The chief officer said it all. After the French police had questioned him, when finally they had persuaded him to admit to eight wretched, bloody murders – to admit that he had been there personally with his pistol in his hand while the Africans were shot to death – the Ukrainian sailor cocked his chin at the cops and told them that he had done nothing wrong really. He said: “Europe will thank us for what we did.”
Right now, Valeri Artemienko may not know how right he was. He and his captain yesterday were jailed for life which in France is likely to mean they will never be released. Three of his crew were also jailed for 20 years. The five of them – together with one other sailor, who was acquitted – have spent the last four weeks sitting in the dock of the imposing Cour d’Assises in Rouen, listening through their ear phones to the translation of events as the court rehearsed their murderous conspiracy.
Artemienko and his colleagues heard the lawyers recall how three years ago, in the autumn of 1992, they had crewed the MC Ruby as it worked its way up the west coast of Africa towards Europe; how, on October 24, they steamed away from a town called Takoradi on the coast of Ghana with their cargo of cocoa beans, all unaware that hidden away in the hold, they were now carrying nine passengers, eight young men from Ghana and one from Cameroun, who had stowed away to escape their hopeless poverty by reaching the Promised Land in Europe.
With laborious attention to detail, the presiding judge and the prosecutor reconstructed the night, nine days later, when, as the MC Ruby ploughed through stormy seas to the west of Portugal, Artemienko and his friends attacked the stowaways and murdered them one by one, tossing their bodies into the waves, committing a crime that would have left no trace – if it had not been for the one stowaway who escaped and who hid in the bowels of the ship and who stayed hidden for days even though the cursing crew hunted him from hull to stern, and who survived despite his wounds to tell his unbelievable tale.
Away to the left of the Ukrainian sailors, the courtroom seats were filled with journalists and diplomats and observers from human rights groups who had come to hear a case that was special not only for the ugliness of its crime but also for the significance of its motive. For these murders were committed as a direct and predictable result of laws that have been passed and blessed by France and Britain and by almost every other government in the European Union.
They were designed to control immigration or, as the immigrants might put it, to protect the wealth of the developed world from the desperate demands of the rest of the planet. They created Fortress Europe, a legal edifice of insurmountable barriers whose outer defence was the ingenious new law of “carrier liability”, which undertook to punish any ship or aeroplane which was caught carrying illegal immigrants. For the owners, the fines could be crippling. (In seven years, Britain alone has levied fines against carriers totalling £75.7 million.) For the crew, the result could be loss of wages or even the sack. And, therefore, for any immigrants who were caught by a crew, the penalty which they faced could be final.
There is one other reason why the crowds came to see this trial. It presented a classic confrontation between good and bad for, immediately across the court from Artemienko and his five co-accused sat a slim young black man – Kingsley Ofosu, the surviving stowaway. Day after day, he sat in his high-backed wooden chair and gazed at the men who had tried to kill him, who had killed his friends, who had murdered his own brother before his eyes. He was the archetypal victim, commanding the sympathy of his audience, and yet, as the trial unfolded, a subtle change began to take place.
It was not that Kingsley Ofosu ever lost the sympathy of the court. When he rose during the second week to tell his story, the judge advised him to speak without hatred or fear. He spoke instead with harrowing directness. Standing alone at the microphone in the middle of the cavernous, mediaeval courtroom, he described his life in Ghana: how he had tried to earn a living in the docks but often went home to his young wife with nothing to show for a day spent waiting for work that never came; how he had dreamed of travelling to Europe to study to be an engineer;. and how one day he had won some cash on the lottery and decided to take his chance.
He told how he had parted anxiously from his wife, who was now pregnant with their first child, and teamed up with his young brother, Albert, and seven friends. Together, they had slipped into the hold of the MC Ruby where, to their surprise, they had found a young man from Cameroun, already hiding among the cargo. For days, they had dared to imagine that all was well, until they woke to find four crewmen standing over them, one with a gun, who demanded that they hand over their money. They had been taken to a tiny, dark room where they had been left without food for three days and then, in the middle of a dark and stormy night, the crewmen had returned and taken them out in groups of two and three without explanation. Finally, only Kingsley and his brother remained to be led away.
“When they took me out of this room, I saw that one of the sailors was having some blood on his shirt. My brother was frightened and I was frightened. I walked first. Albert was coming behind me.” He told the silent court how they had been led up on deck and into a dimly lit room. “When I was going through the door, I saw the chief officer with a hand gun and, on the left, another man with an iron bar. Suddenly, he hit me and I fell and quickly I got up. I saw two other men, one with a knife and I started to run.
“I heard my brother shout. He was shouting my name and I turned my head and I saw the men throwing him into the water. I heard two shots.” Albert Ofosu was never seen again. Nor were the seven other stowaways. By now, the only sound in the courtroom was Kingsley Ofosu crying gently into his hand.
There was no disguising the brutality of those who killed the stowaways. The presiding judge sat stoney-faced as he heard how the killers had scoured the hold of the MC Ruby searching for Kingsley Ofosu in order to get rid of him and how Ofosu had hid in the girders on the ceiling, so desperate with thirst that he had tried to drink his own urine and how, finally, the ship had put into Le Havre, where Ofosu had discovered he was locked in the hold and had scrambled to freedom out of a ventilation shaft, sprinting into the night, with his clothes torn and his skin still stained with his own blood, not even knowing what country he was in.
And yet, as the story of the killers began to emerge, it became harder to typecast them simply as bad men. It started to happen as the presiding judge reviewed their backgrounds, built out of fragments of the Soviet past: the childhoods in broken homes with vodka-addict fathers; the years of unrewarded study to break into the merchant fleet; the political commisar who used to travel with them on every voyage; the captain who had been punished with two years loss of work because a brother officer had defected on a trip to the USA.
This feeling grew as the court was told of their experiences since their arrest. There was Oleg Mikhaileski, who had worked in the ship’s kitchens, and whose wife had written to him in prison, disowning him as a murderer, cursing him for putting a murderer’s blood in her childrens’ veins. He had tried to kill himself. The psychiatrists told the court he was still suicidal, although the judge refused to let them say that in front of him, for fear that it would send him over the edge. He sat slumped with his chin on his chest.
There was Dzhamal Arakhamiya, who had always insisted he was wrongly accused. The other defendants, who had all confessed to some kind of role in the crime, agreed that he was innocent, and a Catholic priest in Le Havre had written a book calling for his release. In three years behind bars, he had heard nothing from his family apart from one brief phone call from a brother who told him they had been caught up in the civil war in Georgia. He had never heard another word and still did not know if his wife and children had survived. Eventually, he was acquitted.
But the full weight of all this sank finally into the court only when an old Ukrainian sea captain named Alexander Vinnitski stepped on to the witness stand and tried to explain things on behalf of the Black Sea Company, for whom they all worked. He was a strong, solid sort of man and he made no attempt to disguise the truth. “We know that our sailors have killed these citizens of Ghana,” he said, “and we are horrified by it.”
Then he started to talk about life in the Ukraine. He described the wave of unemployment that had swept the republic since the collapse of the Soviet Union, leaving old people digging into dustbins in search of food, and he spoke of the wave of gangsterism which had followed, flooding every corner of life, including the docks. He spoke of a captain there who recently fell out with some gang: they had killed him and his wife, too. “They kill for nothing,” he said.
He spoke of the seamen in Odessa who had once worked for the Soviet merchant fleet and whose only hope now was to work on a foreign shipping line who would pay three or four times the Ukrainian rate. If they could land such a job, then they could earn dollars and buy homes for their families and smuggle a fridge or a video recorder back to Odessa with them. He conjured up an image of them standing on the dock for days, watching the ships glide away to the Promised Land, taking with them their only chance of escaping their hopeless poverty.
“The terrible thing about this situation,” he said, “is that this crew went to the other side of the world and met people who were just as unhappy, people who were just as anxious to find a better life. They were afraid they would lose their jobs if anyone discovered the stowaways. I believe it was that which led them to commit these terrible crimes. Today, they know this was a dreadful act. They are full of grief. But it is too late.”
The court heard that stowaways on ships had become as common as fare-dodgers on trains, as citizens of the Third World pressed northwards in search of survival. In the single port of Le Havre, in 1992, the year of the MC Ruby’s arrival, French police had found 205 stowaways, most of them from Africa. In harbours all across Europe, the figure was multiplied . In seven years, Britain had found 54,040 stowaways in its seaports and airports. The crew of the MC Ruby knew all about the heavy fines on carriers; they said they had been caught with stowaways four times in the previous two years. They believed that the last captain had been demoted for his failure to deal with them. They were all afraid of what the ship’s owners might do if they arrived in Europe once more with illegal Africans aboard – afraid that they would find themselves back in Odessa, back on the dockside watching other men set sail for the Promised Land. And so they did what they did.
They are not the only ones. Antonio Cruz, editor of the Brussels-based Migration Newsheet, has written a book on carrier liability called Shifting Responsibility: “I have no doubt that there have been many other stowaways killed at sea. We have no idea how many there have been, because dead bodies don’t speak, but it is definite.”
The crew of the MC Ruby are not the first to have been tried for such murders, but no police force has ever confronted the people who incited the crimes, with the result that no European government has ever been charged as an accessory to the murders. As the trial in Rouen moved to its conclusion, Valeri Artemienko had reason to reflect that Europe would indeed thank him and his crew, if only for taking the blame. For his part, he began the final week of the trial by hanging himself in his cell. He was cut down before he died.
Kingsley Ofosu watched all this unfold. He had no temptation to forgive the Ukrainians, nor any reason to do so, and yet he could see how they had suffered from a common ill. His own experience in Europe has been full of trouble. Because they needed him as a witness and because his suffering compelled compassion, the French authorities bent the rules and allowed him to stay. But that was all. He was given a carte de sejour and told that he must apply to renew it each year until eventually he would be given a ten-year residencey – and only then would he be allowed to bring his young family from Ghana. Until then, he must live alone.
For many months after his arrival, he stayed in a hostel for homeless men in Le Havre, surviving on pocket money which they gave him. He started teaching himself French and managed to find himself work serving drinks in a bar in the town. Then the bar closed and, when he tried to sign on, he was told that he had no work permit: he could neither draw state benefit nor work again. Faced with disaster, he survived, rather as he did on the MC Ruby, because he is both luckier and shrewder than most.
Two years ago, the Guardian told his story, and film producers started beating a path to his hostel door with their lawyers not far behind. One day, he was taken away like Cinderella in a chauffeur-driven saloon car which whisked him up to Paris to a grand hotel where he was introduced to a man who he believes was Eddie Murphy, who said he was dying to make the movie. Ofosu refused to be flattered into signing anything, occasionally informed producers that they were thieves, and told them that although he knew very little about movies, he did know how his mother sold tomatoes on the market in Takoradi and he was not about to be cheated. Eventually, he came to trust two British production companies, Viva and Union Pictures, who made a joint deal with the BBC and HBO, the American cable TV station, and who are now shooting the film in Ghana.
They paid Ofosu for the rights to his story. It was no great fortune, but it made the difference. And it is only because of this freak circumstance that he has been able to survive, to afford three trips back to Ghana to see his wife and baby son, to rent a small flat in Le Havre. For the rest, he plays football, reads the Bible, goes to Mass at least once a day and still dreams of becoming an engineer. For all his effort and all his luck, he still has little more than stowaway status in the Promised Land.
