The Mediterranean swallowed a thousand people.
I've been staring at my screen for hours now, reading and re-reading the interview with David Yambio published by La Repubblica. Outside my window in Emilia-Romagna, the winter rain taps gently against the glass—a sound so ordinary, so safe. Somewhere between Tunisia and Italy, that same water became a mass grave during Cyclone Harry. And the institutions we trust to protect human dignity? They've said nothing. Not a single official word.
Let that sink in.
The Numbers We Weren't Supposed to Know
When the first reports emerged, authorities spoke of 380 people missing. A tragedy, yes, but somehow contained—a number that could be processed, mourned briefly, and filed away. David Yambio and his network of activists at Refugees in Libya knew better. They started calling contacts in Tunisia, cross-referencing desperate messages from families searching for sons, daughters, brothers—some looking for five or six relatives at once who had boarded those boats and vanished.
The real count? At least one thousand dead.
More boats departed than were ever officially reported missing. The bureaucratic undercount wasn't an accident. It was a feature.
"I Know How It Feels"
What gives Yambio's words their unbearable weight is this: he's lived it. He survived torture in Libyan detention centres run by Almasri. He crossed those same waters, felt that same terror, made that same impossible calculation.
"It's a risk you take consciously," he explained, "because the choice is between the danger of dying once and for all, or dying a little every day."
I read that sentence three times. As someone who's spent years in hospitals, who's had my skull opened for brain surgery, who's felt my own body become a stranger to me—I understand something about impossible choices. Not the same ones, never the same ones. But I know what it means to weigh survival against unbearable circumstances. To choose the terrifying unknown over the certain slow destruction of remaining where you are.
These people weren't reckless. They were rational. And that's what breaks my heart.
The Convenient Silence
Here's where the story turns sinister. In the days before Cyclone Harry struck, Tunisia's Garde Nationale cleared the informal settlements where migrants had been sheltering among the olive groves near Sfax. Was it coincidence? Yambio doesn't think so.
"The Tunisian government has shown itself extraordinarily effective at blocking departures," he noted. "But in those days, people were almost pushed to try everything."
Nobody in those camps knew a cyclone was coming. From the shore, the sea looked calm. The wind carried no warning, only the faint smell of salt and the promise of Europe somewhere beyond the horizon. They boarded boats that would become coffins, and the authorities who could have stopped them—who had been so efficient at stopping them before—watched them go.
The activists fear these people were intentionally sent to die.
I'm simplifying complex geopolitical dynamics here, I know. Migration policy involves economic pressures, security concerns, diplomatic negotiations I can't fully explain in a blog post. But strip away the jargon and you're left with a brutal question: did governments let this happen because dead migrants are more convenient than living ones?
What the Families Want
"I want my son, brother, or parent—dead or alive."
That's what the families tell Yambio's network. Not justice, not policy changes, not political accountability. Just the bodies of their loved ones. The most basic, primal form of closure.
Some still hope. Malta doesn't let rescued migrants communicate, so a few families cling to the possibility that their relatives were pulled from the water and are simply unreachable. But the collective prayers have started. The vigils have begun. Hope is curdling into grief.
There was one miracle. A young man named Ramadan Konte was found by the merchant ship Star, clinging to life in waters that had claimed everyone else around him. His survival proves that rescue operations work, that finding survivors—and bodies—is possible.
But no government has launched such an operation. No search. No recovery mission. Nothing.
The Price of a Human Being
Italy's Prime Minister Meloni has, in the past, blamed "traffickers" for these deaths. It's a comfortable narrative. Evil smugglers exploit desperate people; tragic but external to European responsibility. This time, she didn't even offer that deflection.
"Not even that," Yambio observed. "It means these people's lives count for nothing."
I've spent my life studying the cosmos—the birth of stars, the death of galaxies, the incomprehensible scales of space and time. Against that backdrop, individual human existence can seem vanishingly small. And yet. And yet.
Every astronomer I've met, every physicist who stares into the void, comes away with the same conclusion: precisely because we're so improbable, so fleeting, so cosmically insignificant, each human life carries immense weight. We are the universe becoming aware of itself. To let a thousand of those points of awareness wink out without acknowledgment isn't just policy failure. It's a betrayal of what makes us human.
What Must Happen Now
Yambio's demands are straightforward. Launch a search and rescue operation to recover at least the bodies. End agreements with Tunisia, a country that regularly violates the Geneva Convention and persecutes the same asylum seekers it's paid to contain. Open safe, legal channels for people trapped in limbo—many of them officially recognised as refugees by UNHCR, yet abandoned anyway.
"It's hypocritical," he argued, "for Italy and Europe to build centres in third countries to process asylum claims while refusing to open embassies and consulates where people could actually apply."
The logic is perfect. The silence from Brussels and Rome tells you everything about the priorities.
Why I Can't Look Away
I wasn't born to activism. I was born in Albania in 1986, a kid with a movement disorder who emigrated to Italy at five years old searching for medical treatment that didn't exist in a country still shaking off dictatorship. My journey was legal, documented, relatively safe. It was also desperate—my parents choosing the unknown because staying meant watching their son deteriorate.
I got lucky. I got surgery, education, a degree in astronomy from Bologna, a master's in physics from Milan. I got a wheelchair that carries me through life rather than a boat that might have carried me to death.
The people who drowned during Cyclone Harry weren't less deserving of luck. They weren't less intelligent, less hardworking, less human. They were born in different coordinates on this spinning rock, and that accident of geography determined whether they'd live or die while Europe watched in silence.
The Sound of No One Speaking
There's a particular quality to silence after tragedy. I've experienced it in hospital waiting rooms, in the moments after bad news, in the spaces where words should exist but don't. It's heavy, that silence. It presses against your ears like water pressure at depth.
Right now, that silence is pressing against Europe. One thousand people drowned. Families are searching. Activists are mapping the dead. And the institutions responsible for human rights, for international law, for basic decency—they're saying nothing.
The silence is the message.
I don't have a tidy conclusion. I don't believe in wrapping horror up with a bow. What I have is this: a responsibility to not look away. To write these words even when they feel inadequate. To insist, from my corner of the internet, that those lives mattered.
At FreeAstroScience, we talk about the universe and our place in it. We talk about the wonder of existence, the beauty of knowledge, the power of curiosity to lift humanity. But knowledge means nothing if it doesn't translate into conscience. Wonder means nothing if it stops at our own borders.
A thousand people died. Europe said nothing.
What are we going to say?
— Gerd Dani
President, Free Astroscience
Tirana, Albania – February 2026
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