On board the tiny fleet saving terrified migrants from an angry Mediterranean
The EU has massively reduced its effort to rescue refugees fleeing to Europe. A new, scaled-down mission is under way amid fears of looming disaster. Emma Graham-Harrison joined one ship off the storm-battered coast of Lampedusa
* <
http://www.theguardian.com/profile/emma-graham-harrison> Emma Graham-Harrison on board the Viana do Castelo
* Monday 17 November 2014
A Portuguese naval captain describes patroling the seas around southern Italy to stem the flow of migrants from north Africa
Even the captain was worried, he admitted, about waves nearly 10 metres high crashing over the stern of his Portuguese navy ship as it sailed through a hurricane in the Mediterranean. The migrants he had been sent to rescue would not have stood a chance.
Miguel Morais Chumbo commands the Viana do Castelo, part of a new European Union mission to aid some of the thousands of people who cram on to tiny, leaky boats each month in Libya, dreaming of a safer life in Europe but painfully aware they risk drowning on the way there.
This year alone more than 3,000 people have died in the Mediterranean, after boats capsized or, in one case, were sunk by the same traffickers who had overloaded them with desperate passengers <http://> (
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/15/migrant-boat-capsizes-egypt-malta-traffickers). Tens of thousands of others were rescued by a massive Italian navy operation, launched after a particularly grim shipwreck last autumn. Rome is now winding that initiative down and says the rest of Europe must take more responsibility for the expensive business of saving lives. But as politicians bicker over funding and rules, deaths at sea are almost certain to rise.
The de facto EU replacement deploys only seven boats and three aircraft to help those adrift in a sea that covers more than a million square miles. Its budget of €2.9m (£2.3m)a month is less than a third of Italian spending, and the organisation managing the effort insists saving lives is not its main motive.
“Operation Triton is a border control mission, focusing on surveillance,” said Izabella Cooper, spokeswoman for Frontex, the agency that co-ordinates EU border controls. “Obviously while the primary element is border control, saving lives is an absolute priority,” she added.
Frontex is bound by the politicians that set its agenda and budgets, many of them with hardline views on whether migrant lives are worth saving. Foreign Office ministers recently announced that Britain would not support any future search and rescue operations, including Triton, claiming the assistance simply encourages more people to risk the crossing. <http://> (
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/oct/27/uk-mediterranean-migrant-rescue-plan)
That ignores the vast profits to be made from people-smuggling and the fact that many are fleeing such terrible violence in countries such as Syria and Eritrea that they are willing to set sail on boats they know may never arrive.
While the Italian rescue mission coincided with a leap in arrivals as boats plucked migrants from the very edge of Libyan waters – far beyond the remit of the Triton mission – landings also soared in other Mediterranean countries such as Greece, which had no comparable rescue efforts.
“Border control is not the panacea for addressing migration,” said Cooper, adding that, with the Middle East in turmoil, departures were likely to continue. “You need a more global approach that includes stabilising the countries of origin, providing economic assistance, addressing the people-smuggling networks that are organising these departures.”
She added: “Libya is de facto a failed state, where law enforcement authorities are virtually absent. This creates extremely favourable conditions for people-smuggling networks who are running a zero-risk, high-profit operation ... They make up to €1 million on a boat carrying 450 people on board, without any risk of being arrested whatsoever.”
The remains of many of those boats lie snarled in a scrapyard on the island of Lampedusa, a tiny speck of Italian territory in the southern Mediterranean. It sits closer to north Africa than to Sicily and so for years has been on the frontline of the migration crisis, its fishermen and coastguard wearily accustomed to pulling desperate shipwreck survivors and the bodies of less fortunate travellers from the waves.
Most of the wrecked boats look too primitive even for a short fishing trip, much less a days-long voyage to Europe with hundreds of people crammed above and below deck.
Chumbo, whose last mission was tackling pirates off the Somalia coast, is more haunted by those he has been sent to protect than by those he used to fight. “I think for me it’s the most difficult mission I have had,” he said as his crew scanned the seas off Lampedusa. “Here it is a human disaster.”
A few days into their patrol, with the seas roiled by winter storms, they have not yet found any boats in distress, but he has been trying to prepare his crew.
“It’s difficult for everybody to see children and women at sea in poor conditions. Of course, we are human beings,” he said. “If we don’t get there in time, and people are dying, it’s a horrible situation for us, but somehow we need to be prepared. First of all we look for survivors, and then we recover the bodies. Our mission is to not leave anyone behind, bodies or survivors.”
Lampedusa is less than 300 kilometres from Tripoli, a journey that would take the Viana do Castelo just ten hours or so – but the migrants can spend days at sea in boats whose heavy cargo means they make very slow progress, or drift after losing their engines to the sea. They usually only set off in clear weather, but forecasts can change fast in winter, with a hurricane last week catching even the Portuguese navy by surprise.
“We are used to the North Atlantic and still I have never hit such bad weather,” said the ship’s chief engineer, Lourenço Machado. “If you think about a small raft filled with immigrants, it will be a very hard situation.”
The wind was blasting at 150km an hour. “Every day we received weather forecasts, but they don’t have any idea we are going to have this kind of situation,” Chumbo said. “If I said I was not afraid, I am lying. In the first two hours I was a little bit afraid, but when I saw the ship fighting the sea so well my fear reduced.”
For any migrants who had left days earlier, when the seas were calm, hitting the storm would have been the end of the voyage.
Bad weather also makes it harder to find boats in distress, and much more complicated to rescue those on board or trying to stay afloat, because the only way to get on board the Viana do Castelo while it is at sea is up a rope ladder on the side of the ship, or winched up in a basket.
The ship can hold hundreds of refugees in a temporary shelter on its helicopter landing pad, sealed off from most of the ship and its crew, who have to worry about infectious diseases – now including Ebola – and the fact that some of the people-traffickers are often among those rescued.
“We are ready for Ebola, we have the protective suits with the gloves, the masks,” said the ship’s doctor, Mendão Rodrigues, who added that the long journey that west African migrants must make through the Sahara makes a case on board unlikely. “Ebola is far from this area, it’s not the main concern.”
Within hours of being found at sea, migrants are taken to Sicily or the Italian mainland for medical help and identification. A handful of boats still make it to Lampedusa under their own steam, but the processing centre there is now closed.
“I had many, many emotional moments; you go to recover these people from the port and you see a little baby, four or six months old, or ladies pregnant, or people who have arrived in a new country with no clothes, no documents,” said Fabio Dimaggio, a Lampedusan pizza chef who used to work in a centre for new migrants. “I asked them, ‘What are you going to do?’ They would say, ‘As you see me, this is my life, I don’t know what I am going to do’.”
In 2011, when the Arab spring sparked the biggest wave of migration from north Africa yet, migrants arrived so fast that at one point they outnumbered the few thousand permanent inhabitants of Lampedusa, who responded with fear and anger, particularly after reports on the crisis appeared to put off tourists who are the lifeblood of the island’s economy.
Still, like most local people, Dimaggio is angered by the callous stance of politicians he says have no understanding of the migrants’ desperation. “What do they mean to do? They mean to let people die in the Mediterranean sea like birds or animals? Well, I don’t agree with that.”
Received on Mon Nov 17 2014 - 13:01:34 EST