It’s a vision almost impossible to imagine for anyone who has not experienced it first-hand.
Darkness, silence except for the beating of the sea against the rickety craft, the straining engine, and the noises of fellow passengers who are cast adrift in an overburdened boat. Groans of discomfort, a murmured prayer, the cry of a child.
For many people who attempt the Mediterranean crossing, despite the many deterrents and measures from the EU and its constituent countries, this journey will be their last.
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The crossing from Libya is also often the culmination of months and years of travelling through extremely dangerous and unstable areas. The journey risks kidnapping, sexual slavery, torture, human trafficking, and death.
We often hear about the crossing attempts from politicians, but Oliver Kulikowski, a representative for volunteer-led organisation Sea Watch, has now offered an insight from a rescuers' point of view.
Sea Watch runs rescue operations in the Mediterranean providing assistance to craft which are attempting the highly dangerous crossing.
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He said: “It's not a migration crisis at first, it's a crisis of human rights. These people have rights, and these are rights that we are taking.
“You have to risk your life to actually have access to a right that we take for granted. I can travel to any place in the world tomorrow if I'm up for it and if my credit card allows.”
Sea Watch volunteers have seen first-hand the conditions faced by people who are attempting the crossing.
Oliver said: “You never know what situations you're going to come across. It might happen that you encounter people that have already drowned, or people might drown during operations.
“People sometimes have to sit for days in a mixture of whatever's in the boat. Mostly it's a mixture of gasoline and seawater. This leads to massive chemical burns."
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In 2023 a UN-commissioned report claimed that there is 'overwhelming evidence' that migrants are 'systematically tortured' in Libya. The signs of this are something that Sea Watch has witnessed first-hand.
Oliver said: “You have all kinds of physical issues people face from being tortured while living in camps. And of course, a lot of it is not happening only on the physical side but the psychological side, the massive trauma people experienced.
“This is something very challenging to handle on a ship because we are a rescue ship, we are not a facility for the treatment of traumas of all kinds. We have a hospital on board, we have medics on board that can deal with urgent situations. But these people need actual treatment by professionals also in the long run.”
As if the conditions faced by people making the crossing weren’t bad enough, Sea Watch says vessels often face severe delays getting into port as authorities redirect them and refuse permission to dock so that people can disembark.
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Oliver also claimed that vessels are inspected for the amount of medical supplies and life jackets they carry, and can face administrative obstacles if they are carrying more than what would be officially advised for the vessel’s size.
These obstacles can leave people who are often suffering from physical and psychological trauma stranded on vessels for days on end.
Meanwhile, other occasions have seen vessels given permission to dock in a port a very long way from where they may have picked up a distressed vessel. This means more time on board without medical treatment, as well as increased operating costs for Sea Watch.
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Oliver said: “So you have Lampedusa, Lampedusa is a very small island, so you wouldn't assign a port of safety for a bigger ship. Now they assign ports that are super high up north.
“They assign ports that are like 900 nautical miles away, which is roughly 1700 kilometres, which means that's five, six days travel, depending on the weather.”
One of the largest problems is the areas of responsibility and jurisdiction on the ocean. While it appears blank to the untrained eye, the area of the Mediterranean which sees huge amounts of people attempting to cross is in fact a patchwork of jurisdictions.
This has led to some authorities providing water and provisions to boats, only to drag them into a different jurisdiction and effectively make them someone else’s problem. Oliver also claimed that sometimes distress calls are not flagged to NGO vessels such as those run by Sea Watch because they will bring them to a European port.
He said: “In theory, you don't have an area where no one is responsible. A lot of times, NGO vessels do not get informed about distressed cases by the maritime coordination centres, these are the state-run coordination centres for the rescue zones.
“They know where NGOs bring the people, because we bring people to Europe because we need to bring them to a safe port. Everything else would basically be a violation of international law.”
Needless to say, Libya is not a safe place to return people.
Many people start off the overseas portion of their journey in Libya. For those trying to reach Europe, Libya has become a figurative jumping-off point.
The country is still dealing with the fallout from the first civil war which toppled Muammar Ghaddafi’s decades-long dictatorship after a UN intervention. This was followed by a second civil war between rival factions vying for control in the resulting power vacuum.
It would be a stretch to say that any of the factions in Libya exercise the rule of law over the areas they ostensibly govern. Meanwhile, the south of the country is now largely controlled by armed militias.
All this means that Libya has become a smugglers’ paradise.
Oliver said: “If you talk about jurisdiction in Libya, I mean, there's no consequences. And there's tens of thousands of people in the last few years being pulled back by Libyan actors, paid and trained by the European Union.
“The reason for that is that European actors cannot do this. There is a quite famous case with Italy where an Italian ship brought people back to Libya. Legally it was absolutely clear that this is a violation of international law.”
Oliver explained that the people who demand payment for running a smuggling operation are sometimes the same individuals who then catch the boats and send them back to Libya, in a vicious cycle.
He said: “It's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. They profit from the system the European Union created. They take money from people trying to flee and they take money from the European Union to bring back the same people.
“There's a lot of camps where people face massive human rights violation, torture, there's slavery. There's a lot of camps with non-state actors that even the United Nations High Commission for Refugees do not have access to.”
The journey across the Mediterranean is merely one stage in journeys which take up years of people’s lives.
Elisa di Pieri, a researcher at Amnesty International, has emphasised the length of the journey that people undertake.
She said: “People who reach Libya have already travelled often for years, and definitely for months. They have been abused along the way by State forces and armed groups in various countries.
“So they've arrived in Libya already exhausted and abused. And they do this knowingly. They come from places where they know that they will not be saved. These terrible journeys offer a hope for a better life.”
The journey also often costs thousands of dollars, assuming that you even survive the trip. This means that the people who attempt it are people who have the means to do so, often middle-class people with careers, property, and savings. They are teachers, doctors, journalists, and business owners.
What is clear is that there is no way to deter people from attempting the crossing regardless of the danger. The horrors exacted on people in the dungeons of the Assad dictatorship, the prospect of national service for life in Eritrea, or repeated government crackdowns against all opposition in Iran are all widely documented by agencies including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, as well as accounts from people who have survived these abuses.
They render any attempt at deterrence superfluous. What is drowning in the sea when the alternative is living under fear of random imprisonment and torture?
The reality is that people will attempt the journey regardless of the risk, and the only way to minimize the danger to them is to offer safe, legal routes.
Until that happens, people will continue drowning.
Topics: World News, News