The Desperate Journey

The drinking water runs out about 16 hours into the voyage, with the coast of Libya far behind and the old wooden boat chugging through the Mediterranean toward Sicily. But Abdi Salan Mohammed Hassan — a gangly, gentle, 23-year-old Somali man crammed into the open 12-m boat with scores of other Africans, all trying to smuggle themselves into Europe — isn't worried. It has taken him eight months to travel a 4,500-km route from Mogadishu and begin this perilous October crossing, and along the way he has gone without food and water plenty of times. His optimism seems rewarded four hours later, when the young Egyptian piloting the green-and-white fishing boat spots the lights of Malta, steers left, and announces that the Italian coast is just 10 hours away. But there's still no land in sight the following afternoon when the motor stutters and dies. The boatman tries a few times to restart it and a few of the men fiddle with the thing, but it's no use. Women scream that they are doomed. A young Somali named Ismail prays to Allah for their survival. By the next night, Abdi Salan is praying too. Late on the fifth day, the Egyptian boatman sees a ship pass in the distance, dives into the sea and swims frantically for it. He soon drowns. And by the ninth day, people inside the crowded boat begin to die of thirst and exposure, and most of the rest are semiconscious. Abdi Salan lies amid the sprawl of bodies on the boat's floor, thinks about his family and friends in Mogadishu, and prepares to die.

When Abdi Salan's boat was discovered on Oct. 19, after 15 days at sea, with 13 corpses and 15 survivors aboard and an unknown number lost along the way, the story threw Italy into a spasm of soul-searching. The mayor of Rome organized a funeral at the capital's historic city hall, where 13 coffins were draped in the blue-and-white Somali flag. But until now, the full story of this journey has not been told.

Just about every night, one or more boats like Abdi Salan's try to navigate the 275-km-wide stretch of sea between Libya and Italy's southernmost island of Lampedusa, which has become the preferred crossing point for thousands of Africans trying to reach Europe. Italy's 7,600-km-long coastline is the European Union's most porous border. It's also the most perilous to reach. Over the past decade, thousands of would-be immigrants are believed to have died in Italian waters, including 283 who drowned off the coast of Sicily in a single 1996 incident. Some 623 would-be immigrants survived the voyage last month alone — at least, that's how many were caught — and an estimated 8,900 landed in Lampedusa last year. Of those who make it to Italy, some 75% move on, eventually settling — legally or otherwise — in countries farther north. Their presence is fueling angry debate across the Continent, with some saying Europe's borders must be sealed to preserve order and economic well-being, and others arguing that immigrants are inevitable and must be integrated into society.

As this debate rages, the voices of the arriving immigrants like Abdi Salan are rarely heard. For many, the treacherous voyage across the Mediterranean is just the final leg of a months-long journey during which they risk their lives — at the hands of crooked smugglers, in the backs of suffocating trucks, on the decks of leaking fishing boats — to reach Europe. Abdi Salan crossed Ethiopia, Sudan, Libya and the Mediterranean before touching Italian territory. His journey started in January, when he left his family and friends behind to embark on a harrowing odyssey in pursuit of his European dream. This is his story.

THE FIRST STEP
In Mogadishu, the sweet-faced, rail-thin young man named Abdi Salan Mohammed Hassan is known for his football prowess. He plays endless matches in the city's empty lots and with his quick feet and broad shoulders excels at every position on the pitch. He dreams about going to Britain to follow his favorite players — he can reel off the names of the stars on England's national team — and maybe study economics at university.

At a weekly pickup game in late 2002, a close friend of Abdi Salan's shows up on crutches. His left leg has been blown off in a mortar attack on his apartment building. Violence is nothing new to Somalis of Abdi Salan's generation. He was 11 when the civil war broke out in 1991. Since then, more than a million Somalis have died in the violence and some 429,000 refugees have scattered around the world. Looking at his crippled friend, Abdi Salan decides to flee. "When you're young, you don't really think about leaving home," he says, speaking through a translator. "But when I saw what happened to my friend, I understood that in Mogadishu you can get killed anywhere, for any reason." Abdi Salan has cousins in Denmark and Norway, but no specific destination in mind. "I knew I wanted to leave Somalia and go to Europe. It didn't matter where."