head across the Mediterranean in search of employment in the EU. But Munadi was determined. He made contact with a fixer in the port city of Djerba, who charged 2,000 dinars (£900) for passage on a fishing boat. In the early hours of 17 March, after a week in an apartment waiting for the weather to clear, he and two friends put all their belongings together in a single sack, climbed on to a raft, and floated out to the boat. Fifty other migrants were already on board, waiting. “The captain of the boat was only 20, and yet he was so calm and professional,” recalled Munadi. “Most of those on board were from Djerba, working in tourism or fishing. We were all so happy, smiling, singing, making videos on our phone.” On the second day, however, a storm blew up and everything changed. “The captain came to us and said: ‘As long as the winds don’t get any stronger than this, we will live. But if the wind grows, I’ll just say I’m sorry, because for sure we will die.’ I’ll never forget this moment for as long as I live. I could tell you about it for hours and you still wouldn’t understand. You have to experience it, to know what it’s like to think it’s done, this life is over.” After three days, Munadi’s boat landed on Lampedusa, the tiny Italian outpost that has become a magnet for those trying to reach Europe from north Africa. Its permanent population is no more than 5,000; so far this year, six times that number have tumbled ashore on the island’s port and beaches. Some are Libyans, or Libyan-based workers from other countries also fleeing the conflict between Muammar Gaddafi and anti-government revolutionaries, while others are sub-Saharan refugees. But the majority are economic migrants from Tunisia who have arrived in droves over the past three months, fanning out across Lampedusa’s gentle, scuffed-idyll landscape and constructing temporary homes in caves, deserted farmhouses, pockets of scrubland and half-empty churches. Many hardships await those who land illegally on the island, but more than 800 have died trying to reach it in the last months alone according to the UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, and for Munadi the overwhelming sensation on arrival was relief. “It wasn’t just Lampedusa, it was another life. You can say that when I put my foot in the port, I was born again. The sea was like death, and Lampedusa was like life.” The stories of those on Lampedusa charged with rescuing distressed migrants from the sea confirm his luck. “Many of those we pick up have been travelling like sardines for days,” said Lieutenant Diego Bianchi, a doctor with the Order of Malta. “They can’t move. They can’t answer to their body’s needs. They can’t help each other. Some are risking death because down below the air can be impossible to breathe. Those that have travelled from beyond the Sahara have already been on the road for months, and the damage is not just physical – these are exhausted, demoralised people when they arrive.” Far-flung from its Italian administrators, Lampedusa has been a focus of immigration for hundreds of years, hosting ancient seafarers from the Phoenicians to the Romans. Out by the lighthouse a six-metre signpost stands testament to a long heritage of transitory visitors, pointing in the directions of dozens of cities across the planet whose citizens have, at one time or another, wound up here. At the height of the crisis, Tunisian migrants could be seen in every corner of the island. Today evidence of the latest human influx lies tucked away in the holiday resort’s nooks and crannies, such as an under-construction swimming pool built into the hills on the edge of town. Mattresses, empty tuna tins and discarded clothing litter the floor, scattered randomly below the pool’s wide wooden beams. On the granite walls, overlapping graffiti tell of the utilisation of this space by both local youths and migrants, knitting their concerns together in an explosion of scraggly technicolour. One concrete section is daubed in Italian with 2.5-metre-high letters: “Hey Loco, Ti Amo!” The slab next to it is in Arabic: “Horreya” (freedom), it reads. Munadi stayed on Lampedusa for 10 days. “We slept out in the open in the port, because the [migrant detention] centre was full. To fill the time we would go on journeys around, looking at the coast and the sea.” Finally he was processed at the centre, given a temporary ID card, and placed with 1,400 other migrants on a ferry to the southern Italian town of Taranto. “They searched us all before getting on the boat and took away any objects that could be dangerous. Even our shoelaces. They knew we were full of stress.” On 1 April, Munadi arrived in mainland Europe and was bussed to a detention centre in the Puglia region of southern Italy. Set in a grassy wasteland between the towns of Manduria and Oria and buttressed by a series of stone ruins, the blue-tent city is surrounded by barbed wire, guarded by dozens of police units – including mounted horse patrols – and subject to helicopter surveillance from the air. Originally designed to accommodate 1,500 people, the camp’s existence sparked tensions with the residents of Oria. By the time Munadi arrived there were more than 2,000 migrants inside the camp, served by two food distribution points, a shower block that regularly failed to work, and almost no official sources of information about what would be happening next. A camp on edge The international medical organisation Médecins Sans Frontières has described conditions in Italian migrant centres as “intolerable”, worse than refugee camps in other parts of the world where the NGO operates, and warned that this aggravates the mental state of those being held. “People get nervous. They don’t understand what’s happening,” said Munadi. “Some people get drunk and have fights; and so the whole place is on edge. I get scared because I haven’t met people like this before. Not everyone is good. Many times I’ve wished they would take me back to Tunisia, just to get away from this place.” In Munadi’s time at the camp there were two mass escapes by migrants. On the second one, Munadi made it on foot to Bari, 60 miles north, before being hauled back by police. Life in the camp settled into an uneasy routine after officials began processing temporary six-month residency visas for all those who landed on Lampedusa before 5 April, a condition that Munadi met. Each morning a list was posted up outside the camp’s police office detailing the names of those whose visas were ready for collection, but the process appeared largely random and in the absence of clear details about who would be getting the visas and when they would materialise, rumour and conspiracy theories quickly spread. Some migrants believed the camp food was being drugged to make them docile. Last month reports of camp officials charging migrants €30 for a visa almost provoked a riot. “We wake up for the lists alone,” said Munadi. “Often you don’t feel that you are human but you have to accept the conditions. The one thing you must keep in your mind is this is a problem about days, about hours, about nothing more than that.” Now they were waiting for their visas, the migrants were no longer locked inside the camp during the day and were free to walk a few miles into Oria, a little town of twisting alleys and stone archways, topped by a castle which plays host to historical re-enactments – a local obsession – every summer. The people of Oria have exhibited flashes of extraordinary kindness to the migrants who head in each morning for coffee. An Italian couple from the town once picked up Munadi in their car and took him for an impromptu day trip to the beach. But there have also been clashes. Shopkeepers have put up Arabic signs ordering only one person to enter their establishment at a time, while bars and cafes have started restricting the hours in which migrants are allowed to make use of their facilities. “We are a small town that relies heavily on tourism, and that’s being threatened by an invasive presence that has turned some people’s lives upside down,” said Emilio Dell’aquila, the local police commander. “I understand,” said Munadi. “It’s their home. We must always say ‘excuse us’ for our presence here.” At sundown the migrants gathered round small fires by the roadside and Munadi pointed out characters and cliques that dominated the rhythms of the camp. They included farmers, computer animators and a techno DJ. Some spent their time talking politics and debating the new Tunisia, and others would rather play football. “If I get the visa, I’ll go to Rome and take pictures – spend a day there, tourist and immigrant,” said Munadi. “After that I will try to reach Paris, where my friend’s cousin will get us a job in a bakery. It’s a simple job, and insha’allah we will become successful. My friend will cook the bread, and I will learn.” Getting the permit would mark only the beginning of one more uncertain phase in Munadi’s journey. Trains and buses require money but with no identification, he has found it difficult to use money transfer services through which family and friends could send him funds. At the French border, police have been stationed in an effort to block permit-holding Tunisian migrants from crossing into France under the EU’s “borderless” Schengen scheme, and trains suspected of carrying migrants have been turned back. Even if Munadi reaches Paris there is no guarantee that he will not face deportation proceedings at some point in the future. Arrest sweeps were carried out last week on Tunisian rough sleepers in several French cities. Back in Munadi’s home town of Dahibah, fighting in Libya had spilled across the border, leaving many dead and wounded. If the route back there seemed difficult, the path ahead was no less challenging. Meanwhile Munadi knew he would leave the camp armed only with some shampoo, a change of clothes and maybe a temporary visa to combat the bureaucratic struggles ahead. But he believed his struggle against borders would not last for ever. “Sometimes when I see the news, all the catastrophes and wars in this world, the revolutions and natural disasters, and I see people coming from Libya to Tunisia, Haiti to Canada, Serbia to Italy, all that makes me think that soon there will be no borders in this world,” he said. “It will be a miracle, but it will happen. We will go back to the first moments of humans on this earth, and move free.” Additional reporting by Mustafa Khalili and Valeria Testagrossa Arab and Middle East unrest Tunisia Libya Middle East Protest Italy Europe Refugees Jack Shenker guardian.co.uk