Tuesday 29 September 2015

A day on a refugee rescue ship: 'this job must be done, there must be no sinking'

On board a merchant ship around 30 miles north of Libya, Gordie Hatt hurries up the stairs to the bridge, his long white hair tied back in a ponytail. “Where is everyone?” says the 63-year-old Canadian, bursting from the staircase. “It’s just Amani and me down on deck, and we have a thousand people trying to find a place to sleep.”
Hatt has a point. This is the bridge of the Bourbon Argos, one of three merchant ships hired by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) to rescue stricken refugees from the waters north of Libya, in the absence of full-scale EU rescue operations. Earlier in the morning the crew rescued two boats in quick succession, a pair of operations that brought 1,001 refugees on board the Argos, almost all of them Eritreans. The boat is only supposed to take 500, so Hatt needs all the help he can get on deck.
But what he doesn’t know is that an even bigger problem is unravelling in the waters in front of the boat, consuming his colleagues’ attention. In this bit of the southern Mediterranean, there are nine rescue operations in progress, involving MSF’s boats, the Italian coastguards and a few warships from European navies. But it’s not enough. From the bridge, Hatt’s colleagues can see two more flimsy refugee boats on the water, and only one of them is being rescued.
The Argos cannot safely take on any more passengers, so Sebastian Klein, the MSF team’s second-in-command, stands by the radar monitor looking grim. “We can’t help them,” says the 34-year-old Norwegian. “The only difference would be if they started sinking and we had to rescue them.”
The situation is already tense enough when Klein’s boss, Lindis Hurum, picks up the bridge telephone and radios another rescue ship in the area. “Does your boat have a gynaecologist?” she asks. “We have a very pregnant woman on board who needs to deliver within 24 hours.”
Even as the smuggling season begins to wind down, this is the reality in the southern Mediterranean, 30-odd miles north of the smuggling ports of western Libya. In recent months the media’s migration coverage has shifted from here to the beaches of Greece and the plains of the Balkans, along the new routes that Syrian refugees are taking to reach the EU. But even without the Syrians, the number of people attempting the sea crossing from Libya to Italy has remained near record levels. And record numbers have died in doing so.
According to figures released to the Guardian by the International Organisation for Migration on Tuesday, 130,891 people have reached Italy so far in 2015, only marginally fewer than the record 138,796 who crossed during the equivalent period last year.

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