Saving Lives in the Mediterranean

When you're living in Argentina and all that you see in the media relates to election campaigns, it’s difficult to remember that on the other side of the world hundreds of thousands are still fleeing their homes-turned-conflict-zones, making the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean sea to reach the European Union (EU).

The press may not have published washed-up children on Greek shores over the last few weeks but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. It did. Europe’s migrant crisis is nowhere near ending. In fact, it’s only just beginning. Last week, 8 people suffocated in a boat and nothing was mentioned in the press. The lifeless bodies of 43 people were also discovered on the Libyan coast.

The deaths are so frequent that we are becoming quasi-numb to them, we keep scrolling.

For months now we have been seeing numbers in the papers and on our screens. These figures correspond to the dead bodies of men, women and children who left everything behind in an attempt to reach the perceived safe-haven that is Europe. Any of us facing the same hell as they do, would attempt to do the same.

It’s easy to feel detached from a number: “Three people drowned” doesn’t generate the same reaction as “Young Syrian woman, who had recently graduated with a medical degree, dies holding onto her one year little girl, who had taken her first steps only two weeks ago, as her husband’s cries for help were muted by the salty water that filled his lungs. They were 25 years old and had their whole life ahead of them. His uncle was going to welcome them in Germany. Back home or in Europe she would have saved the lives of many, but she couldn’t even save her baby.”

There is a story behind all those numbers. And here are some more.

Over 3,000 have died and almost 700,000 have landed on Europe’s shores and made their way to various EU countries, some of which have been more welcoming than others. Most of these people come from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan but there are also many Somalis, Eritreans and Sudanese, making up what is considered the continent's “worst” migration crisis since the Second World War.

As much of the media coverage of the refugee, migrant, humanitarian crisis - call it what you will - has recently focused on what’s been happening on land, I got in touch with Argentine Juan Matías Gil who us told a little more about what goes on at sea.

Juan Matías is a humanitarian coordinator for rescue operations of Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in the Mediterranean sea. Over the past few months he has been spending days on end aboard the very aptly named MSF rescue boat, Dignity I, doing a job that EU leaders are struggling to do: saving dignified lives while EU leaders bicker and blame each other at their frequent ‘emergency talks’ instead. Talk about being a union.

Juan Matías at the rescue

In October 2013, a boat carrying migrants from Libya to Italy sank just off the Italian island of Lampedusa. Italy reacted with an emergency response which saved 155 lives and launched Operation Mare Nostrum, a military and humanitarian operation to save refugees and migrants and arrest their traffickers. Despite its success the operation was terminated one year later in October 2014 and replaced by the EU’s Operation Triton. Problem is, Triton only received a third of the funding Mare Nostrum had and this showed in the tenfold increase of migrant deaths at sea between 2014 and 2015. (It was also more of a border control operation than a search and rescue one, reflecting the EU’s usual line of thought on immigration issues: a fortress above all.)

JL: “When operations are carried out, do you (Dignity I crew) work on your own or do you collaborate with other boats/government or non-organizations?”

JM: “Well we have three boats. We started in May following an incident in April in which about 700 people died. We tried to see what approaches were best to take; always trying to react as quickly as possible.”

Dignity I is the third MSF boat that has carried out missions in the Med but it is the only one to have had operational independence so far. The other two were running in partnership with NGOs. This means that MSF is in complete control of the operations it carries out and the staff they hire to have on the rescue missions.

JM: “When Operation Mare Nostrum ended, there was a big gap - not many boats meant low capacity. So we realized that there was a huge need and that people were going to continue dying despite Operation Triton.”

JL: “How do the operations work?”

JM: “We work on standby in international waters; in certain rescue zones, until we receive an alert via the coordination center in Rome or we spot the boats ourselves. Normally we see them very early in the morning because they leave the Libyan coast around midnight. We are in the international waters 30 miles away so by the time the sun rises, they are about 20 miles away. At night it is too hard to see them because they are still too far, near the Libyan coast, which we don’t have access to.

In terms of their organization, the smugglers provide the migrants with the boat, and a compass and tell them to always head north. They train somebody to sail the boat and they give them a satellite phone, in which only one number is recorded: the coordination center in Rome, which they call when they see the sunrise to warn of their arrival.”

There are two main routes into Europe this year, the Turkish-Greek route and the Italian one; the former being considerably shorter (10km) than the latter (several hundred km). Upto the end of July, around 100,000 people crossed each of these routes. However since September there has been a surge of Syrians taking the Turkish route.

JL: “How many people have you managed to rescue since you got Dignity I?”

JM: “Almost 6000 people since we started on June 13th and with all three MSF boats together, about 18,000. Our boat’s capacity is of about 350 people.”

Juan Matías  goes on to explain that when the boat’s capacity is exceeded they must immediately call for assistance from another boat. In the case of imminent danger (if water is coming into the boat or it starts sinking) they have room to fit hundreds more on the boat but it is impossible to sail. Dignity I just becomes a recovery base whilst they wait for more boats to come for support.

JL: “Where do you take them once you have recovered them?”

JM: “When we finish our rescues, we report how many people we have on board and the coordination center in Rome will direct us to know whether or not we can take more people. If we need to go to a port, we go to Sicily, Calabria or Puglia, the three southernmost regions of Italy. Here, the refugees are welcomed by authorities where they receive legal assistance, food, clothing and get medical check ups by the health ministry. Once we hand them over to the port, our responsibility is over and we go back to the sea to continue rescuing people. What is happening on land is another story.”

JL: “Do you also provide them with medical assistance when you are on the boat or is your role just to get them out of the water and to land safely?”

JM: “We always provide them with medical assistance, food and water.

First of all when we find a boat we send a sailor and a cultural mediator (who speaks French, English and Arabic) to explain who we are and what we are going to do to. We distribute life jackets to everybody and the proceed by transferring them onto Dignity I 10 at a time.

As soon as they arrive onboard, we do a medical screening to see who needs immediate assistance. If they are injured, fainting or bleeding they go straight to the hospital we have onboard. Those who are self-sufficient are registered and then we give them water because most of them are dehydrated. We give them as much water as they need, food and blankets, towels and socks for them to have when they get to the port because it gets cold at night.

We also change their clothes because many people have burns and are covered in fuel because they have just spent the past few hours sitting on the floor of the boat where fuel has been leaking, leaving them with burns.”

I ask him my next question but mid-way through answering he remembers something he had forgotten to mention.

He tells me that they have a mid-wife onboard, too. She assists all the women, many of whom have suffered sexual violence.

Ten days ago, they had a delivery. A child was born fleeing in international waters. Two hours after arriving on board, the Cameroonian mother was in labour so they delivered the baby on board. She could have given birth on the rubber dinghy with 120 other people there, in very dirty conditions - it would have been a different story. “And although this has a happy ending” he tells me, “it is a very sad story.”

JL: “Do you think that the media gives an accurate portrayal of what is actually going on?

JM: “Well the media is temporal. Media attention is always focusing on tragedies. We received a lot of media attention on August 5th because we assisted a sinking. The boat was carrying more than 600 people. Almost 300 died. So we had two weeks of the media calling us all the time, speaking about this specific incident.

The media has now switched to focusing on the Eastern route that the migrants are taking rather than those who are dying at sea. It also tends to focus on the smugglers, which are a problem. But they are only part of the problem. If we imprison the smuggler, the problem is not over. It’s a very simplistic way of analysing the problem.”

I couldn’t agree more.

He carries on, making me want to shout preach! at everything I am hearing through my headphones via Skype.

“When we reached 5000 people, we published a book with 5000 stories for 5000 rescues to show that they are not just numbers. They are people moving, uprooting their lives, and they have really heavy stories on their back so we need to consider them as the human beings they are.

What we try to do is to put faces to the numbers. They are just people fleeing from violence in Somalia, Iraq, Yemen. They are politically persecuted in Gambia and in Senegal too. They are labelled as economic migrants but they are running away from something. Those escaping their situations back home were living there for years but cannot stand it anymore because they are abused in ways that we cannot even imagine.

And the discussion shouldn’t be about whether we should label them as refugees or migrants. It’s that they are human beings who are trying to survive by escaping conflict, dictatorship, censorship and abuse of human rights.”

Before our conversation ends, I ask when he next goes back out to sea. In two days, he tells me.

JM: “The rescue operation has been increased by the European Union but not in the way that we would like. It is not a humanitarian approach but rather a military one. Military boats do not provide the basics that we provide: medical assistance, food, water, clothes, etc. So we are very worried about that. They also rescue people differently. They are soldiers so they are not trained like us. We should focus on the quality of the searching capacity as well as the quantity. Providing medical care is crucial and I don’t think the military boats have the same resources and preparation that we do to assist the refugees.

What we advocate for is safe and legal routes into Europe. Rights and legal procedures should be in place for these people to be able to seek asylum before leaving their home countries, instead of fleeing, crossing the sea, being subject to exploitation or illegal imprisonment, detention centres, smuggling networks, prostitution, forced labour. This would be avoided if such a mechanism was in place.”

On that note, I wished him good luck back at sea and he responded with the same about my time in Buenos Aires. I couldn’t help but feel an awful rush of guilt at the fact that for me that means enjoying an “expat” life in the ‘developing’ world while for him it means heroically saving the desperate lives of possibly hundreds each week, in the ‘developed’ world.